rebooting america

256 Pages·2008·1.39 MB·English

by  Personal Democracy Forum

© 2008 by the Personal Democracy Press
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us
Rebooting Democracy is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
ISBN: 978-0-9817509-0-3
Printed in the United States of America
C o n t e n t s
Preface 1
Foreword 5
Esther Dyson
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 11
to: Micah L sifry, Personal Democracy Forum 2008 19
Zack Exley
21st Century neo-enlightenment 27
Julie Barko Germany
echo Chambers = Democracy 32
David Weinberger
Participatory Democracy Demands Participation 38
Michael Turk
Winning the Future in the Personal Democracy Age 43
Newt Gingrich
Participation As sustainable Cooperation In Pursuit of Public Goals 48
Yochai Benkler
By the People, For the People 54
Andrew Rasiej
the Merciful Death of the Freedom of Information Act and the Birth
of true Government transparency: A short History 59
Ellen Miller
the Void We Must Fill 64
Richard C. Harwood
smartmobbing Democracy 70
Howard Rheingold
Weaning Campaigns from old Media’s teat 75
Brad Templeton
the Power of Inclusion 79
Marie Wilson
In the Beginning there Were Wikis 83
Joshua Levy
saving America from Its 18th Century Political system 87
Jan Frel and Nicco Mele
small “d” Democracy 92
Susan Crawford
Professional Politicians Beware! 95
Aaron Swartz
sidewalks for Democracy online 101
Steven L. Clift
Privacy in the Internet Age: time to Go? 108
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Can social network sites enable Political Action? 112
danah boyd
In skypeoogletubeapedia We trust 117
Martin Kearns
Grassroots Activism is More than a Campaign 122
Morra Aarons-Mele
Corruption, technology and Constitutional Design 126
Zephyr Teachout
our Voting Re-Public 133
John C. Bonifaz
Checks and Balances Reinvigorated 139
Craig Newmark
the “Killer App” of Public Participation 142
Mark Murphy
Citizen 2 0 147
Nancy E. Tate and Mary G. Wilson
the Last top-Down Campaign 151
Joe Trippi
tangled signals of Democracy 155
Micah L. Sifry
Finding Your obviousmeter 161
Matt Stoller
Congress Reloaded 165
Matthew Burton
Beyond WarGames 168
Douglas Rushkoff
the obvious Answer: online Voting 171
Allison H. Fine
Who needs elected officials? 177
Tara Hunt
new Gadgets Do not new Humanity Make 181
Avery Knapp and Tennyson McCalla
Deliberative Democracy in theory and Practice 185
Kaliya Hamlin
Government by the People 192
Beth Simone Noveck
self-organized self-Government 198
Scott Heiferman
the Digital Will of the People 201
Pablo del Real
Political Collaborative Production 204
Clay Shirky
Community Information Commons 209
Harry C. Boyte
the ethics of openness 215
Jeff Jarvis
Creating Humane Codelaw 221
Gene Koo
Digital natives as self-Actualizing Citizens 225
W. Lance Bennett
A Millennial Upgrade for American Democracy 231
David B. Smith
Glossary 237
About the Editors 243
About Personal Democracy Forum 247
PReFACe
his project began as so many good things do, over a cup of
cofee. Our conversation wandered to talking about new social
t media tools like blogs and social networking sites and their
important role in fostering an explosion of public participation in and
around the national political campaigns. We started wondering when
we might see the rise of similar public energies and optimism about
government and governing. For it’s clear we’re living in a new age,
where millions of people can participate directly in governance and
policy making, not just in ratifying the results on Election Day.
Te Internet is putting individual voters, and networks of activ-
ists, in positions that used to be the sole reserve of professionals. Today
anyone can be a reporter, a fundraiser or a community organizer; all it
takes is an Internet connection and a compelling message. And so we
wondered: as the Internet revolution hits the institutions of American
democracy, how might it change things for the better?
Dana Perino, the White House Press Secretary, summed up the
typical response of government ofcials accustomed to shutting cit-
izens out of governance when she responded to a question from a
P R e FA C e
reporter earlier this year about the Iraq war by saying, “You had input.
Te American people have input every four years, and that’s the way
our system is set up.” In other words, the people had their say at the
election booth (a vote that may or may not have been recorded and
counted accurately, by the way) and now it’s our turn to run the coun-
try as we see ft, away from the watchful, interfering eye of citizens.
As we have seen, this kind of thinking and behavior is dangerous for
Americans and for American democracy.
On January 21, 2009, a new tenant will occupy the Oval Ofce,
and that person will be wise to continue to build on the public input
and participation that helped to put them there. Returning to business
as usual will be an enormous missed opportunity for both the new
president and the American public.
America’s wonderful, messy experiment with a republican form of
democracy is a work in progress, an unfolding story of astonishing
possibilities and periodic disappointment. Te storyline of this new
century is the yawning chasm between the passion that Americans,
particularly young people, have for a fair and just society, with the real-
ity of near permanent incumbency for elected ofcials and a gridlocked
political system.
Voting is our most visible political activity; it’s easy to see and mea-
sure, but it’s only a small part of the spectrum of political activities that
form the backbone of our democracy. Political campaigns have begun
to use an array of social media tools to connect with potential voters,
but there are far greater uses for these tools beyond campaigns and
elections. Social media and broad, enthusiastic participation together
can profoundly afect governance and policy development, who runs
for ofce and how, the communications between elected ofcials and
citizens beyond elections, and the loosening of the death grip of mon-
eyed, interests on politics and policies.
Tis jarring juxtaposition of our political reality against the poten-
n
P R e FA C e n
tial for great political change is vividly revealed in the awful uses of
technology (e.g., touch-screen voting machines or microtargeting of
voters by what beer they buy) versus wonderful uses of technology
(e.g., cell phones used to mobilize voters or live-blogging of politi-
cal events that engage thousands of people in direct conversation with
candidates). Rebooting America is dedicated to understanding these dif-
ferences and providing a vision of how we can realize our collective
hope for a better future.
We invited a variety of interesting, creative thinkers spanning the
political spectrum and the generational divide, and from a variety of
diferent professional perspectives, to write essays for this anthology.
We also posted a general call for essays at the Personal Democracy
Forum website, and three of those submissions are included in this
volume.
Te essays are naturally as varied as the participants. Tey range
from revisiting the need for checks and balances within government
and between the government and its citizenry, to a radical reinter-
pretation of the public’s “right to know,” to the exponential power
of many-to-many deliberation to shape public policy. Tese essays
confrmed our optimistic sense that the political system is due for
substantive changes. Undoubtedly there are many more voices and
thinkers whom we failed to engage, and we apologize for those over-
sights. It is our hope that Rebooting America will continue as a living
document online, and to that end we are publishing all of the essays
at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com and inviting public comment
on (and of) the site.
We hope that, you, our readers and participants, will help to jump-
start conversations about increasing citizen participation in gover-
nance, opening the doors of government wider and making the walls
see-through, and unleashing our collective creativity to help solve
technical problems and break through long-standing entrenchments.
P R e FA C e
Our future does not have to be a continuation of the past or the pres-
ent. We can create a new and better course—we just need to imagine
it frst.
—Allison Fine
—Micah L. Sifry
—Andrew Rasiej
—Josh Levy
n