Digifesto

Third Party Spunk

Doug Mayle sent me this article today about Libertarian candidate Bob Barr’s law suit to remove McCain and Obama from the party ballet.

Texas election code §192.031 requires that the “written certification” of the “party’s nominees” be delivered “before 5 p.m. of the 70th day before election day.” Because neither candidate had been nominated by the official filing deadline, the Barr campaign argues it was impossible for the candidates to file under state law.

This may seem like a petty move on the part of Barr, but it’s really a principled demand for better treatment of third parties. “Fair” treatment would be outlandish to ask for–the current legislation hardly gives them a chance. But letting the actual enforcement of the law be held to a double standard would just be a travesty.

“The facts of the case are not in dispute,” says Russell Verney, manager of the Barr campaign. “Republicans and Democrats missed the deadline, but were still allowed on the ballot. Third parties are not allowed on the ballot for missing deadlines, as was the case for our campaign in West Virginia, yet the Texas secretary of state’s office believes Republicans and Democrats to be above the law.”

It’s worth noting that since Texas is such a deeply red state, this move hurts Republicans far more than it hurts Democrats. I’d recommend that dedicated progressives get behind this law suit and support it, however unlikely the suit’s success, if only for that strategic reason (though I think the third party issue might actually be more worth fighting for).

September 14, 2008

OBEY

idea by kyle moore

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September 13, 2008

Interesting New York 2008

Friend and colleague Rolando Penate was looking for people to accompany him to today’s Interesting New York event. I took him up on it after briefly skimming the list of speakers, otherwise having no idea what to expect.

It did not disappoint. It was a very interesting, if slightly grueling (twenty eight “short” presentations add up to a lot.) I’m still not sure what exactly it was that I witnessed for the whole day.

The first interesting feature was that event was held at the Fashion Institute of Technology‘s Katie Murphy Amphitheater. Finding myself within the walls of F.I.T. was a small surprise in itself. As it turned out, there was only one talk about fashion, in which an elegantly attired Jennifer Wright, “a freelance writer for a variety of luxury lifestyle publications,” argued that Karl Lagerfeld is a robot. Instead, the audience and speakers appear to be primarily made up of high-tech advertising people and communications consultants. Picking somebody from the speakers’ list at random, the odds are you’d get somebody who would be great at perfecting your digital brand.

This didn’t make me feel any more at home. I tend to view luxury lifestyle as a waste of precious resources; but I have deep suspicions towards all advertising as a source of socially disastrous “false needs.”

But despite all, there was an impressive showing of and expressed interest in social entrepreneurship and even personal stories of disciplined consumption. I was very pleased that this antithesis was brought to light by Gaurav Mishra‘s inspiring talk on being “The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.” He explained that as a successful marketing guy in India, he saw that there were growing anti-consumerist trends in the marketplace. Marketing people, he admitted, should be terrified by this. He himself dealt with it by given up all his unnecessary possessions and changing careers to academic research and social entrepreneurship.

The majority of talks, however, were completely from left field. Some examples:

The guy who sat in front of me for the first section who I had uncharitably pegged as a generic hipster turned out to be Morgan Friedman, the creator of Overheard in New York. He gave an energetic talk about how to enjoy wandering in a foreign or unknown city.
The marketing director of a software consultancy expressed her appreciation of Jane Eyre and made me want to read it.
A Jungian, dream interpreting psychoanalyst (who was also a “consumer researcher”) explained how to get meaning out of your dreams.
A cute communications strategist performed a mind-blowing interview with some guy who Twitters as a Mad Men fan fiction character. The interviewee was in character for the performance, and managed to describe his fan fiction community entirely through metaphorical references to his (fictional) company, Sterling Cooper.

I’d recommend going to see it if it happens again next year and you’re free for it.

September 11, 2008

What happened to Paul Newell?

I have mentioned Paul Newell–one of New York State’s Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver‘s first challengers in over twenty years–before on this blog. Newell represented a departure from New York’s infamous “three men in a room” style of politics, since displacing Silver would have be a serious coup against a monolithic and unrepresentative political machine.

In the course of the primary, Newell’s grassroots fund raising effort outpaced Silvers by more than two to one. Newell also garnered the endorsements of major New York newspapers including the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Daily News.

The day after the primaries, the New York Post reported Silver’s victory in the district with 68 percent of the vote against Newell’s 23 percent.

So what happened?

My guess is this: Newell had tremendous appeal across the state and even across the country as a good government reformer on the progressive “Change!” platform that has swept the Democratic party with Obama’s campaign. But meanwhile, Silver has had 20 years to use his almost unsurpassed clout in the state legislature to support the entrenched groups in his district. And ultimately, despite the impact of the election on statewide corruption and budgeting, the outcome came down to how Silver rebuilt ground zero seven years ago.

Like Sean Tevis’ campaign, this raises questions for me about the purpose of local elections. In this case, where the locally elected official has such enormous statewide power, it feels like his office should be judged by a statewide tribunal of voters. And indeed, I’m sure much of Newell’s support came from reform-minded people who could never cast a vote for him. But meanwhile, Silver first and foremost is a representative of the Lower East Side, and apparently supports those constituents very well. Were Newell’s supporters from outside that district just butting in where they have no business?

I don’t think so. But I’m curious to hear what others say.

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August 6, 2008

Double take: Hakeem Jeffries

Wait a second. Something about this isn’t right.

This is how Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries explains his “Summer at the Subways” office hours:

Since not everyone has the time to visit the office during the day, I will bring my office to a location where many community members find themselves at some point when returning home from work: The subway.”

Isn’t there some kind of contradiction between this tacit admission that most of his constituents are rail commuters and his strong stance against congestion pricing?

My read on this is that Jeffries is caught in a political trap. He appears to genuinely want to support his constituents and do right by them, but likely had to cave under party pressure on the congestion pricing issue in order to maintain any influence in the legislature.

Others will not be so charitable.

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August 6, 2008

Pimp moves, local politics edition

Yesterday morning I was stopped at the entrance to the subway by my Assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries, who handed me a card explaining that he would be holding office hours each evening inside subway stations in his jurisdiction. I am impresed.

I’ve heard some complaints about his politics. But there is no denying that this is a pimp move.

The New York Times has more coverage.

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August 4, 2008

Why not OpenLayers?

Last week I attended the OpenLayers sprint hosted by MetaCarta in Cambridge, Massachussetts. It is likely that you’ve never heard of OpenLayers. Here’s how the website describes it:

OpenLayers is a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. OpenLayers implements a (still-developing) JavaScript API for building rich web-based geographic applications, similar to the Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth APIs, with one important difference — OpenLayers is Free Software, developed for and by the Open Source software community.

OpenLayers is a flexible, powerful library that can read, display, and write geospatial data (or “maps,” as they call them on the streets) in a number of formats. You can load it to a web page in a compressed, single file version, or look at the whole, unobfuscated library and tweak things to your liking.

What’s strange, then, is why in a world where for web development “mashup” has become synonymous with a Google Maps application, OpenLayers–which has in many cases identical functionality–has so few users. Even at The Open Planning Project, where several of us work on OpenLayers development, most of my colleagues turn to Google Maps for their web mapping needs instead.

While at the sprint, I had several of fruitful conversations with the other developers about why this is the case. Here are the explanations that those conversations brought up.

Data. The single best reason to use GoogleMaps instead of OpenLayers is that GoogleMaps gives you access to their now ubiquitous base layer bundled with their JavaScript for controlling the map. If an OpenLayers user wants to use that base layer, they need to import the JavaScript that implements their API along with the map. The OpenLayers library then becomes redundant–it’s just an extra 100 KB of Javascript on the page, when the user could just use the Google code instead.
Documentation. The other big advantage GoogleMaps has are its beautiful tutorials. Basically all OpenLayers has going for it in terms of docs are the somewhat inscrutable natural docs and a suite of examples. The documentation is designed for OpenLayers developers, not as a way of making OpenLayers easy for users. That naturally scares a lot of people..
Design. The default UI for the various OpenLayers controls suffer from indifference to design. Neither prettified nor minimalist, the best word I can think of for it is “literal.” In principle, web applications that use OpenLayers can easily re-theme their maps. EveryBlock does some nice work along these lines. But in practice, redesigning OpenLayers is actually labor intensive when you include how long it takes to figure out how to do it. The Community Almanac project we’ve been developing at OpenGeo, for example, still uses the default zoom control, even though the rest of the site has had some wonderful design work done for it. OpenLayers could be made much more appealing right out of the box.

What do these three things have in common? They are outside the realm of the normal activity of its development community, which is made up primarily of engineers from places like TOPP, MetaCarta, and Camp-to-Camp. Data, documentation, and design are not our forte. Many would argue that accumulating, styling, and hosting free data is completely out of OpenLayers’ scope. But nevertheless, these issues are exactly what’s holding OpenLayers back from being a widely used tool across the web. Its ultimate success depends on the community’s finding a way to overcome them.

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August 2, 2008

Public vs. grassroots campaign financing (part 3)

Earlier, I argued that grassroots campaign funding doesn’t really make campaigns more democratic. Public campaign financing is better, but only if it is designed to actually level the playing field. The U.S. federal campaign finance system is not well-designed for this.

One of the often cited problems with public campaign finance in the United States is its susceptibility to ‘loopholes.’ While most campaign finance systems will attempt to impose some constraints on private contributions, it appears that the politically motivated always find a way around the restrictions. 527 organizations are the most notable examples of this, but there are others. For example, a thorough study of the donors to local campaigns will reveal that in many cases all the employees of a particular company will individually make donations to one candidate up to the local limits. If it is possible for the leadership of the company to pressure employees to contribute in this way, then company has effectively gotten around the legal restrictions its own ability to donate as a company.

The typical response to this sort of news is the call for stronger restrictions and better enforcement of them. But this generates a backlash. Many argue that we have a right to make private campaign contributions, a right derived from our right to free speech. Whether or not this moral argument is correct, it has been enforced by the Supreme Court in Randall v. Sorrell. In addition, many see private ‘grassroots’ campaign contributions as a revitalization of political participation.

So removing the influence of money from politics completely appears hopeless. Thankfully, one fact means that despite ‘loopholes’, public campaign financing still can mitigate the problem of unequal representation based on wealth.

That fact is the diminishing returns of campaign funding. A candidate with a $15,000 budget has an enormous advantage over a candidate with a $5,000 budget. But if candidates’ budgets are $30,000 and $20,000, then the advantage is much smaller even though the dollar difference is the same. At some point the campaign message saturates its audience. Empirical research into the effects of campaign finance consistently report that the effect on elections of differences in funding between major candidates is surprisingly small

What public campaign financing can have a big effect on, though, is who gets to be a major candidate in the first place. Third party candidates don’t get a break in our system. And in states where the major party PAC’s have a lot of funding and power, representatives from low income districts can be held hostage to the interests of their state PAC without whose support they would not be able to run for office. A strong and fair system of public campaign financing solves these problems.

So ultimately, grassroots funding and public campaign financing are compatible–we can have a system that allows for both. But public financing is absolutely necessary to reduce the effects of money on politics, even if it can’t eliminate them entirely.

July 19, 2008

Web class campaign finance

Sean Tevis, journalist-turned-information-architect, is running for Kansas State Representative for District 15. Brilliantly, he posted this webcomic about his campaign in the style of XKCD, asking for donations to reach his goal of raising $26,000. Last Wednesday, it hit Boing Boing. Shortly thereafter, the web site was down due to mass traffic. By two days later, the donations far exceeded his target, and people across the country are following his progress.

Guys like Paul Newell should learn from this guy about how to run an intern et campaign! So what’s his secret?

A simplistic answer would just be that Tevis “understands the internet.” He understands the power of an honest, witty, conversational blog. He knows that people on the internet will self-organize around a good cause if it appeals to them. This explanation totally ignores the mechanism of his success though.

Tevis’ campaign funding is ‘grassroots,’ but grassroots campaign financing works by harnessing class or identity interests. Obama’s grassroots funding comes largely from the disposable income of his wine-track supporters. Tevis’ funding comes from a narrower base. It comes from readers of Boing Boing. It comes from people who are turned on by an homage to XKCD.

Sociologist Manuel Castells has argued that as governments lose the ability to provide for the needs of their citizens, people will organize around other, non-national identities that give their lives meaning. Somtimes these identities are tied to a particular region, like the Basque ethnic identity. But other identities, like the global feminist movement, and radical Islam, are indifferent to regional and state boundaries.

Tevis’ campaign funding illustrates the mobilization of the bearers of a new identity like these others–the identity shared by lots of the people who are active in the most forward-point parts of the web. There is a strong culture there, with its own communicative style, aesthetic sensibility, and core politics. I will call the bearers of this culture the ‘web class’ (although I don’t love the term and welcome alternative suggestions).

Don’t believe me? Perhaps you think that the majority of the donors were rallying around a general progressive agenda, accessible to all? I think the title of Cory Doctorow’s explosive shout out says it all:

Progressive geek looking for 3,000 people to help him win Kansas election against dinosauric anti-science/pro-surveillance dude

Yes, progressivism gets a mention. But the clinching trifecta is:

Tevis is pro-science. The web class loves science, because they know the internet owes everything to science and see the improvements science can make in their lives each day.
Tevis is anti-surveillance. The web class is sensative to issues of surveillance and privacy because their day-to-day life is both highly exposed and at risk of digital attack. The web class is constantly renegotiating what is public or private, and is loathe to lose control over that aspect of their lives.
Tevis is a geek. “Geek” is entirely an identity label, that denotes a shared outlook of creative practicality, as well as an independence from/rejection by “the mainstream.” The web class is largely constituted by geeks, and in this context the label is an honorific: “He is one of us.”

Like Obama’s supporters, the web class is made up largely of young professionals and students who can spend their parents’ money. I’m pretty sure a subset of them were what kept Ron Paul’s campaign alive for so long. In addition, because geography is comparatively irrelvant to the web, it is just as irrelevant to web class politics. (Several potential donors to Tevis’ campaign–for a Kansas state government position–were legally unable to because they weren’t U.S. citizens.) This makes them an excellent base for remotely financing elections. And if this sort of thing keeps up, then the web class will have some serious political clout across U.S. for the years to come.

Is this a good thing?

I’m ambivalent. On principle, I object to the heavy role of money in politics, even if that money is ‘grassroots.’ In this case, the fact that most of Tevis’ donors are likely from out of state gives me additional worry. On the other hand, I appreciate Tevis’ politics, and believe that, for example, the project of science and scientific education is one that transcends and supercedes the project of democratic legitimacy. Part of me feels strongly that the web class should not hesitate to take politics into its own hands. I will likely donate to his campaign anyway. What do you think? Comments are very welcome.

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June 23, 2008

Public vs. grassroots campaign financing (part 2)

If grassroots funding does not really solve the problem of campaign finance, then what other option is there?

Public campaign financing–where the state provides money for candidates to run–is the more traditional solution. If the state provides funding to qualified candidates irrespective of their political positions, then that means that only voter preferences will determine who will win office.

That’s how it works in theory, at least. In practice, there are several problems with the current public campaign financing systems, and especially our current presidential system.

One of those problems is qualification. Obviously, you can’t just give public campaign funding to everybody. But if the conditions of qualification reiterate the conditions for financing a private campaign, then public funding doesn’t help anybody. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens with the current presidential funding laws:

At the federal level, public funding is limited to subsidies for presidential candidates. To receive subsidies in the primary, candidates must qualify by privately raising $5000 each in at least 20 states. For qualified candidates, the government provides a dollar for dollar “match” from the government for each contribution to the campaign, up to a limit of $250 per contribution. In return, the candidate agrees to limit his or her spending according to a statutory formula.

This is lame. Contrast it with the Clean Elections financing system used in Maine, Arizona, and elsewhere. In this system, candidates qualify by getting some number of seed donations (commonly limited to $5) that demonstrate popular support. In systems like these, qualification correlates to voters, not dollars.

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