Digifesto

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.

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.

John McCain has long been seen as a congressional crusader for campaign finance reform. It now looks like Obama will fund his general election campaign largely through small, ‘grassroots’ donations from supporters. Each candidate is trying to take the moral high ground regarding his funding choices. That raises the question: which is better, public campaign financing from the state or grassroots funding from small donors?

When looking into this question, it’s important that we keep our eyes on the prize. Ideally, sources of campaign funding would have no influence on who can run and get elected. The argument for this is simple. Money is not evenly distributed; access to political representation should be.

In this light, ‘grassroots’ funding is a step forward, but problematic. On the one hand, it does diminish the influence of lobbyists and special interest PACs. But on the other, the fact remains that most ‘grassroots’ contributions are not from average citizens after all, but from the wealthier-than-average. See Jay Mandle’s Washington Post article for the numbers on this. Although certainly admirable, the success of Obama’s ‘grassroots’ fund raising relative to, say, Clinton’s, when one considers that Obama was more popular among wealthier Democrats. His base was better able to afford to make $200 contributions.

So to some extent, grassroots funding devolves the problem of money in politics from a problem of special interests to a problem of class interests. This shift looks even more dramatic when one considers that special interests are often indirectly representing working class interests (for example, in the form of unions).

Anil Makhijani pointed me to a New York Times article on Obama’s announcement to forgo the federal public campaign financing system and the spending limits it entails. It’s an important story that’s worth a read. But speaking of e-campaigning, there;s one detail in particular that caught my eye:

Mr. Obama announced his campaign finance decision in a video message sent to supporters and posted on the Internet.

Click here to see the video.

I am far from the first to bring this up, but Obama’s use of the internet in his campaign is amazing. I’ve heard the analogy has been made between FDR and radio, Reagan and television, and now Obama and the internet; each mastered a new communications medium and used it to great effect to rally and expand their base.

What seems special about Obama’s use of the internet is that it allows him to eschew mainstream media outlets entirely when he needs to. Rather, he is using tools communication that are available to all of us: videos posted on the Internet. There is something compelling about this use of popular tools to reach the populace. It places him not just in living rooms, but in social networks; however distantly he may be from you or I, he is present in the same space.

This ties directly back to his fund raising efforts, of course. By existing, virtually, among his supporters instead of transcending them, he can ask for the millions of small donations for which his campaign is famous. Institutions–even the institution of the Democratic party itself–are made obsolete as an intermediary.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Sen. Robert Bennett [R, UT]
• Sen. Thomas Coburn [R, OK]
• Sen. Susan Collins [R, ME]
• Sen. Jim DeMint [R, SC]
• Sen. Pete Domenici [R, NM]
• Sen. John Ensign [R, NV]
• Sen. Judd Gregg [R, NH]
• Sen. Charles Hagel [R, NE] — who has stated that he will resign from the Senate in 2009 and has been mentioned as a possible cross-party VP pick for Obama.
  
• Sen. Jon Kyl [R, AZ]
• Sen. Richard Lugar [R, IN]
• Sen. Lisa Murkowski [R, AK]
• Sen. John Reed [D, RI]
• Sen. John Sununu [R, NH]
• Sen. George Voinovich [R, OH]
• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D, RI] — who replaced Republican Lincoln Chafee in the 2006.

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.

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 more »

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.