The League of Technical Voters and its partner, the NewGov Foundation, are finally ready to launch a verified constituent Proof of Concept, based on the excellent Trinsic Studio recommended by Phil Windley.
The League of Technical Voter’s mission is to form a Special Interest Group (SIG) in most US political jurisdictions to support and guide representatives’ decisions and their re-election.
We propose collaborative SIGs as the third major modality for politicians’ viability.
Before the broadcast era, politicians were required to deliver soaring oratory, projecting their voices to the back of a crowded hall. In the late 20th century, they had to abandon ideas and master fundraising in all its crass permutations and…
I love the Palo Alto VA Hospital. It’s free for me and full of whip-smart Stanford Med School Residents. But the VA system has a nationwide problem: there’s no online patient portal to manage communication. Instead, all the communication is by phone, which means that you call to make an appointment but leave a voicemail. When they call you back, it’s often from a different number, with or without Caller ID.
Many patients are my age or older, so we’re challenged by the logistics of all this back and forth. And everything else. Since it’s the VA, every message starts…
The best rule of all: Each of us is the traffic cop at the intersection our stakeholders' ROI goals.
What Americans want to hear from Mike Bloomberg:
Since 1982, I’ve prospered by helping people who buy and sell corporate ideas and promises. They call themselves “traders”.
Traders call corporate ideas “stocks”.
Traders call corporate promises “bonds”.
I’ve helped them by selling Bloomberg Terminals to their employers, now installed on traders’ desks all over the world. Bloomberg Terminals organize an ocean of public data so traders can make the best choices for their clients.
Families care about traders’ decisions because it’s how they make retirement funds more valuable. …
Improv Yes/And rules: the secret to building online communities.
Bruce Preville and Chris Page are inspiring a few of us at People Centered Internet to help NICs—Networked Improvement Communities—become the best exemplars for engaging their stakeholders with a suite of tools for seamless evolution of random ideas into well-organized, easily followed threads.
Catalytic Converter: Zooms to Rooms to Whom it may concern.
It’s now a universal challenge: An offhand observation in a Zoom meeting might be the spark for organizational change, but not if it’s buried in a Zoom recording that’s too difficult for most participants to access or build upon.
The solution seems to be an automated workflow to leverage Otter.AI to transcribe the conversation so a light…
On Political Campaigns
Originally published 5/19/04, as a subset of Democracy’s To-Do List
What have we learned about campaigning in the Internet era? The Dean Campaign seemed to be the answer, but was not. In fact, it was a better-equipped iteration of many previous “breakthroughs”, like the Goldwater, McCarthy and Perot campaigns. But many naive citizens took the thrilling possibilities at face value. These enthusiastic efforts crop up periodically and have always failed. How might a real political revolution occur?
Open Resource Group has been working on the mechanics of the solution since mid-2003. Our mission: Help regular folks find the next Mr…
Doc Searls, Harvard, 2008: “Note to selves: a lot of what Larry Lessig wants here is what Britt Blaser and friends are working on.”
12 years later, we can see the obvious next, potentially final, step:
USOS upgrade: Committees make the laws:
Mike Bloomberg’s Senate Loyalty Terminals
What Americans want to hear from Mike Bloomberg:
Since 1982, I’ve prospered by helping people who buy and sell corporate ideas and promises, who call themselves “traders”.
•Traders call corporate ideas “stocks”.
•Traders call corporate promises “bonds”.I’ve helped traders by selling Bloomberg Terminals to their employers, now installed on traders’ desks all over the world. …
Mei Lin Fung and Vint Cerf co-founded the People Centered Internet in 2015 with significant support from the UN.
Mei Lin Fung:
One of the most powerful tools in the hands of half of humankind, like fire, can be harnessed for good or bad. The People Centered Internet is just a short name for those who believe in an Internet by the people of the people and with the people of the world.
Vint Cerf:
In the tussle between beneficial and harmful behaviors, our challenge is to preserve and encourage the former and discourage the latter. This should be a…
We’ve been marveling this week at the ziggurat of competence, collaboration, and hard work of the contributors rolling out the first vaccine while the Whiner-In-Chief, who couldn’t manage a two-car funeral, wails about his mistreatment. Now is our chance to declare which side of the competence/service divide our progeny will embrace.
“Manifest Destiny” described the aftermath of Europeans’ genocide against North American indigenous peoples. Leveraging their land and resources, we turned to Latin America and, eventually, Spain.
“The U.S. has been involved in nation-building and promoting democracy since the middle of the nineteenth century and ‘Manifest Destiny”, said State Department…
Yesterday, we reviewed Doc Searls’ absurd run-in with Condé Nast, whose Customer Deflection System established a new high with its byzantine subscription renewal maze.
See, with most subscription systems, FUBAR is the norm. A matter of course. Pro forma. Entrenched. A box outside of which nobody making, managing or working in those systems can think.
This is why, when an alien idea appears, for example from a loyal customer just wanting a single and simple damn price, the response is “Never gonna happen.”
The Extra Time we were Promised
George Gilder, 1996:
In every industrial transformation, businesses prosper by using the defining abundance of their era…
