DEMOCRATIC EVOLUTION - Access, Participation, Collaboration

By
GINA COOPER

July 26, 2009
TAIPEI, TAIWAN
ADCT
The American Institute

Thank you for your very warm welcome. It is an honor to be here and I hope that the thoughts and examples I share with you today inspire you to try new things. Thank you to the organizers for providing this remarkable opportunity. My time here in Taiwan continues to be an amazing experience.

good morning

In the days following my presentation I invite everyone to visit Chin Wen Gina and ask me your questions. The American Institute has agreed to translate your questions for me. I hope that I give you something to think about and that after this conference is over we can continue our conversation.

Also, I have uploaded the text of my remarks on my website at ginacooper.com. If it is easier for you to understand English by reading it, and if you have your computer with you, you can follow along at ginacooper.com. I also have the slide presentation there for you.

As a child I could have never even imagined visiting Taiwan. My mother died when I was nine and I never knew my father. I was raised by my sister and her husband who, even with modest means, sent me to the best schools they could afford.

I was the first in my family to graduate from university and get a masters degree. I became a teacher and I count that time as some of the most rewarding of my life. I got married and 5 years later we moved to California, and that is when my life took an amazing turn.

Like so many other Americans, I was inspired by Howard Dean’s “people-powered” campaign. Quite by accident I found myself at the center of a movement to create a much-needed civic space for discussion of policy and politics online.

I founded an organization, Netroots Nation, which relies on technology to bring together engaged Americans and political experts.

Our organization grew from an unknown entity it’s first year, to hosting a Democratic Presidential debate in it’s second year. In it’s third year, last year, we hosted a forum with The first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and former Vice President Al Gore.

I tell this story to illustrate a point in larger context. Technology has the potential to evolve how we do democracy in a very short period of time. I believe that we are at a special place in history and the work we do now to use the power of technology for creating good, will be the foundation for which future generations judge us.

We are all living in amazing times when things once beyond the reach of any one of us is becoming possible because technology is helping us connect with one another. Rapidly, technology changed everything about American politics, and I have been blessed to be right in the middle of it.

We don’t yet know all of the characteristics that will define modern democracy, but it’s evolution will certainly address three principles - access, participation and collaboration.

So lets begin by talking about access.

Generally when we think of access we think of it from a citizen’s point of view. Citizens need access to information so that they can make informed choices and communicate with their elected representatives and other decision-makers.

But access is not a one-way street. As people contribute their thoughts and ideas for government, how can we expect that the few at the highest levels of government should be able to hear so many people expressing so many different views all at once?

Finding ways to communicate effectively is not just a matter of creating a road for citizens, but is also about creating the vehicle through which leaders can take that information and deduce what it is that people are actually asking of them.

So how can access been created?

The good news, is that there are many tools available to both citizens and institutions. The first is obvious, YouTube. For example, every week President Obama addresses the nation, with no media filters. Each presentation can be found both on the White House website and on YouTube.

If you run for office in the United States, a Facebook account is a must have. I’m highlighting Rep. Brad Miller because I think he does an especially good job of posting in his own words and inspiring good feedback from his Facebook fans. He doesn’t over-use the medium, he simply uses it well. He shows the most important quality in using new media tools to communicate with his constituents, authenticity.

Of course, it is not just about leaders initiating conversations with citizens, it is about citizens making themselves heard as well. This month, along with many other newsworthy matters, The US Senate began the confirmation process for our first Latina Supreme Court Justice. Advocates started a communications feed on twitter named after what they wanted the Senate Judiciary Committee to do - confirm her.

While Barack Obama’s presidential campaign gets a lot of well deserved credit for engaging citizens on a whole new level, I think it is important to point out another pioneer, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Last year I asked Speaker Pelosi to do an interview at the Netroots Nation Convention with questions drawn from suggestions composed by and voted on by the community at large. Chin Wen Gina models this process. Askthespeaker.org was the first time an elected leader had engaged citizens this way. Speaker Pelosi was the first with the vision and courage to give this untested process a try, and I encourage your leaders to do the same thing.

Rock the vote, a youth outreach project, did something interesting with mobile. They asked people to register their phone numbers and on election day texted voters links to maps with directions to their voting location. But before election day, they also capitalized on the network effect by enabling users to recruit their friends via text to register to vote and sign up for their own election day maps. This program created a tool, a mashup between precinct data and Google maps, that will be a valuable piece of infrastructure for years to come.

This next set of examples involves outside organizations creating tools to sort and analyze public data.

One of the most successful organizations in pursuit of open data is the Sunlight Foundation. They have three useful tools I encourage you to review. First is The Open Congress project, which publishes the text of bills under consideration by Congress, along with other information such as how each Congressperson eventually votes. Second, OpenSecrets.org tracks political contributions across campaigns and other organizations dedicated to the election of government officials. And, finally, Maplight.org mashes together that data with congressional votes so that corruption is much easier to detect.

Another interesting project of the Sunlight Foundation is the Apps For America program, which challenges citizens to build their own tools for sorting government data. The Sunlight Foundation is a shining star innovation in sorting massive amounts of data for use by the public.

The next example comes from the League of Technical Voters. The League of Technical Voters is a grassroots organization of technology professionals. Their Whitehouse Wiki tracks changes in government websites by comparing old data to new and then tracking that information. Very simple, but very powerful.

CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is an organization that promotes ethics and accountability in government. One of their recent projects, governmentdocs.org, facilitates crowd-sourced public review and annotation of newly released government documents.

All of these projects rest on the notion that it is not enough for government information to be available. The power comes from organizing it in ways that allows citizens to do their own checks for accountability.

Keeping in mind that the US Government and the new administration have only just begun the process of modernizing government, three projects stand out.

First, The Citizen’s Briefing book was a project of the new administration that collected citizen ideas on policy and compiled them into a book that was given to the President. President Obama noted that the ideas were interesting and informative, but I am not aware of the book being used as a resource for more than just the President’s information.

Open for Questions, using the same software as the Citizen’s Briefing Book project, resembled Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s participation in askthespeaker.org where citizens submitted and voted on questions for the President to answer, but this time it was initiated by the government itself rather than a citizen’s group.

I’ve brought up several times that Speaker Pelosi has been a strong champion for modernizing government, and in fact I decided to dedicate this slide to her by making the background one of my favorite pictures of her. It’s called “Heels” and beautifully illustrates what a game-changer she has been. So my last example is something simple, her blog.

In the end, the job of our elected representatives is to listen to us and be accountable for their actions as our representatives. In her blog, The Gavel, the speaker and her staff talk directly to citizens without the filter of media. She does the hard work of rhetoric, trusting that her audience, the American citizenry, is open to reasoned, intellectual arguments. She makes her case directly to the American people, which, is the most important thing she can do - give people the information they need to make decisions for themselves.

Obviously the Obama Campaign created avenues for participation unlike any other campaign that came before it. But I want to stress that participation, to be meaningful, must provide choice and must be tied to a goal.

If I ask everyone in the room to stand, and jump up and down, we’ve participated, but it is just a silly act.

The Obama campaign was successful at getting people to participate because they created types of participation that people believed would directly contribute to a victory, and they provided choices in how to participate -
signing up for a newsletter,
forwarding a video,
signing a petition,
giving an opinion,
making a small donation,
joining a group or a conversation, for example. Once a person committed to a single action, they were then asked to take additional steps like giving a larger donation, calling voters or throwing a “house party” to discuss politics with friends. The key was getting that first commitment. This, of course, is no different than campaigns past, but the new tools for executing such strategies have scaled participation upward to very impressive degrees.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes the campaign brought about were people’s expectations. In the past people saw politics as something foreign that happened in Washington, DC, and so the only way to influence political outcomes was to vote and hope that enough people agreed with you so that the candidate of your choice won.

Now people expect that they should be engaged. They want to see and hear what is going on. They want to have input and expect that it should be wanted and that elected officials should respond.

But creating collaborative programs presents several challenges.
First: balancing privacy and security with openness and transparency.

People need access to data if they are going to contribute productively. Yet, certainly, there are times when government data should remain closed. For example, documents that would violate my personal privacy as a law-abiding citizen should remain private.

But I think the biggest challenge to finding balance between privacy and transparency is simply overcoming resistance to transparency within the culture of government.

Of course access to information is power and there are people who want to hoard their power, but more widespread, I imagine, is the fear decision-makers have of exposing themselves to criticism. I think that is a cultural challenge that will only be overcome with practice and leaders experiencing how the good outweighs the risk.

Second: creating avenues of engagement that encourages participation at the proper level of expertise.

Not every problem is best solved by swift popular consent. We need experts. We need people who dedicate their lives to researching a concept or studying an issue to be the drivers of policy.

But we also need these experts to be willing to make their cases to the people when they are in disagreement. As new democratic processes evolve, I think the experts will like what comes out of it. It is much easier to enact progress when the crowds are pushing with you.

With that, there must be layers of engagement when discussing issues with the public.

For example, my plumber doesn't have a PhD in health care policy. However, as a business owner who can’t afford health insurance for his employees, he is likely to have insight as to what is wrong in a system that denies access to basic health care to good working people who contribute to society.

Third: using the latest technology without alienating people with unfamiliar systems.

Those of you who are experts in technology, social networks and the various crowd-sourcing tools may find that kind of environment very natural, but it can be intimidating to people whose expertise is in another area. For example, an expert in elder care may not be comfortable collaborating on a Wiki.

Technology is constantly changing and of course we want to use the latest and greatest in bringing about collaborative processes, so we have to push people to use these sometimes unfamiliar systems without pushing them away.

Fourth: cataloging huge amounts of qualitative data so that it is searchable.

Simply put, if the government is going to ask people to participate thoughtfully, then that input needs to be catalogued so that the information is accessible to the people who need to use it.

And, finally, collecting input that is actionable rather than amassing policy preferences.

If you are familiar with President Obama’s Open for Questions program, you know that the top question was about marijuana legalization.

While the process certainly shows that marijuana legalization is an issue people care about, that topic was not one President Obama was wanting to discuss at that time.

This is about focus. When crowd-sourcing, expectations have to be made clear and the user interface has to provide the proper environment to generate desired inputs.

This goes back to expertise as well. If the desired input is of a technical nature, then what also must be created is a space for people to express views, otherwise people will ignore instructions and simply express policy preference in the venue they have available.

Further one can’t assume that a call to action will be interpreted the same by all who participate. Again a layered structure is very important to account for the different ways people will want to contribute.

So in conclusion there are three principles that must be understood to evolve and modernize democracy:
First: democratic evolution begins and ends with access.
Second: participation that is meaningful provides choice and is linked to an outcome.
Third: leaping from participatory to collaborative is more complex than it sounds and we have a long way to go in making this an efficient process.

Thank you.

Submitted by Gina on July 25, 2009 - 16:47.

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