League of Technical Voters, at last.
The League of Technical Voters (“LoTV”) and its partner, the NewGov Foundation, through the GEOvoter API, are finally ready to launch a verified constituent Proof of Concept, as recommended by Phil Windley: “[Politicians] wonder, “Are all the angry tweets coming from voters in my district?” and likely conclude they’re not. Britt Blaser’s been trying to solve this problem for a while.”
The League of Technical Voter’s mission is to form a Special Interest Group (SIG) in every US political jurisdiction to support and guide representatives’ decisions and their re-election.
We propose open source, collaborative SIGs as the third major modality for politicians’ viability.
1️⃣ Before the broadcast era, politicians were required to deliver soaring oratory, projecting their voices to the back of a crowded hall.
2️⃣ In the late 20th century, politicians abandoned ideas and policies, mastering fundraising in all its crass permutations and now, the threadbare assertions of social media.
3️⃣ The model we are building is based on the “Shirky Method”, an authentic partnership between politicians and their verified constituents, crowdsourcing policy based on the techniques that coders follow to crowdsource code using Git repositories.
Compilation of a richly detailed email thread
The following thread is by members of the People-Centered Internet* who are intrigued by the vast trove of public data sources and methods to support representatives from eight levels of government jurisdictions, requiring loyalty to their voters as part of the deal: 51,231 US jurisdictions:
50 States
435 Congressional Districts
2,030 State Senate (Upper) Districts
4,842 State House (Lower) Districts
3,138 Counties
29,267 Cities
554 City council districts (wards) in 37 major cities
10,915 Unified school districts
4/24/21, Bruce:
Wanted to highlight this TED Talk by Clay Shirky I received from Britt Blaser. You can view it at https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government#t-1098862
In his talk, Shirky makes an important observation: that the open systems software development approach, which is facilitated by Github and its mature and effective process, have proven to be effective in reliable development and evolution of continually improving code in a non-hierarchical, non-coordinated community context. I say this in a somewhat generic way because the principles can be applied more broadly.
He makes the point that this creates the possibility of a democracy that is able to advance policy development while dis-intermediating the current system’s reliance on representatives in congress and its structures, while empowering ordinary people to end-run the corrupting influence of wealthy individuals and corporations over our political process. That’s a mouthful.
His point is that this proven open-systems approach hints that a new paradigm is emerging. He has the cred to point toward what’s emerging, as any prophet, without having to wait for the tipping point to be reached and all the details to emerge. His words serve as a call to action to we visionaries to help invent the future.
I invite you to weigh in on what you see we might explore that will forward GHD and advance our learning along these lines.
4/26/21, Britt:
Bruce,
Thanks for forwarding this, which I call the “Shirky Method”.
Folks: This is a space that Bruce has real expertise in. I’ve attached 2 papers he produced for Results.org ~2010, RE interacting with Members of Congress (MoCs). His work is part of a vast hidden-in-plain-sight open source IP portfolio that’s ready to be leveraged immediately, like the GitHub Congress repository supporting taxonomies like this:
The vital layers of subtlety from Shirky’s talk depend on the management of chaos: the evolution of coding from its 20th century roots, when management dictated every detail of a computer program’s features and methods in advance and locked down the code base so only a few programmers could see it (“the Waterfall approach”), As a result, less than 50% of $million enterprise programming initiatives of that period were ever implemented.
Those failures inspired “agile” 21st century systems, where all the code is visible to everyone, inviting anyone to make improvements, embodied by Linus Torvalds’ invention of Git, which enabled agile programming.
- Clay Shirky’s buried lede:
“A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now [Git].” - Implicit:
Legislators and programmers have identical workflows:
They draft, edit and argue over blocs of arcane text which, when “pulled” into an existing code base, have real effects in the real world, often unintended.
What happens next is where they differ:
- Agile management: Programmers immediately start fixing the bugs. They are peopole who are serious about their work.
- Waterfall disingenuousness: Members of Congress toast themselves in the Rose Garden because they’ll never have to mess with their code again. These are not serious people.
In 2008, Doc Searls wrote Is government open source code we can patch? | Linux Journal:
“Democracy is by nature ‘our government’. The open source twist on that is that we put it together and can hack improvements to it. Think of elected officials as committers and maintainers and you start to get the idea.”
A year later, Doc suggested to David Weinberger, Joe Trippi and me that we submit a paper to the Digital Government Society of North America: “Digital Government through Social Networks: How citizens can aggregate their money and votes to define digital government”:
“Surrounded” online by fully empowered and well informed, networked constituencies, our politicians and government employees would be motivated by self-interest to attend carefully to any policy formulations carrying the force of voters’ money and votes. Online, a plurality of anonymous but authenticated voters can pledge their future votes and donations contingent on government behaviors. When issues- based commitments to votes and donations are aggregated, published and audited, politicians are likely to behave as if the entire government were online.
Craig Newmark liked it a lot: Serious Networked Governance Paper from Joe Trippi, David Weinberger, Britt Blaser | TheHill.
In every sense that matters, the 1789 Constitutional Convention was the first Open Source conference.
Our 21st century imperative is to start managing politicians explicitly, requiring them to execute their verified constituents’ most urgent pull requests to form a more perfect agile democracy. It sounds like a ServiceNow project.
4/26/21, Richard:
wowzers! That was a good talk. I’ll do my usual plug for participatory mapping. Seems like the youngster Shirky describes was doing just that, reporting on what she found interesting and important. While I have an interest in the mechanical systems, I’m more about the governance. I’ve often asked, “Who has the read/write permissions to the database?” We are certainly seeing that in the latest training data stories for AI. I suppose my thought is that given enough citizens (by, of and for the people here in the US), some interesting networks will be evolve, but of course that is a big/maybe a complete challenge to existing governments. Britt’s email is full of examples of this emerging community centric governing structure.
Social fluid dynamics indicate that (at least in the long term) any formal (somewhat broadly defined here) enhancement to a flock will cause the more powerful/rigid members of the flock to react (hard to turn a battleship). Typically, flocks are most effectively managed via nudges. One nudge I like is a nine year old doing a daily report on her cafeteria. I suppose at some point a nonprofit distributed ledger like GitHub will have political issues as well. but the biggest problem I see currently is government power structures. This young lady is providing important, not trivial, information on how her tax dollars are utilized. Enough of “hers” and a bubble would start, a rip in the fabric of government.
4/29/21, Britt:
The NewGov religion is participatory mapping! And supporting participatory mappers, whom we call verified constituents, or SuperVoters.
So we developed the GEOvoter architecture to put voter sentiment on the maps of their 6–8 political jurisdictions. That promotes them to “verified constituents”, as described by Phil Windley (cc’d), cofounder with Doc Searls of the Internet Identity Workshop, Verifying Constituency: A Sovrin Use Case:
[Politicians] wonder, “Are all the angry tweets coming from voters in my district?” and likely conclude they’re not. Britt Blaser’s been trying to solve this problem for a while.
Suppose that I had four verified claims in my Sovrin agent:
Address Claim — A claim that I live at a certain address, issued by someone that we can trust to not lie about this (e.g. my bank, utility company, or a third party address verification service).
Constituency Claim — A claim written by the NewGov Foundation or some other trusted third party, based on the Address Claim, that I’m a constituent of Congressional District 3.
Voter Claim — A claim that says I’m a registered voter. Ideally this would be written by the State of Utah Election Office, but might need to be done by someone like NewGov based on voter rolls for now.
Twitter Claim — A claim that proves I own a particular Twitter handle. Again, this would ideally be written by Twitter, but could be the work of a third party for now.
GEOvoter Participatory Mapping Services
GEOvoter.io: Voter hashtags on politicians’ maps + metadata & drill down.
Demo Map: Double-click lists any location’s 6–8 political jurisdictions.
Zip code or Lat-Long Demo: Verify jurisdictions with Zip or Lat-Long.
PowerZone REST call: 61 lines of code returns your 6–8 political jurisdictions.
GEOvoter API Data Types: 12 Twitter native + 21 derived from NewGov
GEOvoter API: 22 notifications to politicians, papers and social networks.
Participatory hashtagging: GEOvoter.io places citizens’ hashtagged tweets on politicians’ electoral maps, in this case, 435 US Congressional districts. It’s a demonstration project, color coded to the NewGov Foundation’s 8 Twitter “__VoteUS” brands: Fair, Fem, Hot, Imm, Snap, Net, Stem, & Vet:
The aim is to level the tweeting field by aggregating a jurisdiction’s verified constituents’ hashtags to, perhaps, counter their representative’s narrow, typically biased and often misleading Tweetstorm. Eventually, constituents’ mindsets might shift:
“Mr. Politician, we now realize you don’t own this jurisdiction. We live here but you’re really a visitor: a quarterback we can trade, not our team’s owner.”
Participatory Mappers’ Influence on a Senate hearing.
During the Kavanaugh hearings, a few Maine voters launched a Crowdpac pledge campaign to pressure Susan Collins to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination. It eventually grew over $4,000,000. Crowdpac’s default format is for the campaign’s leaders to upload a video, often amateurish, and which often, amateurishly, buries the lede. It wasn’t obvious from the Collins campaign’s video on Crowdpac that the campaign’s leaders were all from Maine and that most of the pledges were also. A participatory voter map would be far more compelling to Collins and her staff.
An ideal map GIF would replay the history of new pledges accelerating virally over time, ideally with compelling corn-popping sounds.
The GEOvoter API Committee Guide depicts the Senate Judiciary Committee’s sensitivity to participatory mappers, showing how few senators drive important issues. The Senate Judiciary committee’s 12 majority members comprise only 12% of the Senate. Any Influence-as-a-Service platform will match up activists with verified constituents in the 12 or fewer states the committee’s majority, and that it’s only necessary to peel away a single vote to tie up the majority:
Richard’s crucial question, “Who has the read/write permissions to the database?”.
That’s the point of Doc’s Linux Journal article (“we put it together and can hack improvements to it”). Just as a Git repository must live outside the walled garden of any of its stakeholders, democracy’s too important to be left to the politicians. Every legislature could benefit from an Influence-as-a-Service platform, maintained outside of the .gov walled garden. That’s why NewGov.us mapped and provisioned 58,688 US jurisdictions & officeholders:
50 States
50 State Governors
435 Congressional Districts
435 Members Of Congress
2,030 State Senate (Upper) Districts
2,030 State Senators
4,842 State House (Lower) Districts
4,842 State House members
3,138 Counties
29,267 Cities
554 City council districts (wards) in 37 major cities
10,915 Unified school districts
Unfortunately, 58,000 new social networks = 58,000 ghost towns. Despite that disappointment, a successor in interest could designate political jurisdictions as Networked Improvement Communities and stand them up one at a time, avoiding the ghost town problem.
As specific points emerge in this thread, I’ll continue to provide verbose descriptions and graphics of NewGov’s and other democracy hackers’ architecture, methods, classes, etc. to document the vast trove waiting to be tapped. A rich email thread like this is the perfect conversation to tease out the many aspects of our stakeholders’ user story. Paraphrasing:
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain ignorant of the vast datasets and methods already in the public sphere.”
4/29/21, Richard:
Hey Britt,
Dang it! I think in all my wording I forgot to say explicitly, Hear! Hear! I agree NewGov is indeed participatory mapping. I’ve played around in it and was very enthusiastic (until the next shiny ball passed by). I’ll take time to absorb your presentation. I like the long text form myself for a variety of reasons. So no complaints from me!
Thanks for giving me that head start.
4/29/21, Phil:
Britt, this use case wouldn’t be hard to put together now as a proof of concept using something like Trinsic Studio to define the credentials.
The hardest one would be the address credential (updated words from when that piece was written). But its not impossible using data from Equifax, or someone else to get 90% of the way there.
Beyond that, I think the best way to approach it is to find a willing Congressperson to test it in their district. They’d have a Twitter tool that highlights anyone who’s proven their twitter handle belongs to a verified voted in that district. Or maybe it automatically creates a twitter list. That might be easiest.
Anyway, this is doable as a PoC now.
4/30/21, Richard:
Greetings all,
I’ve started reviewing Britt’s info but I’m going to drift off to this quickly.
“best way to approach it is to find a willing Congressperson to test it in their district. They’d have a Twitter tool that highlights anyone who’s proven their twitter handle belongs to a verified voted in that district.”
I have an old friend from EPA, Matt Robins, who is now a Tucker, GA city council person. Tucker is an incorporated city (I think). It’s one of the small enclaves trying to assert itself against the tide of Atlanta. He’s always followed my mapping/community engagement work so it’s at least slightly possible Tucker would be into a trial run of this type of thing.
One current example, Tucker was considering closing Main Street to car traffic. But ultimately, it’s been at least sidelined. It’s a great idea and would enhance the village area. I’ve always wondered why it didn’t get more of a hearing.
I really have no idea whether this would be interesting to the town. And there’s some reality to the test site being pretty far physically from most of this group. However, that can’t be a roadblock in the long run.
Seeds can take a long time to grow, so I’ll just leave this one here and we’ll see if anything sprouts.
Thanks!!
4/30/21, Phil:
From the perspective of a PoC, the question would be how many twitter users comment on Tucker GA politics and city services, etc. If it’s a handful it won’t be a meaningful test because many of them won’t go through the hassle of setting it up.
But… this is the kind of thing we’re looking for I think Richard.
4/30/21, Richard:
My favorite social philosopher — Pierre Bourdeau, uses the term “symbolic violence” adding quantitative value to qualitative reasoning. Science may have all the answers, but it may not have asked the right question for the recipient. We see this today in the vaccine issues. the science is clear. The emotions, far from clear.
The opportunity of NewGov and like ideas is to provide a mechanism that allows/encourages folks to come home after a long day of working, taking care of the family in the evening and still feeling like they can spend 10 mins learning/voicing their opinions. I use the ATM machine as my basic design idea for any software. If they struggle to participate, they won’t. But if they participate, AND they see the process within their community, then when the results are reached, the individuals will (hopefully) feel like they were a part of the process and more importantly, will understand that they can continue to be a part and have real influence. I’ll note that only a small part of that scenario involves what the decision actually is. You win some. You lose some. But you need to “believe” you made good decisions/had real and meaningful input, aka a real opportunity to change the original proposals.
I’ll add this is a huge threat to existing power structures. If the people actually participate and determine what they want for their communities, the elected officials become project managers, not so much choosing how to spend tax resources, but rather enacting what the people want. Radical, I know, but never underestimate the power of a politician in danger of loosing his/her grip on power.
A bit windy, but that’s why G-d made Fridays!
Enjoy the weekend everyone! And thanks for including me in these most interesting discussions.
4/30/21, Britt:
I’m imagining an organizational exoskeleton that tech/policy wonks catalyze and manage, using well-established techniques to aggregate verified constituents who appoint themselves as their representative’s C-Suite for marketing and shareholder management (without calling it that): processes that cement 2-way loyalty between the Rep and voters. 2-way politician/voter loyalty can become the 21st century hallmark of political viability, as oratory was in the 19th and crass fundraising in the 20th.
The disruption of the US Policy Development Industry can proceed using the model that has disrupted so many others.
This startup would leverage my 17 years of learning cycles RE democracy and Influence-as-a-Service. Again, one of several hooks is the insight that politics changes over time: In the 19th century, politicians had to project their voice to the back of a crowded hall. Today, they need to raise money in the humiliating way described by This American Life, Take the Money and Run for Office, with Barney Frank’s pull quote:
“If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money’s rear end any time. I’ve never met a politician who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn’t go with the district…I have had members say to me, you’re right. But I can’t do that politically because I’ll get killed in my district. No one has ever said to me, I’m sorry, but I got a big contributor I can’t offend.”
The business model would be to manage, for politicians, all the customer-facing services that any vendor considers the core of their growth strategy.
Low-hanging revenue example, A Politician Early Warning System:
GEOvoter.io records and maps constituent hashtags. We could hold back the data for, say, 72 hours, because it’s really not a trend yet. But statistical analysis can detect the initial viral patterns that portend long term virility. Those insights are political gold, and could be sold to politicians.
Another vector: Nitin Badjatia’s startup is ServiceNow.com. One of their government-oriented demos is for FOIA Request processing. I’m sure he’d be intrigued by the opportunity to help a team of whip-smart young policy & tech wonks helping Congressional representatives and their staffs to automate their constituent research and outreach.
5/1/21, Britt:
Here’s a 2019 proposal to Zoom, directly related to City Council meetings.
Fwd: City council meetings & Zoom settings
I see that Zoom just announced this functionality. I’ll keep an eye out for my check ;-)
Hi,
I told Cody that we want to broadcast City Council meetings by using multiple Zoom sessions. So, if there are 5 City Council members, we might have a Zoom feed for each, plus a feed for the person addressing the council and another for the computer display. We would use a Zoom dial-in phone connection to share the audio from the public address system.
Ideally, we’d like to superimpose the Zoom sessions on a static photo of the council:
5/8/21, Richard:
1. Having used Teams theater seating, I did see that Zoom is introducing that. As just a personal comment, and I believe VR will pretty shortly overtake all this, the difference with such a small change is remarkable. Putting people in seats is psychologically comfortable. Yet another example of “hiding” the technology (with all the foibles attached) in plain sight. VR is currently dicey and not yet user friendly. But it’s time to consider its impact on learning systems. For educational purposes, its potential is astounding.
In the interim, I really like the potential of these more psychologically familiar settings for technology tools. Especially with audiences that are not particularly tech savvy (or have strong non-tech power centers), this type of small thing can have outsized impacts.
2. I mentioned that I have an old friend, Matt Robins, who is a City Councilman in Tucker, GA. Tucker is one of those growing suburbs around Atlanta. I’d be glad to see if Matt considers Tucker a good candidate for some experimenting. I’m relatively sure he would enjoy chatting with us about some possibilities.
5/8/21, Britt:
Meet Anna Johnson, who directs marketing for Trinsic.id, and lives in Georgia!
I’m spending my weekend preparing a process & onboarding flow chart for Anna. I think she’s going to be a fair but demanding boss ;-)
Anna and I spoke yesterday with Nicole Sister, cc’d, who is in marketing with Nitin Badjatia’s company, Service Now. Their platform looks like it could offer a user-seductive dashboard for elected reps to partner with their verified constituents in what may become accepted as 21st century politics vs. the 19th: Oratory, and 20th: Ceaseless fundraising and whacky social media. Servicenow’s FOIA Request demo shows the potential, as do their government other government demos listed in the FOIA demo’s sidebar.
Every representative needs a F.A.N. Club: Friends, Allies & Neighbors as described at Chairman Chaffetz needs a F.A.N. Club. It’s a response to Phil Windley’s Verifying Constituency, a Sovrin Use Case.
Once my flow chart is good enough to criticize, could you share it with Matt Robins and schedule a call for next week? He might be one of the reps in our first alpha round of the Trinsic Proof of Concept.
Bruce, 5/25/21:
I invite you to attend the Cool Cities Challenge initiative info session by zoom on Jun 1 (Other info sessions are available on subsequent weeks). Moving out from cities to the state, to the nation, to the world. Starting with $1M grants to three cities in CA. Further info below.
Moonshot thinking is when you choose a huge problem and propose a radical solution using breakthrough technology. This project has a strategy for scaling the achievement of carbon neutrality by 2030 to reach global scale by 2045. The thinking behind this is by David Gershon of the Empowerment Institute Center for Reinventing the Planet.
You should be aware of this, at least. Check it out at https://coolcity.earth/
Britt, 5/25/21:
A variation on moonshot thinking is to enjoy a running start by discovering existing components of the solution that are simple, if you know where & what they are. In this case, the GEOvoter API, developed by the NewGov Foundation and the League of Technical Voters, requires just 61 lines of code to identify the 8 political jurisdictions of any US address or Lat-Long. It’s straightforward to leverage public data to add overlapping jurisdictions and their representatives as in this San Jose example. That process can designate the participants as verified constituents of those jurisdictions:
A deprecated proof of concept is at NewGov.US, newgov.us/ca/san-jose:
And https://newgov.us/ca/san-jose/03 presents:
Once designated as verified constituents by a trusted 3rd party identity authority, voters comprise a special interest group (SIG) to crowdsource policy the way programmers crowdsource code, because:
Legislators and programmers have the same workflow: Draft, edit & argue over blocks of arcane text which, when “pulled” into an existing code base, have real effects in the real world: How the Internet will (one day) transform government.
Thank you Bruce, for inspiring our stealth team of People Centered Internet members to identify the first political jurisdictions to designate as Networked Improvement Communities. San Jose seems like a logical candidate for the first three cities and, perhaps, Google might have a special interest in helping as it expands into San Jose:
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*Background
The People-Centered Internet and its Global Help Desk (GHD) initiative are full of smart, caring volunteers, as you’d expect from a movement founded by Mei Lin Fung and Vint Cerf. Intro videos: Short & fuller.
That’s why it’s so gratifying that so many PCI members see the light at the end of the League of Technical Voters’ tunnel!
