Updates to come after 2pm ET on micropublishing service – maybe a hashtag will surface to follow along – subscribe to my #opengov Twtr list for starters, if you’re so inclined – but my context here is as follows: with Congress’ historically low popularity and historically high degree of partisan gridlock, what’s needed is comprehensive electoral reforms to restore public trust in the federal legislative process. This would certainly start with full public financing of elections to mitigate systemic corruption of public policy and improve our status quo of rampant regulatory capture (see: big banks, telcos, media giants – cf. first chapter of ToTE - etc.).

Opening up government data (e.g. THOMAS info) to bulk access, strong-as-possible ethics reforms, significant Senate filibuster reform, and immediate public disclosure of lobbying & campaign donations would be a *bare minimum* floor. Anything less than that in 2013 should be responded to with another broad, stop-SOPA style campaign by the networked public sphere & open Web advocates to demand a more accountable, digitally-accessible federal government. As steps towards that, PPF invites our #opengov allies (see the footer of our homepage, for starters) to help us build new free & open-source tools for #GitLaw and more distributed online campaigns to affect the legislative process – before, during, and after crisis points like #SOPA.

Aaron Swartz in January 2012 at Stop-SOPA protests

I had the privilege of knowing Aaron Swartz, who passed away yesterday, over the past seven years. He was a truly incredible person, and his work was inspirational to me personally and our non-profit PPF’s mission – and that of our sibling organizations, the Participatory Culture Foundation and Fight For the Future. Aaron was sui generis for real.

I’d like to first echo the moving remembrances of others who knew him closely: Cory Doctorow, on Aarons’s selflessly inspirational nature and way of being; Prof. Lessig, on his disproportionate legal prosecution (fix copyright!) and his dedication to getting corrupting money out of public policymaking; and especially Rick Perlstein, on the massive depth & breadth of Aaron’s reading and his pure generosity with his time & skills. Raw Thought FTW – seriously, check the archives on that and see how much he externalized productively, taking down a book or two a week and blogging about his takeaways. His critical insights were sharp. I’ve seen him hold remarkably fluent conversations with experts in economic policy and the civil rights movement in American history – with effortless command of the relevant historical literature. How many people can do that these days?

I saw Aaron just this past Wednesday at a MeetUp in NYC for progressive technologists and we chatted – about the usual topic, viz. innovative new Web tools for civic engagement, and especially about how much we were looking forward to the upcoming “Up With Chris Hayes” segment (aired today – video, loads w/ brief ad) featuring fiction writers on political rhetoric & especially feat. George Saunders (!) – we were both reading his new collection of stories. I’ll miss Aaron, it’s a heartbreaking loss for the world. I mean, three friends giving remembrances of him on the leading social networking service today were Eli Pariser, Anna Galland, and Carl Tashian – not to mention everyone he affected in his many overlapping professional & work circles – and their good heartedness is evidence of Aaron’s moral impressiveness.

Some of what I have to say in memory of Aaron now is about his urgent work towards reforming the campaign finance system with Prof. Lessig’s “Change Congress” and Rootstrikers - reinvigorating a modern, functional democracy as a positive ideal. But that’s a bigger topic. Instead, for now I’ll mention some of what Aaron and I had been chewing over recently, when we hung out at conferences or at get-togethers in Brooklyn – he believed, as we do with PPF, in the capacity of technology to radically reform the political process towards better outcomes and healthier people. What’s more, he believed in the necessary role of human creativity and the laborious, grinding work of real-world political organizing efforts along the way. And last, we agreed that the existing tech landscape has barely begun to produce the kind of powerful toolkits that will result in a publicly-accountable, empirically-based representative democracy. Online activism was just one of his many projects & interests, but he was always game to take a critical view of the landscape with me. Aaron’s felt sense of social justice was massive, complex, visceral. I’ll do my best to continue to dedicate my work towards his inspiration.

My condolences go out to Aaron’s family and friends. For more of Aaron’s quality of thought & critical approach, read his review of Chris Hayes’ book, “Twilight of the Elites“.

Prof. Yochai Benkler presents "Blueprint for a Networked Public Sphere" at Activate NYC Summit, May 3rd

This video presentation, by Prof. Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is one of the best articulations I’ve ever seen of the meaning of “participatory politics”.

Please watch it in full & share it: Blueprint for Democratic Participation.

(We’d embed it here for handiness, but alas, no such sharing enabled by the host site, unless you subscribe for a membership, but that’s all right. We’ll be talking about this extensively & excitedly in the months to come.)

Stop SOPA & PIPA - coalition for net freedom

Prof. Benkler gave the speech last week Thursday, May 3rd, at the Guardian US Activate NYC Summit. (Great lineup of heavy-hitter thought leaders, compliments to Guardian US team & their Open Editor, Amanda Michel.) The presentation builds on his ongoing academic research into the stop- #SOPA movement for #netfreedom that peaked last fall through Jan.-Feb. 2012, and is ongoing. Which in turn, builds on his ‘alpha’ version of the speech from the Truthiness conference in March 2012 at Harvard, link to YT video, which mentions OpenCongress’ role in the netroots advocacy at approx. 12:52 in.

More background info on why this is so important to us – on Feb. 8th, Donny & I wrote this recap for the OC Blog of what happened in and around American Censorship Day, Jan. 18th, the biggest-ever day of traffic & engagement on OpenCongress to protest #SOPA. Very proud to be part of the defenders of the open Web.

OpenCongress bill profile page for SOPA

Back to the above-linked Yochai video – absolutely vital to watch in its entirety – I was fortunate enough to attend the Guardian conference and was overwhelmed with how sweepingly & compellingly this talk captures our organization’s mission. It’s a highly-practical empirical case study of how the open Web & p2p networks can “filter up” the most useful & current info, instantiating the public interest through the semi-coordinated actions of a variety of entities, from non-profits to tech watchdogs to mass-market web services. Of course I can’t speak officially for his timeline, but Prof. Benkler said he’s continuing to iterate his lecture, so final version to-come in a couple months. (Disclosure – Yochai is on the advisory council of the non-profit Sunlight Foundation, the founding & primary supporter of OpenCongress since we launched in 2007.  But Yochai has no affiliation with our non-profit, the Participatory Politics Foundation, we’re just friendly & supportive & have admired his work since his book The Wealth of Networks in ’06.)

After a brief intro ad on the Fora video service, Prof. Benkler’s presentation is about 15 min. long, with OpenCongress appearing as a leading resource for understanding the legislation itself, social wisdom around it, and an open hub for activism about 5 min. in. The video also highlights, with significant focus & weight, the positive role in encouraging netroots activism from our sibling 501c4 non-profit organization, Fight For the Future, working to defend online freedom in coalition with American Censorship (of which PPF was a founding member) & the brand-new Internet Defense League (count PPF in as well, of course).

Homepage for American Censorship coalition to stop-SOPA & defend net freedom, from PPF's sibling non-profit, Fight For the Future

Don’t miss the arc of the presentation and its findings on “information backbones” (fact-checking false memes & filtering-up #realitybased discourse fluidly) – so please watch the whole thing & embrace (not uncritically, but hopefully) the future of the open Web as the greatest-yet communication medium between humans for community organizing & democratic participation (if we can retain a foundation of net neutrality & mitigate corporate gatekeeper influence & commercial oligarchical erosion) – but allow me to loosely transcribe Prof. Benkler’s summarizing conclusion, if he doesn’t mind ::

The networked public sphere is composed of layers. There are the traditional media organizations and they continue to play a role, but interestingly, in this dimension they are not in a privileged position. They are complemented by blogs that allow particularly engaged & knowledgeable individuals… to play substantial roles. We see the tech media, not at all political, playing a critical role. We see traditional NGOs also playing a large role as info brokers & sources of education, and amazingly enough, over 3 dozen special purpose action sites that are set up specifically to find a way to block the legislation… one or two of them stick, and they move forward, and they stop this piece of legislation.

Together creating a tapestry that is in fact the nature of the networked public sphere. No  not everyone is a pamphleteer, but we’re also not falling off a cliff. What you see is a complex relationship between NGOS & commercial organizations, between V.C.’s & activists, b/w traditional media & online media, between political media left & right and tech media, all weaving together a model of actually looking, learning, mobilizing for action, and blocking [SOPA]. This, ideally, is the shape of the networked public sphere. – Prof. Yochai Benkler

Whip count page for OC Wiki community project - stop SOPA campaign

My hope & expectation is that Prof. Benkler’s latest speech on networked activism will become as influential & central to the #nonprofit, #publicbenefit, #opengov movement as Prof. Larry Lessig’s seminal lectures on systemic corruption. (Not to mention other #opengov legal-academic open-tech thought leaders like Profs. Susan Crawford, Beth Noveck, and many more.) I am optimistic that, as the implications of the stop-SOPA movement sink in further and as our #opengov movement matures to fight the #systemiccorruption of the federal legislative process, PPF will find additional not-for-profit funding support to enhance our free & open-source online organizing features.  Please read & circulate our non-profit funding prospectus – support our public-interest work. My compliments to Prof. Benkler for his thoughtful research. we’re thrilled to be a part of it and hope to contribute analytics & #opendata & open-source code from OC however helpful.

Where we're headed with OpenCongress as a free engagement tool - help us grow! Open-source & not-for-profit.

To reiterate, Prof. Benkler’s vision is absolutely core to PPF’s founding premise – that the open Web can & will generate networks for peer-to-peer watchdogging of our elected officials, mitigating systemic corruption in government and improving political outcomes for the public benefit. For example, the free OCv3 online organizing features we released last summer can help groups engage with the bills & issues they’re tracking at the federal level. Our proposals to turn OpenCongress into a two-way platform for continual, reciprocal communication with elected officials will result in a more deliberative & participatory democracy. (More to come on the real-world distinctions, as we see them from a tech-booster perspective, on representative vs. parliamentary vs. participatory vs. direct vs. deliberative democracy – and indeed, participatory politics more broadly as we foresee it.) More practically, with more support we can turn OpenCongress into a more powerful open platform for advocacy at the community level in Congressional districts. (And at the state & local levels, our next major project, OpenGovernment, seeks to replicate the OC model of transparency & free engagement tools.) We’ve written before on the OC Blog about how this model of D.C. based public-interest legislative / policy experts (e.g. our allies Public Knowledge, EFF, Free Press & others) combined with tech-media press (e.g. TechDirt) and vital online communities (e.g. Reddit’s new “Watching Congress” subreddit) will result in ever-more meaningful accountability in the legislative process. It won’t necessarily reform the system immediately, but as we saw with SOPA, we were able to come together to stop the worst internet legislation in history. But we’re fighting for comprehensive reforms towards a fundamentally more participatory democratic system in which we don’t have to be starting from such an uninformed, closed-off position in crafting legislation.

This January, our successful wiki community project to stop SOPA & PIPA proves the public demand & general use case for our proposed new features on OpenCongress to “whip Congress”, for which we seek non-profit funding support for open-source Web development. Each of these major bills & issue areas in Congress can be subject to many overlapping stop-SOPA-style grassroots campaigns – whether it’s catastrophic climate degradation or immigration reform or freedom of association or reproductive rights or civil liberties or net neutrality or economic inequality or electoral reform – with a bit more funding to develop campaign features on OpenCongress. Major donors & philanthropists, please contact me anytime to hear more about our plans for enabling SOPA-esque campaigns for public accountability, we need your help to build them out and offer them to the public on the open Web: david at ppolitics dot org. Help us facilitate more stop-SOPA-style engagement on OpenCongress – around the economy, education, health care, and any issue imaginable.

The Guardian summarizes in their blog-style write-up: ”Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, followed with a detailed analysis of the SOPA/PIPA debate and how the way internet users altered the decision making process offers “a unique insight into the dynamics of what the future of democratic participation could become”.

(Screenshot of photo above from Fora.tv video for the Guardian US Activate summit.)

… later this year, PPF hopes to offer our own version of a comprehensive electoral reform pledge, one focusing on #opengovdata and public accountability. More to come on that – see more of where we’re headed on our non-profit funding prospectus.

The PPF team will collaboratively publish thoughts here, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed. Among other topics, we’ll look to cover at least the following bases: Carl Tashian, our Director of Technology, will write about our open-source development of OpenGovernment and more (e.g., our experience w/ civiCRM); Andy Ross, our lead OpenCongress Programmer since the site’s creation in 2006, will talk about our sprawling scraper code & Rails code base; Morgan Knutson, our Graphic and Web Designer, will drop some knowledge on user interfaces and his participation in the Dribbble design community; Donny Shaw, our Outreach Coordinator & Lead OC Blogger, will give overviews of what he’s learned over the last four years covering the news from the Beltway as part of the the reform & #opengov movements; Conor Kenny, our Wiki Editor, will publicize opportunities for involvement in community projects in semantic MediaWiki on the open Web; and more.

For my part, I look forward to putting out more regular thoughts about the Participatory Politics Foundation: our mission, some of our projects to date, and crucially, where we’re headed with OpenCongress (i.e., our wish list). An overview of PPF’s experience (in the free culture movement and in on-the-ground community organizing, in part), our work, and our core competencies in the #opengov landscape is coming up next in this space — and any such overview would surely need to start with a shout to our sibling non-profit, the Participatory Culture Foundation, working for a fairer and more democratic media space (hey0 if you like video, Get Miro!). My goal is to add solid (non-baffling) value to the ongoing #opengov discourse by suggesting some innovative short-, medium-, and long-term open-source projects for the dev community & designers to tackle together, and bake-in some critical-but-collaborative suggestions for different resource allocations in the open-source / #opengov world than we’ve seen so far over the past four years… OpenAllocation.org & ParticipatoryCriticism.net, perhaps. (Certainly no.)

Closer to the here & now, the biggest news this month will be the public launch of a beta version of OpenGovernment, a free, libre, and open-source web application for government transparency at any level: state, city, local, international, and more. Finally, a version of OpenCongress for your state legislature. To stay in touch as we roll out OpenGovernment to all 50 U.S. states, head over there and sign up for our low-volume email list. Last, today I started up an official @ppolitics Twitter account (also on Identi.ca, big ups to open source & open standards & open data) — looking forward to joining more of the discourse on social media. Other social networking accounts to come, while mitigating as much as possible the serious concerns posed by what Eli Pariser terms “filter bubbles” inherent in closed-source, commercial, top-down social media services. More to come on that as well.

Most of all, here on this reinvigorated publishing platform I look forward to hearing more feedback on our open-source, non-profit web development and expanding our community of volunteer programmers, building open-standards tools for transparent government for everyone, free of charge and freely-licensed. Holler at us (or email me at david at ppolitics d0t org) and let us know your skills, interests, and if you can help us secure more non-profit funding to expand our open-source development team. With OpenCongress and OpenGovernment, we have a good start at creating effective, popular civic engagement online, but really, we’re just getting started. Thanks for reading, and please give me a follow, as we get ready to unveil some major-league new public resources and make transparency more user-friendly than ever.

(Image above by our very own Morgan, forthcoming on the OpenGovernment web application … goodness, won’t it be useful to have a free tool to track government at every level? Blog post by PPF Executive Director, David Moore.)