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]]>Democracy is a game in which we all make the rules. How do we make this serious game more inclusive, more fair, and more fun?
This was the core question of Participation Camp <http://participationcamp.org>, an unconference organized in New York City on June 27th and 28th. The scene for conferences and unconferences around Open Government and Gov2.0 has been growing rapidly in the U.S. Earlier this year in Washington, D.C., we had Transparency Camp, e-Democracy Camp, Gov2.0 Camp, and even Privacy Camp. Meanwhile, O’Reilly Media has joined the fray with its upcoming Gov2.0 Summit, and Personal Democracy Forum retained its status as the technology and politics scene’s red-carpet event.
In order to distinguish PCamp from the others, we sought ways to experiment with the unconference form. This was reflected in our slogan: “Change the Rules”. Just as we examined ways in which citizen’s could participate in changing the rules of their society for the better, we looked for ways to change the rules about how conferences are conducted.
Our first goal was to change the vibe. A common saying about conferences is that the magic happens in conversations in the hallways between the sessions. At PCamp, we encouraged presenters to present less and facilitate more. Most sessions proceeded as open discussions and workshops. During our wrap-up session and in conversations after the event, many participants commented that at PCamp the sessions themselves were where the magic happened. Some of the highlights include:
The Noisy Idiot Problem: Catherine White, a student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (which hosted the event), led a workshop on the problem of forum participants, both online and offline, who adhere to the rules yet derail the discourse by dominating the discussion and cleaving to an extreme position. Catherine has conducted this research so far under ITP professor Clay Shirky, but has decided to take it to the next level after a unexpectedly intense brainstorm session at PCamp with over 20 participants. The idea even bubbled up into Personal Democracy Forum (which happened June 29th and 30th, right after PCamp) when White House Deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck used the term on the main stage.
NYC Open Data Legislation: New York City Councilmember Gale Brewer, who heads the city’s Committee on Technology in Government, recently introduced legislation making all public information available, accessible, and machine-readable online. She led a discussion on Saturday which was attended by a number of leaders in the field, including Andrew Hoppin (CIO, NYS Senate), Noel Hidalgo (Director of Technology, NYS Senate), Steven Clift (Founder, e-democracy.org), Silona Bonewald (Founder, Legal of Technical Voters), Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org), and Peter Corbett (Organizer, Apps for Democracy).
We deliberately paired our event with Personal Democracy Forum (PdF), and this proved to be a winning combination. Many great thinkers were in the city for the weekend, and they had the opportunity to mix with NYC’s thriving local open government scene. Many new connections were made during PCamp, and participants were able to arrive at PdF with momentum behind their new ideas and proposals.
While some wished that PCamp had been better attended (60 on Day 1, 40 on Day 2), others tied PCamp’s “intimacy” to their feeling that more things “got done” at PCamp than at other conferences. On top of that, while PCamp was physically small, it was virtually expansive. Thanks to the innovative team at Radical Inclusion, we were able to involve dozens more attendees in our pre-conference and post-conference chat sessions. Radical Inclusion also organized several virtual presenters, who were beamed into the main room at ITP from locations such as Vancouver, Netherlands, and India. Many of the sessions were pushed back out to the web by our partner Livestream, who reported that almost 3000 unique viewers watched at least part of PCamp on Day 2. Archived presentations are available at http://livestream.com/pcamp.
Participants also made extensive use of twitter before, during and after PCamp: 156 users tweeted about PCamp09, using the tags #PCamp (almost 100 tweets) and #PCamp 09 (over 860 tweets).
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of PCamp, however, was our participatory sculpture. Conceived and produced by PCamp co-oranizer Oliver Wellington, and facilitated by artist Andrew Wellington, the sculpture was built piece-by-piece by conference participants over the course of the two days. Organizers supplied nearly 3000 ping pong balls and a lot of hot glue as the main ingredients, but participants quickly changed the rules to include coffee cups, dental floss, and business cards.
There’s a lot more to say about PCamp, and new developments are still underway. During this process, we learned that there is great potential to be both inclusive and productive if the conditions are right. Together with the team at Radical Inclusion, we are formulating a plan to create a persistent discussion space that can act as a common thread through the many events and camps in the arena of technology and collaboration. You are welcome to join our open discussion on this concept in the PCamp Skype chat. It will take place Wednesday July 15th at 15:00 GMT (11am in NYC, and 8am in LA). For an invitation, send an email with your Skype name and “Skype” in the subject line to [email protected].
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]]>The post Participation Camp: Change the Rules – New York City and Online – June 27th and 28th appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Democracy is a game in which we all make the rules. How do we make this serious game more inclusive, more fair, and more fun?
Participation Camp will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation, and collaboration around this question. Participants may attend a wide range of physical and virtual presentations (or deliver one themselves), compete in a conference-wide participation game, or roll up their sleeves in a hands-on workshop.
PCamp will be hosted by ITP@NYU. There is no cost to attend. Register now.
Thanks to our partner Radical Inclusion, we’ll have a virtual conference running simultaeously with the physical event. Some virtual presenters will even be beamed into the physical space. This means that you can participate no matter where in the globe you happen to be.
Other notable events:
COLLABORATIVE SCULPTURE
The centerpiece of PCamp will be a sculpture designed entirely by our participants:
We’ll supply the ping pong balls, the glue, and a space. The rest is up to you. What will emerge?
NOMIC
Gameplay helps us think differently about participation. Since we’re focused on democracy, we thought that Nomic would be a good fit:
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
—Peter Suber, the creator of Nomic, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362.
You can learn more about the many variations of Nomic on Wikipedia. We’re designing a version that will fit the timetable of the conference, and will equally engage physical and virtual participants. To get involved with the design process, visit the PCamp Game page on the wiki.
CODE JAM
We’re inviting civic-minded technologists to join us for a collaborative coding session. We’ve got some exiting projects lined up and some soon-to-be announced partners that will help make them a success. More details soon.
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]]>The post “Your Own Democracy” and Government 2.0 Platforms appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>YOD also overcomes one of the usual problems with e-governance applications – they are no fun. YOD solves this by using standard social network best practices, always tying issues to action opportunities, awarding points for actions completed, and presenting its application suite using a financial trading desk metaphor for the interface.
While it gets many things right, YOD faces the same challenge as every other “Facebook for government” out there: it has to become as widely adopted as Facebook in order to become relevant. Democracy is messy and ultimately local, and this holds true on the web. It is difficult to convince users to allocate time to a new social network, even if they feel a civic obligation. In addition, a platform that attempts to put all of the necessary features in one place thereby increases its coordination costs, and is less able to take advantage of the rich ecosystem of democracy applications being built by independent developers.
If we are to truly evolve to “Government 2.0”, powered by online democracy applications, it will come down to cross-platform protocols rather than a single platform. In the U.S., Brooklyn nonprofit Gateway to Gov is developing Civic ID. Based on the Open ID identity protocol, Civic ID preserves a user’s identity across online platforms, ties that identity to the user’s official voter status (congressional district, party affiliation, etc.), and maintains a record of that user’s signed petitions and other political declarations.
With protocols such as Civic ID in place (it is nearly complete) we can imagine political engagement applications and widgets across a number of existing platforms, allowing users to build movements without leaving the comfort of their favorite social network. This allows application developers to focus on crafting tools for specific needs and specific online locales, rather than trying to “build it all”.
My own company, the Independence Year Foundation, is adopting this strategy. We recently released the iVote4U Facebook application, which allows users to learn about their representatives, declare opinions about them, and initiate mini-campaigns to steer representatives’ votes on legislation. In the near future, we plan to integrate with Civic ID, and will build sister applications on platforms such as iPhone and OpenSocial.
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]]>The post Harnessing Online Campaign Workflows for Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The progression from passive observer to fire-breathing activist is now well known and has now been built into the architecture of all future successful campaigns. In fact, the universality of that progression is predicted by a study published in 2006 by Forrester Research, which described the progression as a ladder of engagement with six rungs:
- Inactives
- Spectators
- Joiners
- Collectors
- Critics
- Creators
Four national campaigns have provided laboratories that demonstrate that the pattern of its steps is universal. Chronologically, the beginning of these campaigns is most significant, because that’s when the architecture is set and proves its success:
Howard Dean, 2003-4
Ron Paul, 2007-8
John Edwards, 2007-8
Barack Obama, 2007-8
Forrester’s Ladder of Engagement is generalized to all “social” online activity, so we developed a more granular ladder to model the activist’s progression. In both cases, only some people will make the full progression, but any progression by any member of the campaign adds to the campaign’s success.
They demonstrated that “Creators” are not the top of the activist ladder, but just below the middle, starting as casual readers:
- Readers
- Critics
- Creators
- Joiners
- Doers
- Leaders
By any standard, people progressing through that sequence within any campaign comprise a social network, whether they’re on line or off, whether they know each other before or because of the campaign, whether by name or an obscure “handle”. All that matters is that an individual voice has an evolving reputation visible to others, with weak or strong ties among them, and that their effort is perceived as a shared and growing success. But only when the campaign is coordinated online can it unlock the full force of its members’ participatory surplus.
“Real” campaigns–mailings and meetings and calls and glad-handing and fervor–live only in collective, faulty memories and ephemeral news reports.
Counter-intuitively, a “non-real” online network is continuously accessible to its members, to inform us, impress us and to add to whenever we want. Invisible bits of magnetism on unseen machines present and maintain for us evidence of our actions and importance to each other, apparently permanent and always meaningful. Improbably, online networks are far more real and accessible, so we use and rely on them more and respond to their signals with more alacrity.
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]]>The post A Website with a Constitution appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>As innovative as our web tools are, they are a distant second to the legal technology we’re developing.
If our platform becomes as populous and powerful as we expect it to be, it’s certain to draw a lot of attention from folks who want to monetize it or shut it down. To ensure the continued openness of this enterprise, we’ve placed all of the code and intellectual property (logos and such) within an “Internet Services Irrevocable Non-corporeal Trust”. There’s no board, no owner, and no tangible assets – just a trustee with limited powers. (Visit iyear.us/about for further explanation.)
Not only does the trust keep the platform safe from outside influence, it also keeps it safe from the authoritarian impulses of its inventors. At the end of Independence Year (defined as 4 July 2008 to 4 July 2009), we will turn over governance of the platform to its users. We have begun this process by drafting a constitution.
I met yesterday with organizational democracy guru Alex Linsker and iYear Founder Britt Blaser. We began by making a clear distinction that the constitution specifies only the process by which decisions are made about how the platform is designed. It does not specify in any way how users will use the platform (except in the indirect yet substantial way that architecture influences behavior).
We decided to model our governance system loosely on the branches of the U.S. government, starting with the legislative. We’ve quite literally applied Lawrence Lessig’s axiom “Code is Law”. Every change to the code will first be proposed as a bill, which must be passed by the legislature before it is implemented. I’ll be thinking today about whether and how bills should be screened before they are brought up for vote, who exactly gets to vote, and how many votes are needed to reach a quorum.
The judicial branch will be trusted with settling disputes and reviewing all bills to ensure that they do not contravene the principles of openness that underpin our constitution. As for the executive branch – well, we’re not quite sure what that will be. We just know that we want to avoid installing another Decider like the one we have in the White House now.
We’re extremely excited by this project, and I hope that we can blaze a trail for virtual communities all over the world. We’ll release our first draft to the world on November 1st. It will be hosted on the MixedInk collaborative writing tool so that everyone can write and rate different drafts of the constitution. I’ll be sure to post again when the time approaches.
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