Join The Conversation

We are a few weeks away from the Presidential election, and I have decided to become even more involved in our political system. I think that the internet is having a bigger and bigger role in our democracy, and is shaping it for the better. I have decided to begin exploring the ways in which the internet can fix the problems in our system, and this blog is one of my first steps.

I began about a year and a half ago, during a long drive with my wife, where we started brainstorming ways to use the web to improve depressing correspondance I have continuously experienced with my representatives. I would write them, and weeks later a staffer would send me a form letter vaguely dealing with the subject. I can see that for my senators, but for my congressional representative, that is just not right. Tools are possible to create to make that interaction a more personal and responsive one, they are just not built yet.

Howard Dean then became a sensation, mostly due to his unprecedented use of the internet to bring people together and communicate quickly, cheaply and easily, on a massive scale. No candidate in this election cycle has surpassed Deans use of the internet, with the possibility of Kerry, who is now wielding online supporters quite effectively, but is not really expanding the paradigm much.

Candidates should have an engaging, interactive website that allows them to communicate with their representative on a personal level, become involved in thier community and democracy. My project for the next two years is to build the software for such a site and find a candidate who will use it in the next election cycle. I am specifically aiming at the congressional district level. Wish me luck.Fixing Democracy

The internet is in fact beginning to have a big impact in politics, my candidates preferences aside. In the VP debate last night, Cheny was trying to mention FactCheck.org to make some point that he wasn’t getting any money from Halliburton, so that can’t influence his current decisions, but instead said FactCheck.com. The site was owned by a small fry, who was getting deluged with traffic, so he pointed the traffic to a George Soros site. This
article sums it up pretty well.

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The important point is that the fact that a candidate can say the name of a website and drown it in – traffic means that people are logging on and going to a site almost immediately after it is mentioned on TV. This is making TV more interactive by association. Candidates don’t have to rely on just 30 second spots, or even 60 minute debates – they can say ‘to find out more, go here’. Thats a powerful force in getting our democracy to work better, people engaging themselves, not just passively listening. The internet has made the effort to get involved cheap enough to be worth their time. Maybe they won’t go walk precincts, but they will read a blog, or check some references, or register to vote online. I think this is an important trend to note, to try to explore how we can take advantage of that in order to reform our political system.

So unfortunately, its been quite a while since I posted here, even though I’ve been so incredibly busy. I started volunteering for a local congressional campaign, Jerry McNerney. I got really involved, walked precincts every weekend for the last three weekends and set up this great website for him. I had a blog and a forum that was starting to take off, a newspaper writing tool, all sorts of fun stuff. It turns out that some people are still not ready for the internet to have a place in politics. His campaign manager thought it was not a good idea to let people write whatever they wanted on the site – open dialogue is apparently dangerous. I know that someday soon the internet will be the future of politics, I’m just trying to figure out how to help it along. I will probably be posting quite a lot on this topic in the near future.