Open Source Legislation and Digital Civil Rights

[cRitter]

In July of 2007, blogger and activist Matt Stoller kicked off an open, online discussion with Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) over the shape of a national broadband policy with a blog post on the newly launched OpenLeft.org that began as follows:

"Over the course of the next week, we're going to be holding an experiment in using the Internet to help create legislation. Senator Durbin, one of the Democratic leaders in the Senate, is asking for our advice and help to craft a national broadband strategy. He's asking for the public to participate in government and to use the most populist medium ever devised to do it. A variety of industry and public interest representatives are going to be a part of this discussion. You will see, in some manner of speaking, how the process of legislating works. And your blog posts and comments will be put on par with those of telecom and industry experts. At the end of the discussion, Senator Durbin is going to take our feedback and use it to craft a bill."

FTA: Open Source Legislation and Digital Civil Rights

[MondoGlobo]

Stoller joined MondoGlobo yesterday, and left a comment on 10 Zen Monkeys regarding the Open Source Party:

Both parties have primary systems and flexible platforms and rules. It’s not an issue of generating a new party, it’s an issue of getting involved with one of them and making it yours.
As for your agenda, oh just join the Democratic Party already. There are a lot of corrupt losers in it, but then, where isn’t that the case? And a majority of Democrats are actually for most of what you put forward. Republicans, by contrast, are fucking crazy.

[cRitter]

Reminds me of the story of Mouseland, where every few years the mice would vote a new cat into office. When the laws of the black cats became too much to bear, the mice would vote in a white cat. And when the laws of the white cats became a burden, the mice would turn around and vote the black cats back into office.

When I told the entire story to my daughter she asked the obvious: "Why don't the mice vote for a mouse?" After I explained how Democracy works, how the cats decide who the mice can vote for, she lost interest and moved on to something more fashionable -- kind of like voting fashionably for a Democratic cat in '08.

[thebonobo]

his profile says, "I'm a liberal blogger, and a strong partisan Democrat who runs primary candidates against conservative Democrats. I believe in strong democracy, and I think that it's a waste of time and a serious misunderstanding of political power and the responsibilities of citizenship to do anything but work through one of the two political parties."

i'm all for trying to reform the current system, which is a total farce of choice, but i don't see how it's "irresponsible" to envision something other than the goat rodeo that's in power now. the actors in that scene have had plenty of time to demonstrate some willingness to fulfill even the tiniest of democracy's promises, and rejecting them wholesale, while not always practical or even right-minded, CAN BE a courageous act in itself.

[Michael]

Third parties have always played an extremely important role in American politics -- that's why it's not irresponsible to start one or work for it. Even if the Greens will never elect a President, they do make certain points of debate acceptable in the public discourse. Even though Ross Perot didn't win (didn't even run the whole time) he certainly affected the outcome of the '92 elections. Electing people -- winning -- isn't the be-all and end-all of politics, not by a long shot. It's all about communication.

Calling people irresponsible for doing what they want to do and think is right? That's not very QA/Open.

"A serious misunderstanding of the responsibilities of citizenship" may describe an awful lot of people in America, granted -- but not me. Not me. And I'll continue to vote Green/Dem -- and someday Open/Dem -- in full recognition of my understanding of the responsibilities, not just of citizenship, but of good-faith action in the world.

[Jon Lebkowsky]

I'm glad to hear that, Michael. FYI I invited Matt Stoller to join after I heard that he was interested in what we were up to. I think it makes sense for dedicated partisans to oppose third party movements that might take votes from them and throw the election, a la Ralph Nader. I don't think he should have a problem with us - we're not out to take the presidential election. We'd do better to focus on small local elections, at least this round.

Unlike Matt, I don't give a flip about the elections at this point. There's a political monoculture inside the beltway, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Rather than change the system or elect one set of candidates over the other, I'd like to see us focus on building influence and facilitating participation. If you show up at an elected official's office, it doesn't matter whether he or you is a Republican or a Democrat - if you're a constituent he'll listen to you - he has to listen. I'd rather raise the volume on that collective voice than fiddle with elections and candidates.

I suspect that many of us will still be voting for and even working for Democrats, but it still makes sense to form the OS Party and facilitate its evolution.

[Michael]

Boy, I have to agree with all that.

[Sedicious]

I don't agree. I mean, yes, of course I'd like to "focus on building influence and facilitating participation," no argument there. But that doesn't have to mean taking a glacial pace, here in the Internet Age. Movements/campaigns can self-organize very explosively, at not only nation-wide scale, but even global scale. But in order to really pull people in hard and fast, you need to draw them with commensurately big promises. Ron Paul doesn't attract such fervent support by being timid. We can't let ourselves be afraid to dream big, either. If we have a vision, we need to shout it out there.

I have a dream today.

I was going to link that to a video of the Rev. Dr. King, on YouTube, but then I found this:

I Have a Dream Project - Daniel Stringer

Yeah, couldn't have said it better myself.

[Michael]

Who said glacial? Well, maybe John did, kinda.

There's no reason not to have a dream or to make big promises -- but if those big promises are based on the same old crap, you've just got another flash in the pan, and probably not even that. Is Ron Paul going to change America? (If he does, will it be in a direction that's recognizably American?) I doubt it, otherwise I would be behind Ron Paul. (Well, I wouldn't -- because besides speaking against the Iraq war, he's a freak.)

If, on the other hand, you are doing serious engineering in order to effect lasting change, well, the explosion will take care of itself. I believe very strongly in the need for good engineering, and I believe very strongly in the need for the explosion to take care of itself -- because by allowing it to do so, we are actually encouraging true democracy.

That said, nice video. Yes.

[Sedicious]

I'm not hitching my wagon (so to speak) to Ron Paul either. I'm just trying to make the point that a bold vision can sometimes attract a very dramatic groundswell of support. If anything, I think Ron Paul's success speaks to just how little it can sometimes take to prompt a really remarkable scale of response!

As another example, recall how MoveOn just sprang out of practically nowhere. If you can sound the right note, at just the right time, magic will happen.

[Michael]

True. Very true. But if the magic doesn't happen, the system is still broken. We still have to fix it. And the magic will come, or it won't -- doesn't mean I won't be giving it a place to roost if so.

[Sedicious]

What other way can there be to fix it, though, other than to make this magic happen? I mean, I think we either succeed, and then look back on what happened as magic, or we fail. What middle course is there? How can we change anything without changing (to some degree) absolutely everything—shaking up the whole playing field, changing the whole character of the system?

Just to be clear, here, by "magic" I don't mean some naïve utopian miracle by which everybody suddenly turns into angels and all the world's problems are instantly solved. But I do mean that some tipping point is reached, some threshold is broken and a phase change takes place, and what seemed utterly unrealistic the day before suddenly is accepted by the vast majority as now inevitable. Such shifts don't usually happen literally overnight, but they tend to happen much more quickly than most people anticipate—by definition, really, because no sooner do most people begin to anticipate it, than when the shift has thus already happened. And without that "magic", I think, very little of the things we're talking about here can be fixed at all.

[Michael]

Y'know, that's very true. I've been present before when history was happening -- my Hungarian wife and I were getting married, living in Germany, in the summer of 1989. There's just this sense of bogglement when one impossible thing after another happens, and afterwards you realize Hey, that was history.

What I was after in my comment was to say that even if magic doesn't happen, the hard slogging work still has to be done, and even slow, small change is change, and therefore preferable to throwing up your hands and thinking you can't do anything.

But that doesn't make you wrong.