I-495 Lanes: 4 More Tears?
An IaaS workflow for curbing another Real Estate developer turned politician. (IaaS: Influence as a Service).
As a former real estate developer, I get why they think they’re smart, while clueless about distribution channels, framing, marketing, etc. The roads deliver their buyers to them. Location, Location, Location is all they need to know.
CABE represents Maryland Citizens Against Beltway Expansion because MD Governor Hogan is a former real estate developer who has the authority to enter into public/private partnerships without approval by the MD Assembly. So why not let a group of developers build 2 new toll lanes (“Lexus Lanes”) on each side of I-495, the DC area beltway that literally defines Beltway Bandits.
CABE doesn’t need badges, but they do need Verified Constituents
Phil Windley and I have been discussing Verified Constituents for quite a while. They’re valuable to every elected representative so they’re valuable to anybody who wants elected representatives to pass a law.
Wouldn’t Twitter be smart to offer Verified Constituent accounts? We know for sure that a Verified Constituent has real influence on her representatives. If not alone, then in visible, persistent, sane collaboration with just a few other constituents.
IaaS, Influence as a Service, is based on ITTP, the Influencer Text Transport Protocol. Both are proto-protocols, too cute by half, but they have the virtue of sending what Sandy Pentland’s been calling “Honest Signals” for a decade. Everything on the web is moved by HTTP, the HyperText Transport Protocol, so the pipes assume everything has the same importance. Twitter’s Verified accounts signal that we should care more than the pipes do.
Because a Verified Constituent can own a VC token (maybe a VoterKittie) in a social media profile, a rich set of assertions, verified by trusted 3rd parties can attest to verified influence. Then other accounts can take special notice. Like her politicians.
Why do they care? “Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who faces a potentially tough reelection in 2020, says Congress should re-open the federal government, even without a deal on funding President Trump’s border wall.” The actions of a politician who needs constituents.
So what’s a great way for CABE to get MD Assembly members to pass some effective laws slowing down Developer Hogan? They can identify & activate constituents of the Assembly committee(s) and demand results.
Expensive lobbyists do that all the time, but usually only at the federal level where the laws are worth it, like for Bradley Army Vehicles, or fighting Net Neutrality. It’s faster & cheaper to use the GEOvoter API to ID the 7 political jurisdictions for any US address, with no more than a 61 line REST call.
Include those 61 lines in an IFTTT recipe hooking up the Twitter API, and GEOvoter can wrangle the rarest political resource:
Aggregated Constituent Sentiment
Big props to Stratechery.com‘s Aggregation Theory! @benthompson has nailed web services’ secret sauce: digitizing the hardest problem, as Uber aggregates people who want rides and AirBnB aggregates people who want rooms. Ben’s also the master of engaging us with folksy drawings worth a few thousand words,
Previous incumbents, such as newspapers, book publishers, networks, taxi companies, and hoteliers, all of whom integrated backwards, lose value in favor of aggregators who aggregate modularized suppliers — which they often don’t pay for — to consumers/users with whom they have an exclusive relationship at scale.
So the GEOvoter API, after this workflow is automated, can equip CABE or any stakeholder to algorithmically aggregate a legislative committee’s constituents.
To support crowdsourced policy, we must think of ourselves as constituents of our representatives’ committees, directing policy through our rep.
The metaphor of FOSS, Free Open Source Software is precise because:
Coders and legislators do the same work: They draft, edit and manipulate blocks of arcane text which, when added to an existing code base, have real effects in the real world, often unintended.
But the work proportions are inverted: Open source teams spend 99.9% of the work developing the code and 0.1% on the Pull Request to add a new module to the repository. Committing a new policy module to the code base of state or federal statutes takes 99.9% of the work.
Here are the steps to fix that by verifying and aggregating constituent sentiment to surround and compel their representatives to adopt a policy. The GEOvoter API has digitized most of the following hard work. Deconstructed, it looks like this:
1️⃣ Get the MD Voter File (from NationBuilder, NGPVan, etc.) and algorithmically assign a unique, anonymous code to each address record.
2️⃣ Algorithmically append the MD Assembly Senate & House districts for each address, pseudonymously, so no names or addresses are exposed. Here’s brittb’s map:
3️⃣ List the MD Assembly Senate or House Committees with relevant bills or policy areas. Add others any time.
- Certain: the House Delegation Committee, Montgomery County: House Delegate Al Carr thinks the state’s largest county, Montgomery, should have the right to control what toll roads are built there, as can several other MD counties, so he’s introduced MC 8–19.
- Probable: the House Environment and Transportation Committee will surely be involved.
- Maybe: the Assembly’s Senate Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee.
4️⃣ List the district for each of the 24 members of the Montgomery County House Delegation Committee. E.g., Delegate Alfred C. Carr, Jr. represents House District 18, Montgomery County. Each is responsible to their district’s residents. GEOvoter API Example:
This month, CABE must urge every activist to Tell your representative now! regardless if the rep is on a Committee that can make a difference. Soon CABE can use the GEOvoter API to focus like a laser on the constituents of the Committees that matter most to put the public in public policy.
Tedium Alert!
This is surely making you crazy. Who has the time or patience to do all this? Without Influence-as-a-Service, only big lobbying firms can, when selling F35s or killing Net Neutrality, etc. That’s why Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory is so important, requiring someone (like NewGov Foundation’s GEOvoter API) to digitize the hardest problem, AKA the most tedious problem, nonreproducible by grassroots activists using manual techniques:
Social Lobbying: specific laws, committees and schedules.
At the federal level, Social Lobbying looks like this:
6️⃣ Finally, the fun part of the workflow because CABE can unleash the messaging wizards, social media APIs, mailto scripting, etc. The GEOvoter API can soon recruit each district’s Verified Constituents online or even through snail mail fulfillment like the lob.com API.
Leveraging the Twitter API:
Mailto P2P script:
Please click-to-send this personal email to your friend Joan Jett, who can make such a big difference to suburban Maryland.
Hi Joan,
Did you know that Governor Hogan and some private developers just like him want to make I-495 even worse by adding privately owned “Lexus Lanes”: questionable for-profit toll lanes? I know you care don’t want that, but here’s the thing: You’re a constituent of Al Carr, Vice Chair of the MD Assembly’s Montgomery County House Delegation Committee, but I have Zero influence.
Please say you’ll help! Your opinion matters more than 85% of the people in MD!
