Join The Conversation

As I mentioned on my Congressional website, I am turning jointheconversation.org into my personal blog again. This time, I will be concentrating on campaigns and efforts across the country that further Open Source Politics or government.

I have imported all the articles I had from the Chacon for Congress race (which goes back about a year) and I will try to get the comments imported a bit later. I will also try to archive a lot of the work of the Chacon for Congress race here for reference.

I think Open Source and Participatory Politics is the future of governance and I’m looking forward to getting started on our next leg of this journey.

Scott Chacon

I have been quiet on this site for a while now because I am withdrawing my name from the race. When I first started this campaign, over a year ago, I had put myself up as a candidate because 1) no one else was both willing to run and try new, grassroots, open source ideas dedicated to the goal of involving people in their government, 2) I could not find someone I wanted to support in my district, and 3) I had assumed there would be no significant chance of anyone else defeating the incumbent this election.

It became clear early on that this was not to be the case. Pombo has gained national attention for his questionable and controversial acts while at the same time his congressional mentor Tom DeLay is being prosecuted for corruption charges. Because of this negative attention, the DCCC and other democratic-leaning organizations have targeted our eleventh district. Pombo and the Republican party are vulnerable, so now candidates and money are pouring into this race.

The lack of a viable, ideal candidate that would be willing to use technology and grassroots campaigning changed only a few weeks ago, when I met with Margee Ensign about her impending announcement to join the race. Margee was spoken highly of to us by Jerry Hildebrand when we interviewed him for our podcast, so I had known of her already. When Jessica and I met with her, that was the end of this campaign. Margee is unbelievably qualified, technologically savvy, internationally and politically experienced and still amazingly humble. We are continually impressed with her passion, kindness and strength of character. She is exactly who I want representing me. I have volunteered to do whatever I can to help her campaign and she has very graciously accepted. I have developed a website for her that just launched last week at: http://www.ensignforcongress.com and I will hopefully continue to be involved in whatever capacity I can help.

So what happens to this campaign?

JoinTheConversation.org will become my blog, focusing on open source politics and races and will be a place for me to discuss the continuation of GroundWorks. I will continue to develop GW, first for Margee’s campaign and also with other local and national campaigns that have shown interest.

Though the campaign is ending, we have accomplished a lot with almost no money and little time. Our campaign produced several political examples that, as far as I know, nobody had done before:

• Open Schedule – first come, first served campaign scheduling
• Micro Goals – small, easily achievable, specific donation goals with reports
• Call Me – Letting people request a personal call from the candidate online
• Open Books – realtime feed of donations and expenditures as they happen

I was also the first Congressional candidate with a Podcast and the only one so far with a Tumblelog or a Tag Cloud for the Blog I wrote myself. We were a campaign of firsts, experiments and ideas. Several of them are already being used and adopted by other campaigns, which I highly encourage, and I have learned an incredible amount about all of this.

To those of you who supported me or donated to the campaign, I thank you kindly. You invested in tools and ideas that will be used by many other clubs and candidates for a long time to come. I hope you follow my work at jointheconversation.org as I continue to pursue the open source campaign and participatory democracy one election at a time. If you decide to run for something someday, and I encourage you to, please let me know how I can help.

Thank you all,

Scott Anthony Bylo Chacon

Our campaign just got a nice mention on the Politics and Technology Blog.

The typical approach for such a tough race is to raise buckets of money from big-money donors, unleash an attack ad blitz, and spend every waking moment stumping across the district.

Well, Scott Chacon is anything but typical. He’s a software developer running for Congress – and he’s using his campaign as the testbed for an open source project to create a new kind of campaign management software. He’s also doing just about everything differently.

He mentions the GroundWorks software we’re developing, as well as giving a good, simple overview of the campaign and how it’s different.

It’s a new way of thinking about campaigns. Inside-out, really. Check it out.

You probably wouldn’t expect this from me, being such a tech geek, but we don’t have cable television. We have an antenna we bought at Radio Shack a few years ago when our previous antenna broke. Yes, the clerk gave me a funny look. Our entire marriage, Jessica and I have never gotten more than 5 channels.

Now, we’re not complete TV luddites - we watch some TV shows we have on DVD. However, as far as newer stuff goes, we currently only get about 4 channels, all over our rabbit ear antenna - only one and a half in english. (I don’t think fuzzy KQED really counts as a full ‘english’ vote)

Though this has, at times, helped us work on our spanish skills a bit, it rather severely limits how much TV we can stand. When it takes you 8 seconds to flip through all your channels and you end up on ‘Sabado Gigante‘, chances are it’s going to be a short TV night. Which I think is something of a good thing.

At any rate, the reason I am sharing this is that there is a bill being discussed in the Senate to force broadcasters to switch to all digital programming by the year 2009. This makes my story relevant in that they are going to spend about 3 billion dollars (when you say that, be sure to put your pinky to your mouth, Dr. Evil style) giving converter boxes to people that still watch TV over the air. Like me.

The silly thing is that they are doing this regardless of financial status, so, it’s going to cost taxpayers about $40 for the one I would need to use. Not directly, the money would come from the sale of the spectrum, I’m assuming to the private sector, but it’s less money to reduce our debt regardless.

Also, this is one of the arguments in favor:

The move to all-digital broadcasts will free valuable radio spectrum, some of which will be allocated to improve radio communications among fire and police departments and other first responders.

Does that seem weird to you? I mean, that is obviously important, but is the radio spectrum that crowded that we need to sell off the free, over the air broadcast frequencies? Or, is the technology we are equipping our first responders with not making very good use of the existing spectrum?

My question is: is this really a pressing need, or do the media companies just want to make sure they have digital rights management over everything that goes out? So people couldn’t keep doing silly things like tape recording shows without paying extra.

Anyhow, it looks like in the next few years we’re (my wife and I) going to have to either cut TV out altogether or finally break down and pay for cable from our designated monopoly. (I’ve already had this conversation. Me: “What is your smallest package?”, Them: “Well, we start at $49.99/mo and it comes with 850 channels, and you need a converter box so we can add another remote control to your life”, Me: “How does that compare to your competition?”, Them: “Our comp-e-what? [barely stifled laughter]“) Maybe by then we’ll finally be able to subscribe to good TV by the show and have the episodes delivered over the internet and none of this will be an issue anymore.

Hmm. How much do you suppose the ‘Daily Show’ + ‘Sabado Gigante’ package would cost?

Although Pombo has said that his unbelievable proposal to sell several of our national parks was “not serious”, today the House Resources Committee will vote on a budget measure that could “give mining corporations control over much of America’s federal public land”.

From the news release:

The budget reconciliation proposal put forward by Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, a California Republican, would allow foreign and U.S. mining corporations to buy millions of acres of public lands in the West, including land in national parks, wilderness and other protected areas.

In addition, the proposal would undercut budget deficit reduction by prohibiting the federal government from imposing royalties on minerals and metals removed from public lands.

So, no, he’s not selling the parks themselves, just several thousand acres within them so that private industry can rip all the natural resources out of them without having to pay any royalties.

This proposal also includes the ANWR details, which he now calls by the more long winded “Arctic Coastal Plain Domestic Energy Security Act of 2005”. How verbose. As long as the title is blatantly patronizing, I think we should have gone with the “Liberating Energy from the Ground and Protecting Our Children From Terrorists while Happy Fun Caribou Don’t Mind Act”.

Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-CA) introduced the Resources Committee’s budget reconciliation plan today, which includes opening the northern coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to energy production and granting more control of offshore energy production to coastal states.

We’re drilling everywhere! Off our shores, the Arctic Coastal Plain (the plain formerly known as ANWR), giving out mining patents – if you have a drill, we’ve got a patch of land for you! We even want you to drill in ambiguously defined regions of public lands :

the Secretary shall hold the first oil shale and tar sands lease sales under the regulation, offering for lease a minimum of 35 percent of the Federal lands that are geologically prospective for oil shale and tar sands within Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Isn’t there some sort of protection that any of these lands have preventing this? Well, Alaska does, but don’t worry, Pombo has it covered:

REPEAL.—Section 1003 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (U.S.C. 3143) is repealed

That’s just what I found by skimming. Feel free to browse yourself. Also, you can feel pretty confident that I am correctly blaming Pombo directly for this. In the top corner of the document, it has this filestamp :

F:M9POMBOPOMBO_130.XML

So, I’m again going to post some time my wife and I have spent backpacking in or otherwise visting federal land in Utah and Wyoming, before someone finds oil shale there.

The Bull Moose Blog had this to say about possible upcoming indictments (emphasis added):

Having stipulated his distaste for the Bushies, the Moose will not be as jubilant as some if Mr. Fitzgerald announces indictments, even if one of his targets is Rove (in truth, the Moose will then enjoy some schadenfreude). But, it will be a sad day for America. If Administration officials violated the law it will further weaken trust in our public institutions. Cynicism will be the victor.

I am sad that, to a large degree, my side is focusing on this. They want comeuppance, and in my opinion, rightly so. However, it is not what the country needs, i