Personal Democracy Forum conference: initial themes

By Andy Oram
June 29, 2009

This article was originally published on the O’Reilly Media web site. The article followed a series leading up to the forum.


“So what’s this conference you’re going to?” asked my friends, not braced for an explanation that usually took me more than ten minutes. Ultimately, though, they all expressed excitement about the ideas driving Personal Democracy Forum.

These friends care about politics. They argue over all the issues, and at some level they take note of the processes that often matter more than any arguments. But although some know what an API was and a few even understood the concept of mash-ups, it’s remarkable how completely they had been bypassed by the current movement toward open government, whose importance to the Obama administration was signaled by his release of a memorandum on transparency and open government on his first full day in office.

I hooked my friends through the idea of an irreversible political shift. Not a regulatory regime that could be dismantled like the agencies responsible for civil rights, or a mandate that could be defunded like federal housing initiatives—no, in this case a movement integrating the public into government functioning, and that therefore creates an external constituency that helps to perpetuate the system; an ecosystem of non-governmental organizations that will react precipitously and aggressively if the government tries to shut them out.

Digging for themes

PDF is appropriately held in New York City, a culturally open megalopolis that is ethnically and politically uncategorizeable. Free speech holds forth on the subways where the exhortations of the homeless prove that the great art of oratory is still alive.

A thousand people signed up for the conference (leading, of course, to more than a thousand Twitterers). At the gorgeous Jazz at Lincoln Center location, the Rose auditorium was totally filled, and the hallway was choked as attendees strove to reach pitifully undersized rooms for breakout sessions.

As a conference with a contemporary, tech-oriented bent, PDF ripples off into all kinds of online resources. At several points the keynotes were held against a real-time twitter feed, goading on the feeding frenzy by showing the accounts of the people who tweeted the most. This focus on immediate response—and on quantity of response—had a specific effect on the consciousness of the audience. The twitter feed reinforced through highlighting and repetition the most provocative sound bites and the statements most clearly relating to current issues at the top of attendees’ minds

This is a useful function to play, but the provocative utterance and timely issue is only one superficial level of conference engagement. We all need to take away what we’ve experienced, sit with it a bit, and look for underlying themes that represent a significant trends that can guide us.

Give a few hours for reflection, I’ll use this blog to synthesize three recurring themes I heard during the first day. I’m sure more ideas will settle out as I spend even more time thinking through these two days of meetings.

The prerequisite: the power for change lies with the public

It’s scary being a politician, let alone the an agency head. These people may seem indescribably powerful to the rest of us, but they live in fear of public pillory triggered by their own missteps.

Jeff Jarvis listed, as one of his four key elements of change, the ability for government to fail without risk of recrimination. David Weinberger approached the same theme from a different direction, talking about how all wisdom is provisional, emerging, and scattered. Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck—who will be speaking tomorrow—have repeatedly made similar statements in the context of bringing the innovation culture of the Silicon Valley to the area around Foggy Bottom.

In my first ramp-up blog for PDF I talked about a four-part cycle for successful public/government collaboration. Perhaps we need to start the cycle earlier, or add some kind of parallel cycle, to recognize that the public has to make the commitment asked by Jarvis: the promise to show forbearance when the government fails and to grant it a mandate to do innovation.

The platform for democracy: infrastructure we all need

If one engages in some deep listening, you can hear beneath all the celebrations of transparency a recognition that success depends on several elements of infrastructure. Early experiments in open government may produce exemplary and even spectacular successes, but the culture won’t take hold until this platform is in place.

Computing networking and computer technology are the most obvious requirement. Mark McKinnon, a Republican communications strategist, called for universal broadband during his keynote.

But as audience members pointed out, literacy is another requirement: basic literacy as well as media-savvy literacy and knowledge of the tools that let one participate.

Ethnologist dana boyd took the discussion to the next level by pointing out that even when people do go online and do use social media, they self-segregate by race, class, and educational status. Her case study for this claim was limited (the demographics of MySpace users versus Facebook users) but the statements she culled from young people showed that the digital divide is possibly even deeper online than these social divisions are offline.

I believe that a predilection for different forums and ways of interacting online doesn’t have to prevent different races and classes from coming together on issues of common interest, such as health care. But boyd’s point that people set up online barriers that make it harder for them communicate across these barriers is salient. She pointed out that we need to recognize that the sites we visit are not the same sites everyone visits, to spend time on the sites of people we want to influence or collaborate with, and to embrace different modes of interaction among different social groups.

Finally, open discussion requires a tolerant environment. Recent events in Iran, as well as the introduction of Internet filtering software in China, show that governments can choke off civil society online; the technology was described as a cat-and-mouse game where both the side of information dissemination and the side of repression learn how to increase their power.

Time to tune in: we can’t tolerate static

The last theme I’ll highlight from the first day is the sense that we can’t stand still. Americans (and particularly young Americans) expect more and more that we can have a say, that we can move quickly and have choices, that we can contribute to decisions and their implementation. We’ve already seen how many businesses (not all, of course) that fail to keep pace with these expectations are shrinking. If governments don’t meet the expectations, people won’t be able to replace it the way they replace businesses, but there could be increased feelings of alienation and increased social dissatisfaction.

Miscellaneous insights from speakers and participants

ChallengePost (now Devpost) announced today a site that brings together people with needs and problem-solvers, using a challenge model similar to the Netflix prize or the TopCoder software firm. In publishing a challenge, someone can offer money or just recruit people to offer thanks. Respondents may be motivated to solve the challenge by intangible rewards as well as money. ChallengePost offers advice on how formulate a good challenge and judge it expertly, but the form of each challenge is the prerogative of those who post it.

The Digital Literacy Contest tries to develop a generation of problem-solvers who can analyze the streams of government data coming online. They will run contests in high schools and colleges that start with test problems and then move to questions to which they do not have the answers. When several students converge on the same solution, it is published for the public benefit.

Morley Winograd of NDN briefly analyzed Ron Paul’s failure in the presidential election despite his sophisticated use of social media. If I understood Winograd, the medium--which is well constituted for bringing groups together--contrasted too much with the message of individualistic libertarianism.

In a forum on participatory medicine, Esther Dyson said of the current health care debate, “We’re focusing too much on health care and not enough on health, just as one might complain that the government focuses too much on laws and not enough on getting people to do good things.” This was the start of a session that discussed ways patients and doctors could use information sharing to improve outcomes and lower costs.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called in over Skype instead of coming to the conference. Over his call he announced an expansion of the famous 311 service and various initiatives to accept public complaints and provide public data online. I was glad Skype was available for the call, but I find it odd for the government to be using commercial services (Kundra moving staff to Google Docs, YouTube hosting White House videos, agencies going on Facebook, etc.). I can see why the government wants to use available social media for convenience, and it provides a familiar access method for constituents. But eventually governments should develop their own public-domain software, tailored to government needs and open to all.

Blair Levin, who is designing a national broadband plan at the FCC, started out buttering up the audience by making fun of incumbent telephone companies, then gave us a “homework assignment” of reviewing and making improvements to its presentation at the the July 2nd FCC meeting, material for a set of staff workshops in August, and plans to be make in the Fall to do research. A panel following Levin’s presentation—matching up a much-applauded representative from Free Press with representatives from the cable and telco industries—looked at the issue of speed. Is it fair to set a single target for speeds? Will the FCC define broadband to more closely match more advanced countries?


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