A social networking powered tool for political organizing, microblogging and kicking ass

first posted April 2005
current draft 0.3, March 2006
feedback to Dan Ancona
da {at} vizbang {dot} com
415 373 8972

Pitch
It's a site that helps anyone who cares about politics kick ass*, from the barely activated to the committed activist. Users can easily respond to stories, let their elected representatives know what their priorities are, send aggregated feedback to campaigns and see what their networks are thinking.

* kicking ass is defined in this context as "being maximally politically effective with as little effort as possible."

Alpha UI Mockup - proposed 1.0 feature set

• hopeful/scary links - like digg for politics, with a little more editorializing. (if you haven't played with digg, go to digg.com and keep in mind that as simple as it is, it is getting millions of hits/day) When you don't have time to blog, at least you can do this. The sun/rain icons on the right will be ajaxy hovering pick boxes (sorta like the stars widget in yelp). Other features will work similar to digg, inc. a cloud view.
• live thermometer opinion tracking - thermometers for both current state & direction across local, state & national levels. Your position & where everyone else is at will be indicated. May later include graphs of these variables over time. A library (gruff) exists to draw things like this easily in RoR.
• regional/friend/contact overview - see aggregate data of thermometers, stories and priorites based on regions, or on your circle of friends & contacts.
• priorities - there are two things you can do with whuffie: 1, give it to someone and 2, bank or spend it on your priorities, which shows up here. The amounts banked on each priority will be settable either via ajax widgets or on a separate screen.
• basic profile/contact tools - these will include basic voter info, campaign contact preferences, and fun questions. Later, the pro version will include more linkedin type functionality: experience, skills, interests etc. Whuffie will be added to your account based on overall level of involvement in both the site and real campaigns, using the honor system. consumating.com (nice html & art from mule design, modulo their login issues) and yelp both do a nice job with this.

Things that will NOT be in 1.0: forums, any kind of messaging between users, whuffie transactions (well, maybe - this may not be that hard), finer privacy gradient control (i.e. people might want to set their priorities and allow them to be aggregated, but not have them be visible), theyworkforyou.com type functionality. It's not that I don't think these things are needed, I'm just trying hard to keep it minimal and let it evolve naturally. I may even drop the priorities thing and maybe some of the friend management features if I run into any engineering issues.

This system is designed to be ideologically neutral and for anyone who cares even slightly about politics, regardless of their political persuasion.

Problem Statement

The dissolution of what William Greider called "the connective tissues of democracy," - namely, citizen groups and political parties - in his 1991 book Who Will Tell the People has continued unabated since then. One byproduct of this decay is that the process by which citizens provide feedback to elected officials, a critical link in the feedback loop that powers our democracy, is broken. Elected representative's offices are completely overwhelmed by mountains of citizen feedback, both personal correspondence as well as the new kinds of internet driven communications organized by advocacy groups. This time consuming kabuki dance of communications does little to provide these officials with any kind of remotely accurate understanding of their constituencies' true priorities or concerns, and wastes scarce staff time responding to large volumes of messages.

Alternatives, usually organized from the top down (like polling and focus groups), have significant limitations - they happen over discrete periods of time, are highly prone to error, and are expensive and time consuming. Bottom up alternatives, such as direct letters from the leadership of membership organizations, lack the punch of large numbers of people participating. Both elected officials and citizens are poorly served by this system. Some kind of aggregated and friendly communications layer between elected reps and citizens is needed.

Since this citizen input into the democratic process is largely private and infrequently deemed newsworthy by corporate media, it is easier for elected representatives to prioritize the needs of contributing special interests much higher than the needs of the people they represent. This fact is nowhere more evident than during elections, where the first and sometimes only task of the candidate is to raise money.

The public prioritization market proposed here could become a countervailing check on the power of moneyed interests, at least until the badly needed system of public financing of campaigns can be put in place. Take for example the recent passage of the starkly uncivilized federal bankruptcy bill. Commentary on both the left and right ran strongly opposed to this bill, which was clearly purely a creation of large corporate campaign contributors. But without a quantifiable, publicly available, district by district comparison of the desires of the electorate, opposition to the bill was diffused if passionate, and the monied interests moved the bill through easily.

An approach to resolving these issues could be the creation of a virtual, post scarcity marketplace: virtual in the sense that the currency would be unlinked from any real-world currency, and post-scarcity in the sense that inflation wouldn't matter. The total size of the marketplace could be expanded relative to the number of participants and the uptime of the system. Lacking a name, for now the currency is designated here with an underscore, _.

Besides using this system for political process feedback, it could be applied to other uses, such as content filtering. These uses are speculated on in more detail below.

Summary of problems this could (but not necessarily will) address, beyond assuaging my curiousity and being a fun toy to play with ...

• to give people respond to stories without blogging, and to give people who aren't bloggers an easy way to respond
• the unreachable millienials problem
• the polling and focus group problems
• the "connective tissue" problem (described above)
• the unknown nonmonetary priorities problem
• the no easy way to connect w/ other organizers problem
• the broadcast politics not dying fast enough problem

It seems a little questionable to work on this when things are so immediately bad. It's going to hard to wrap metrics (other than hits etc.) around this, it's going to be difficult to quantify the electoral returns. But millenials, the "if you're not on myspace you don't exist" generation must be reached, there may be no other way. Anything we can do to accelerate the end of broadcast politics will help.

Some Prior Art

For an example of a system of roughly similar scale and complexity, imagine a more social-network oriented version of the O'Reilly/Yahoo Research Tech Buzz Game. Some possible names and similar systems that have been described and even implemented elsewhere...

quan - from Jerry McGuire. Not that great of a movie, but Cuba Gooding Jr. explains the concept as succinctly as anyone. Urbandictionary.com defines it: "When you are one with something. Suggests unity or completion. A loosely defined quality combining or uniting athletic skill with love and respect, as well as money."
dailykos mojo - See this entry in the dailykos FAQ. The system being described here is effectively a standalone application for this kind of system that could interoperate with message boards.
whuffie - from Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. We may not be bringing up our _ scores in augmented reality HUDs any time soon or using them to figure out who gets a taxi, but Doctorow takes the same idea and runs far with it.
slashdot's karma - probably the original incarnation of this concept on the web.
advocacy bucks - the original working name I came up with, when the idea was more limited and focused purely on political priorities.

Exisiting social networking tools have, for a variety of reasons, not yet become every day parts of user's lives. In short, they don't help their users kick ass. The system being proposed here has the potential to change this.

The market is Americans (and later, people outside the US) who are already even remotely politicaly enaged. Later efforts to expand the number of users of this system will be aligned with efforts inside the political system to expand engagement.

Business Model

System Architecture

Need diagram - server with four clients: web (maybe integrated with server?), virtual earth, phone/mobile and TV. Go P2P for VE client?

region enum {
everyone, country, state, county, city, hood, block, friends(depth), uid
}

story categories: scary, hopeful, user created?

getPriorities(region)
setPriorities(uid)

getStories(region, category)
addStory(category, level)

getTemperatures(region)
setTemperature(region, level)

getProfile(uid, searchString)
getFriends(uid, relationship)
addFriend(uid, relationship)

other profile stuff
whuffie stuff - transactions

More Details

There are only two basic transactions that can be performed with _. It can be given away, and it can be invested in political priorities.

Small quantities of _ would be distributed to participants' accounts on a monthly basis. Additional quantities of _ would be awarded - based on the honor system - to those who participated in political activities. Particpation in party committees, volunteering for campaigns, publishing writings, passing resolutions etc. would all be rewardable activities.

A system could be developed that would allow participants to respond to news stories and weblog posts, as well as see the responses of their various circles (friends, family, neighborhood). These responses wouldn't have to be written - if users don't have time or desire to write a full blog post in reaction to news, they could at least indicate whether it displeased them or not. Reactions could be captured along several axes - this story made me feel (hopeful/hopeless), (angry/happy), (frustrated/effective) etc. Reactions could then be aggregated to see the most frustrating, hopeful etc. stories over a given time period.

The system's priority space would be seeded with some initial priorities, but participants could suggest priorities in any level of detail. I.e. one priority could be "build more housing in California" and another could be "build more housing in CA according to new urbanist design guidelines." Items with more _ invested in them would rise in the priority standings. Priorities would be categorized according to five to ten or so top level categories, and would include both standing priorities as well as reactions to immediate events. An eventual taxonomy or folksonomy of priorities could be either adopted or developed. Priorities would also be tagged as local, county, state and national levels.

For legislative districts where the number of users is significant, a summary report detailing the priorities of the residents of that district could be delivered to the appropriate elected representatives or governing body. This report would be the feedback system that would give elected leaders a truer understanding of the aggregate priorities of their district, without relying on expensive and error-prone polling and focus groups, albeit with some degree of weighting towards more active and involved residents. More detailed reporting could be made available to interested representatives. A community based webblog-like system (similar to dailykos, but with hard identity verification) could be used to post official responses to issues and concerns.

To counter the natural class biases of a somewhat complicated, time consuming, and novel internet based system like this, _ could be accrued by organizations and invested as a bloc, not unlike a mutual fund. I.e. a community-based political organization working in communities of the working poor could allow it's members to donate their _ to the organization, which would then invest it on their behalf. Potentially, any organization could organize such a fund based on its priorities and allow anyone, including nonmembers, to invest in that fund.

Any amount of _ can be donated at any time to any other user of the system for any reason, such as to reward them for a piece of writing, music, volunteering, etc. Donations made to nonusers can be keyed to an email address and held until someone with that address signs up. Multiple email addresses can be associated with a single account.

An API to the service would need to be developed, to facilitate interoperation with web publishing systems (weblog tools, annotation and commenting engines, etc.) and other systems. Outside systems making use of the API could use it as a noise filter, allowing the viewing of only highly _ rated content. For example, georeferenced based systems such as google earth, mappr and smugmug's map interface currently have no generalized system of content filtering. _ based filtering could serve as another point on the social relactionship continuum, between the 2nd & 3rd degree contacts that some systems support and no filter at all...

<-closer-------------------------------------------- more distant ->
family/friends - 2nd/3rd degree contacts - high _ content - everything

The API would also allow simple calls to be made for a given area, allowing weblogs to display the current top priorities of whatever state or legislative district they choose.

Privacy policy: the system would be based on real names, via a mechanism TBD. The total amount of _ in any user's account, as well as a brief profile of the user, would be available to any other user as well as via the API. Transaction lists, rewarded activities etc. would be secured. Enough demographic information would be included in the private aspect of the profiles to allow segmentation for reporting. Profiles could be searched on at least by name and by location.

Abuse and security policies: TBD, important.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.