Consider me an enthusiastic backer of Personal Democracy Forum's challenge: "Who Will Be America's First Tech President?" Here is their preliminary list of qualifications:
1. "Declare the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways, or public education."
2. "Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide."
3. "Declare a 'Net Neutrality' standard."
4. "Instead of 'No Child Left Behind,' our goal should be 'Every Child Connected.'"
5. "Commit to building a Connected Democracy where it becomes commonplace for local as well as national government proceedings to be heard by anyone any time and over time."
6. "Create a National Tech Corps"
And they are keeping tabs on where the presidential candidates stand on tech issues at TechPresident.com, where they also happen to keep a ticker that lists the rise and fall of each candidate's Facebook supporters, MySpace friends and YouTube stats (which might not be very revealing but sure is good fun).
Whether or not politicians want to face it fully, though, technology is transforming politics. Or, maybe more appropriately, technology at its best is allowing politics to get back in touch with its roots.
Dave Denison of the Boston Globe recently wrote about how various imaginative new tech projects might just save the bastion of true democratic politics: the traditional New England town meeting.
Having attending town meetings as a citizen of a Vermont small town, I know how precious and powerful face-to-face group decision-making can be. Yet I also know that part of my adoration of this intimate political forum develops from a certain unrealistic idealism. As Denison points out, the town meeting, especially for larger towns, is becoming logistically untenable.
Enter such cool ideas as Virtual Agora and UnChat that attempt to provide visual representations of the participants during online collaborative communication -- among other strategies -- to attempt to make virtual meetings more personal.
In the end, though, maybe the most promising solution will be something like America Speaks -- which doesn't abandon real face-to-face interaction. It attempts to enhance it:
In such meetings, hundreds or even thousands of people are recruited (selected for demographic balance) to attend a meeting in a large hall. The meeting is "electronic" in that all participants are equipped with wireless communications, linked to a central computer system. Yet it is more intensely face-to-face than a traditional town meeting because people are arranged at round tables to facilitate small-group discussion.
They are given briefing materials and randomly assigned to tables of 10, where they discuss the issue at hand. Working with laptop computers and handheld keypads, each subgroup reports its opinions to a "theme team" that distills the collective judgment of the meeting.
If we can't find a way to sustain town meetings in the 21st century, after all, how will Vermont ever be able to secede?
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