Digifesto

June 10, 2008

DNC reject lobbyist money

This is week-old news by now, but I just saw this New York Times article.

The Democratic National Committee, now operating under Barack Obama’s fundraising rules, on Friday returned about $100,000 in money from lobbyists and political action committees.

The donations were already ”in the pipeline” when Obama, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, instituted the standards for the committee, a party official said.

Generally speaking, I am deeply suspicious of party politics in the US. As the upcoming Newell/Silver election in AD-64 shows, party allegiance indicates almost nothing about whether a politician stands for real reforms. One of the appealing things about Obama, to me, was his apparent rejection of the party machine.

Perhaps this is a sign that Obama’s reform principles are politically infectious.

Thanks to Kailin Clarke for the tip.

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June 8, 2008

Breeding adaptations in the world of facebook

Commenters skb and Matt Cooperrider have asked for an example that justifies my claim in “Social Killer App” that “My generation has done back flips to meet the socialware demands of Facebook.” An example came up in a conversation i overheard on the subway yesterday.

Two women, apparently close friends, were discussing a man whom one had been involved with. This was a complicated relationship; it had been long distance for some time, and now they were closer together, but still he did not seem to have the time for her that she expected from him. Her mother had suggested that perhaps she was not the only woman in the man’s life, but there was no real evidence for that. He had told her that she deserves better, but still expressed interest in her.

“So what do you want?” asked the patient friend.

“Well,” said the other, “I guess what I want is…. Well, when I changed my Relationship Status [on Facebook], I took off that I was single. I didn’t say I was in any relationship or anything, but I’m not single. I’m committed to seeing where this thing goes. And I wish that he would do the same.”

Without being too glib in reading into this example, I think it demonstrates how today even very personal and subtle social relations get reified in social network technology, and how there is an admittedly heterogenous social expectation that one use those technologies in meaningful ways.

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May 28, 2008

Cultural diffusion, the media

The strangest thing about this New York Times article is not that it attempts to explain the punchline of the “Sudo make me a sandwich” xkcd comic, but that it fails to mention xkcd’s enormous pop culture hipster following, made up largely of people who don’t get the tech jokes, but who appreciate it for its more universal themes of romance, alienation, etc.

Mainstream media is slow to catch on to new trends. But maybe that’s because the dissemination of new concepts is slow, and major commercial news sources need to employ the popular conceptual lexicon. Perhaps there is no way to discuss a pop geek phenomenon in that dialect of mentalese.

Remember when the mainstream media entertained a meta-media debate about its own relationship with the emerging blogosphere a couple years ago? At the time one of the criticisms of the blogs was that they just regurgitated the news of big media without adding any new content. But now that blogs are mainstream enough for many news making organizations to have their own blogs, the situation has reversed. Often you can get the most cutting edge information about a topic by getting legible, accessible information published directly by its source.

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May 19, 2008

Farm Bill

From Open Congress‘ Congress Gossip Blog, the latest on the farce of federal agriculture policy:

Apparently the Farm Bill, which is opposed by just about anyone who has been paying attention, is actually quite popular among members of Congress. Although the bill does almost nothing to address growing concerns over the U.S. agricultural subsidies system that rewards wealthy farmers and tilts the food market in favor of cheap, unhealthy junk food, it managed to pass both the House and Senate with overwhelming, veto-proof majorities.

I’m pretty impressed with Open Congress’ work on documenting the legislation and its roll through congress. Their roll call of the Senate, for example, makes it easy to see which, if any, of the senators might have principles. Here’s the shockingly small list of senators who opposed the bill:

Interesting patterns here: the only two Democrats to oppose the bill were both from Rhode Island. Other than that, the backwoods northeast (NH, ME) and the southwest (AZ, NM, NE) are highly represented.

All three senators still in the presidential race abstained, as did Ted Kennedy, who just suffered from a seizure.

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May 18, 2008

Thoughts on APML

The Attention Profile Markup Language (APML) is a neat idea–but it’s hard to pin down exactly what that idea is. This is how its creators describe it:

APML allows you to share your own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of your ranked interests.

The comparison to OPML is useful. APML is supposed to be a standard XML format that makes it easy to transfer important information across web services.

The definition of APML in terms of Other Capitalized Jargon is much less useful, and I think points to a couple important flaws in the project’s philosophy.

On the one hand, it aims to be a format of compressed data–“Attention Data”–and especially data of the kind that can be easily collected from internet behavior. The APML FAQ indicates that there is all kinds of Attention Data– including clickstreams, bookmarks, and OPML-described feeds.

But the community emphatically denies that APML is just a data format. “APML is only interested in your Attention Profile,” which is defined as “a list of the topics and sources you are interested in, and a value representing your level of interest in them.”

There are two major problems I see regarding this plan.

Read the rest of this entry »

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May 15, 2008

OpenGeo

Chris Holmes made an unofficial announcement of OpenGeo, the new identity of TOPP’s geospatial solutions division. The branding effort is both a consequence of and catalyst for its financial sustainability.

I’m really excited to present OpenGeo, the newly minted geospatial division of The Open Planning Project. Nothing much is changing internally, but we’re getting serious about our image in the world. We’ve been supporting open source geospatial projects for years, and in the past couple years we’ve offered great consulting services around the projects we work on. But it’s always been confusing for people who don’t already know our work.

So OpenGeo.org is about giving a more visible face to our services and products, so we can bring the geospatial work in TOPP to economic sustainability with full cost recovery. It also marks the launch of ‘GeoServer Enterprise‘ packages, which bundle web and telephone support, priority bug fixes, discount consulting rates, and a number of implementation hours by the experts.

Complete post here.

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May 13, 2008

MIT Collaboratorium

Matt Cooperrider pointed me towards this YouTube video on MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence Collaboratorium project:

In my opinion, their design is too centralized and too top-down; but I nevertheless give these folks a tremendous amount of credit, because I believe that a solution to the collaborative deliberation problem they are trying to solve could save the world. It could provide the technological foundation for a Habermasian’ ideal speech situation.  If done right–and MIT doesn’t seem far off from a great first step–it would be the social killer app.

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May 13, 2008

FairVote on social media in politics

FairVote’s blog has an article summing up the use of social media in politics.

As an example of people taking the initiative and offering presidential candidates star power, through using the medium of video sharing on YouTube, the Will.I.am “Yes We Can” song endorsing Barack Obama was an instant hit. Other candidates have also had unsolicited songs inspired by them and written about them.

I would describe the tone of the post as “cautious”–in both the scope of its claims and its attitude towards technology. The most important issue it raises, in my opinion, is the question of access:

One final note of caution is whether these technologies become so cheap that it is truly for the masses or will there become a technological underclass lacking access and the skills to keep up?

A totally appropriate concern. No discussion of e-politics is complete without a mention of the digital divide. I’ve gotten into the bad habit of answering this concern with a hand-wavy, “One Laptop per Child will solve it!” But that’s an inadequate response.

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May 13, 2008

Copyright infringement in the public domain

Mike Masnick at Techdirt on the topic of copyright infringement on the public domain:

…a bunch of episodes from “The Andy Griffith” show fell into the public domain. However, it was just a bunch of episodes from later seasons. Earlier seasons remained under copyright. The court ruled that since the later shows were based on the earlier shows that were still covered by copyright, the later shows could not be distributed freely. This seems like a rather perverse interpretation of copyright law.

Full post here.

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May 12, 2008

Challenger challenge

Kim Hynes has cross-posted to the Common Cause blog urging readers in Connecticut to get political exercise by running for office against their incumbent representatives. As she points out, there are great democratic effects of challenged seats even when the challenger is not elected.

After I ran in 2004, many people would ask me if I `won’. I would tell them that I did win. I didn’t get elected, but I won. What I mean by this is that I became a better person because of the experience. Why, you ask – what good did it really do? I may not have gotten elected, but the electorate sure did get energized by my race. Hundreds of people showed up for the debates. People started talking about local issues that they care about. People got to know my opponent better, and found out how she stands on the issues. I provided reverse coat tails – in the areas in which I ran, the Congressional candidate did demonstrably better than in areas where the incumbents were unopposed. Finally, I provided the inspiration for a candidate in the next district over – who ran in 2006 and lost by just 200 votes. This year the incumbent in that district has decided to retire, and the same candidate has a very good chance at winning this seat – in a district considered unwinnable for challengers.

I’m wholeheartedly in support of Hynes’ call for challengers. But can there be too many challengers?

Yes and no. Yes, when we use a plurality voting system for our elections. FairVote succinctly sums up the problems of plurality voting:

Three is a crowd in our current voting system. Plurality voting, where the candidate with the most votes wins, is dysfunctional when more than two candidates run. It promotes zero-sum politics that discourage new candidates, suppress new ideas and encourage negative campaigns rather than inclusive efforts to build consensus.

Plurality voting weakens candidates the more their politics agree with each other. So two challengers both fighting for the same reforms against an entrenched incumbent can become each others’ greatest enemy.

But in principle, we should stand strong that No, there can’t be too many challengers. Rather, we should be working to change the system so that our democratic process can be as lively as possible.

As I write this, I am worried about the upcoming election in New York’s Assembly District 64. Paul Newell, who I’ve written about here before, has a challenger, Luke Henry, who appears to have less press but a sexier website. (That is, since he fixed up its blog section, which used to contain his del.icio.us page embedded in an IFrame.) So far I haven’t traced out their policy differences; I don’t think it should matter much, since the greatest strength of both is pluck and the promise of Albany reform.

I worry about the chance that they will split the protest vote. It’s unfair for them to have to work around that consideration (instant runoff voting would allow them to run in friendly, undistorted competition). My hope is that they can come to some agreement between themselves, and then add voting system reform to their toolbox for fixing Albany.

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