Monday, July 20
summary by Ben Moskowitz

Doug Schuler

Doug inaugurated the ISDT program in Porto on a light note, presenting an abbreviated list of current global crises. Financial systems are melting down. Climate change is accelerating. Day by day, fish stocks are depleted, and deforestation continues apace. Western societies are plagued by over-consumption and people in the developing world go to bed hungry. Ethnic cleansing, mental illness, weapons proliferation—Schuler didn’t waste any time getting down to business.

“Problems are growing a lot faster than solutions,” he said. “Will we be smart enough, soon enough?”

Schuler proceeded to present a framework for understanding the role information technologies play in repairing the world.  “What type of digital transformation do we strive for? Could information technology be used as a common platform for motivating and coordinating a large number of projects?” If so, how might we measure its impact?

The key metric, argued Schuler, is “civic Intelligence.” How smart are collectivities in relation to their problems?

Civic intelligence recalls familiar concepts like social capital and organizational capacity. We know these things exist, but they’re subterranean—they shape outcomes but remain barely perceptible. How can we recognize and measure civic intelligence? One way is to examine citizen engagement and approaches to shared challenges. But building civic intelligence is never a discrete affair: it is a continuous process of adaptive learning and meta-cognition.

Nicholas Reville

“We’ve hit a critical point in the development of the Internet—a crossroads, where we face some key decisions,” said Nicholas Reville, introducing his work at the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. “I’m here today to convince you to be activists, not just observers, as this process unfolds.”

Nick’s work is grounded in a vision for an online social/cultural commons that’s not managed by corporate interests. As Executive Director of Participatory Culture Foundation, Nick oversees the development of the open source media player Miro. Nick is also involved in the development of OpenCongress, a tool to encourage political participation and government transparency.

The web is a better place for the existence of public-benefit organizations like Wikipedia and the Mozilla Foundation, argued Reville. “The conversation online frequently resolves around products and companies,” he said. “We can leave the shape of the online world to companies with narrow, proprietary interests, or we can build it ourselves—insisting on openness at every levels.”

This thinking has guided the work of PCF and PPF, carrying Reville and company from advocacy projects (framing the conversation around copyright policy with Downhill Battle) to building tools for social infrastructure (Miro and Miro Community Guide) and community-building (efforts like the Open Video Conference).

The challenge, said Reville, is to communicate the threat that vertical and walled systems pose to the open web and online discourse. For example: Apple’s position in digital music sales affords it unreasonable control over that ecosystem. Apple has essentially become a cultural gatekeeper. “My job is to convince people that the degree of control reaches a point that is unacceptable from a values perspective.”

Deliciously poetic example: just last week, Amazon.com was broadsided by the public outcry when digital copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 mysteriously vanished from Kindle owners’ devices. The publisher of the ebooks in question makes its money by digitizing classic works in the public domain and offering ebook editions. As it turns out, the original publishing rights to these Orwell classics have not yet expired in the States, so the independent publisher was in fact selling the works without proper rights clearance. Amazon’s response? Remotely wipe all copies on Kindle devices and credit purchasers’ accounts with refunds.

Never mind the irony—this wouldn’t be nearly as riveting if it were Dan Brown novels being pulled from under readers’ noses. It is remarkable that Amazon can sell you a book, then revoke it. It is remarkable that Amazon can sell you a computer over which you have no control! Imagine if Microsoft retained the right to delete software or files from your computer without your knowledge or consent. Yet this kind of control over devices is becoming more common, with many suspecting that similar “functionality” is built into the iPhone operating system.

“It’s great that this happened, actually,” said Reville. “It’s easy to understand what’s wrong with this story.”

Micah Sifry

Sifry is a writer, strategist, and co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum. He’s also an advisor to the Sunlight Foundation. His work explores the intersection of new technologies and participatory democracy.

Perhaps eager to rouse the jet-lagged assembly at Porto, Sifry kicked off his talk with a short screening of a clever mash-up called “Barack Obollywood.” In it, construction-paper cutouts of the 44th president trip, jerk, and pirouette with technicolor Bollywood dancers, crudely lip-synced to catchy Hindi lyrics. This is an example of what Sifry calls voter-generated content: the product of new modes of political participation and by now commonplace.

Sifry’s talk dismantled the “useful myths” of the Obama campaign: chiefly, that it was a campaign owned by the people. The truth, Sifry explained, is that the Obama machine was a sophisticated 21st century marketing machine.

An interesting story: in 2004, a 28-year-old paralegal named Joe Anthony was inspired by Obama’s keynote speech to the Democratic convention. Hoping to promote the rising politician, Joe created a profile MySpace.com/BarackObama and started building a friend network. Soon, people were asking Joe questions about Obama’s positions, for information on how to vote, and other substantive requests. Joe began to field these questions on a volunteer basis, and gradually began to dedicate more of his spare time toward maintaining and growing the Obama online presence.

In January 2007, Obama finally announced his bid for president. At the time, the Barack Obama MySpace profile had over 30,000 friends in its network—far more than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican. The press took notice, declaring that Obama was winning the “internet primary.” As Obama’s star rose, so too did Joe’s responsibility. Soon he was dedicating 5-6 hours a day toward building the Obama profile, still on a volunteer basis.

When the official Obama team initially learned of the profile, they began to cooperate with Joe, giving him advice on how to manage the page. Joe was a super-volunteer: with him in control, the friend network peaked at 160,000. The Obama team directed MySpace to treat the account as the de facto, official page of the campaign.

As the campaign heated up, the Obama team made an offer for Joe to quit his job and move to Chicago to work on the online strategy full-time. Joe declined. The Obama team said they’d compensate him for his work and take over, and asked him to draft a proposal. Joe came back with $39k and was instantly rejected. Shortly thereafter, the Obama campaign directed MySpace to close the account. MySpace accommodated this request, violating its own terms of service in the process.

“This was an X-ray into how Obama campaign was interacting with its base,” said Sifry. The common perception of the campaign was web 2.0 meets politics. In reality, he argues, the campaign was engaged in highly sophisticated, 21st century marketing. The Obama numbers were impressive: 200k local events held, 2 million profiles created on Obama’s official site, 35k volunteer groups. But who was in power?

To illustrate, Sifry cited Yochai Benkler’s four transactional frameworks:

decentralized | market-based: price-system
decentralized | non-market: social sharing and exchange
centralized | market-based: firms
centralized | non-market: government; non-profits

The kind of activity taking place in the Obama campaign—decentralized/non-market production—is generally expanding because of declining transactional costs. “I do think we are entering into an age of mass participation in the political process,” Sifry said. But instead of giving these volunteers seats at the table, he argues, the Obama campaign simply assigned them tasks (recalling Schuler’s barb this morning: “how does it feel to be harnessed?”).

Was the Obama campaign really as organically bottom-up as it was portrayed in the political press? A few refutations were in order: first, despite reports to the contrary, Obama’s percentage of small donors was similar to George W. Bush’s numbers in 2004. Second, the vast expenditure of all Obama campaign funds was on traditional tactics like TV advertising. Did the Obama campaign’s superb internet machine tilt the balance? No doubt. But the campaign was not as people-powered or Internet-native as Howard Dean’s 2004 bid.

The Obama campaign provides a prototype for how campaigns will be run in the future. But the model needs improvement. Web 2.0 provides unprecedented opportunities for political participation. Can campaigns sustain real participation? Can we make e-governance work?