In each case, I had been invited —and cheerfully [...]]]> Different venues, different audiences, but the same query: Six times in as many months, I stood in front of a group asking (perhaps demanding) that I answer the same question. Audiences can be scary — and the question pointed to the heart of the matter.

In each case, I had been invited —and cheerfully agreed — to talk about web 2.0 and online networks, these new fangled “social” technologies. But, the audiences wanted brass tacks — my academic musings and observations from on high were not enough. The crowd was hungry. They wanted the secret answer.

Folks listened patiently — but only up to a point. I, no doubt, had waxed idiotically on about social technologies being “messy, fast, and casual” — generally ill suited to any sort of organizational context. They are designed to be “personal.” They don’t adapt well to the organizational context, and I don’t think they ever will.

To that, well… I’ve always felt Marion Barry, the former Washington DC mayor, put it eloquently (in three little words): “Get over it.” The fact of the matter is, with social media, an organization no longer can speak with a single voice, or deliver a single message. We need to get over it. It’s all about one-to-one personal communications, only it’s one-to-one with thousands or hundreds of thousands, of people. Sounding silly, I’ve said that since the ‘net began and it’s truer today than ever.

But, such answers have not been enough for hungry audiences, waving netbooks, iPhones, torches and pitchforks.

Folks know there is a secret; what’s worse, they want the secret. They’re unabashed. After all, Obama’s campaign had proven it, right? The virtual cat was out of the digital bag, and it was time for me to come clean. (Pitchforks and torches not withstanding —obviously, I’ve a bit of a love-hate relationship with these presentation things.)

The question on the lips and placards of the angry villagers, the Question with a capital “Q”, is simple: “How can we raise money with these new social networking things?”

I suppose I could blame Election ’08 — specifically Barack Obama — for setting the stage. His campaign’s success was evident. They had raised money, apparently with online social networks. They had also rewritten the rules of politics, and perhaps changed the world forever.

Unfortunately, the answer is not so simple. Moreover, deep down inside, that question is tinged with an underlying belief, a belief that more “friends,” more “followers” equals $uccess. (That’s bull, by the way, pure and simple.)

Nevertheless, nonprofits are nonplussed; they want to raise money with Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever. In the end, it’s the ends. It’s dollars, not donuts, not even the euphemistic “constituent building.” It’s about money, filthy lucre— and deep down inside they know that they’re missing the boat. (So, it’s damn the Tweets, and full speed ahead.)

This belief persists, despite the facts. The facts are clear: social networks are much better “friend raisers” than they’ll ever be “fund raisers.” But, believe is difficult to fight, logically or otherwise. Social networks are the big thing, like direct mail, or telephones, or fax, or email before them. (And, like those that have come before, we are rapidly filling up web 2.0 with random streams of amazing stupidity – but that’s another discussion.)

The “Social Networks = $uccess” belief is ubiquitous. Recently, I reviewed more than 90 grant applications, proposals focused on the intersection of jazz and technology, a far cry from my typical business. However, the same threads were there — a remarkable and overwhelming percentage cited the same holy trinity: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I read it so often I started to refer to it by acronym (FYT — pronounced Pffufft).

‘Till now, I’ve had no ready answer for the Question. Nothing I say seems to satisfy — folks want the secret code.

Lean in a little closer. Today I’m going to tell you that answer.

Here it is: the secret decoder ring, the magic ingredient, the answer to the Question of how to raise money with online social networks. Ready?

Step One… First, you get yourself an Obama.

Wait… Don’t hit that big “X” …

I say this with all seriousness. First you get yourself an Obama. That’s the secret of the Obama campaign. It was Obama — not Facebook, not Twitter, and not the bevy of would-be Dick “Bite-me” Morrises or the myriad of MoveOn’s anxious to fill up your inbox, dance across your Facebook page, or displace Ashton Kutcher in the Twitterstream of useless things in 140 characters.

The real secret is this: It’s never the tools, it’s the content. It’s never the medium, it’s the message.

The tools can make it easier to deliver the “ask,” and they can surely smooth the logistics of it all, but it’s still all about the message; it’s the content, stupid. More followers does not equal $uccess, unless you’re Ashton Kutcher. And that only works because Ashton Kutcher is selling Ashton Kutchers. (Or maybe he’s selling Demi Moores? I’m never sure.)

There you have it, the message in the cryptex, the answer to the Question. Tools only streamline the process. Today’s fancy network tools, social or otherwise, can move mountains, remove the barriers, streamline the donation, facilitate the transaction, and instantaneously validate the act of giving, relaying thanks, community, appreciation, and a receipt.

But, fundraising is about content; it’s about the Obama-factor. Facebook? YouTube? Twitter? Pffufft… Tools don’t create community. Get over it.

Shoes [...]]]> Who’d of thunk it? A simple shoe — well, actually two — thrown with the right twist could so clearly express an opinion. An opinion so succinct, that the world can do nothing but applaud (and perhaps wish the thrower had had slightly better aim). It was a shoe heard ’round the world.

Shoes have power. You can vote with them (or I guess more accurate, you can vote with your feet). You can heat up a cold war as Nikita Khrushchev, shoe in hand, pounding on the lectern at the UN, shouting, “We shall bury you.” (Although there are those that say the more accurate translation is “We shall attend your funeral”).

Sadly, it seems, shoes can be evil too. It is because of shoes — explosive ones at that — that we now all queue up and strip down to pound stocking-footed through airports, marching a sweaty-soled tattoo through the metal detectors. It’s all, no doubt, a dastardly plan by the Fungus Liberation Front to enslave the world and increase sales of tough-acting Tinactin.

Well, 2008 — the year that was — I throw my shoes in your general direction.

I look to 2009, with hopeful eye. With hope, I celebrate the end of dumb and the beginning of smart. I celebrate that “fun to have a beer with” is no longer a presidential attribute. I celebrate that “Nobel Prize” wins over cronyism when considering important cabinet appointments. I celebrate the end of “the end is nigh, prepare for the rapture” worldview that has been used to justify inaction. (Personally, if the end is nigh, I think someone’s going to be pretty pissed to see the earth in such a sad state of repair.)

I celebrate the end of out and out denial of facts and science and truth and intelligence. I celebrate an end to the supremacy of myth and superstition and intolerance. I celebrate a return to complete sentences, pragmatism, a belief in science and technology, and – dare I say it – rationality. I throw my shoes at 2008.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere! And gie’s a hand o’ thine! And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught, For auld lang syne. (Robert Burns)

It was the [...]]]> Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Wisely or foolishly, I think of this particular moment as a “time in between” – we’re no longer where we were and not yet where we’re going — both an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom.

It’s a time of great shifts; the rules of the great game are changing and the players are all different. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the same game. The world may be “flat,” as Tom Friedman says, but it’s also very very bumpy.

Ok, “ho-hum,” you say. It’s no news to you that the forces of globalization, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications, and unparalleled technological innovation are tearing markets apart, changing global dynamics, and redefining almost every aspect of our lives — but, what may be news is that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” There’s a revolution brewing in this epoch of incredulity.

I used to blame it all on the two seemingly contradictory effects of the Internet: the forces of disintermediation and the forces of aggregation. Simply put:

• The Net is a powerful disintermediating force, smashing the Taylor pyramid, revolutionizing “participation” and communications, and generally destroying the value of “brokers” and traditional intermediaries of all variety from travel agents to stock brokers to librarians. It’s all about removing the distance between markets, customers, politics, and people.

Simultaneously (and somewhat contradictorily)

• The Net is a powerful, anti-entropic force, aggregating the disaggregate, creating new “markets” – social, financial, and political – where previously they were too small or too distributed to matter — making collecting PEZ dispensers into a global marketplace, and increasing the value of so-called “infomediaries.”

But there’s another force at work here, a third force. It’s a force I’ve been trying to put my finger on for a while now, since I was part of the research team for the book Megatrends, about the ten trends that would shape the future. Then this third force was something I called the “Eleventh Megatrend.” It didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t that it wasn’t “mega” enough, or “trendy” enough; I think I just wasn’t able to articulate it well enough. Whatever the reason, author John Naisbitt said we only had room for ten anyway.

[I did once ask him once: "Why only ten?" He replied, "It was good enough for Moses." I was young and had no snappy come-back. I should have said something about the Code of Hammurabi. There were over 280 of those!]

Undaunted, I’ve always held this one in the back of my mind. Deep down, it seemed important. Now it’s here. In the last few years, it has started to shape and mold this bumpy world.

I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called “social networking. I see it embedded in “American Idol.” It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. It’s busy working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. It’s reading your electric meter. It’s even there when you drive into a parking lot. It’s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and it’s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles.

The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening.

I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

Day by day, step-by-step, we are closer and closer to having our grubby little metaphorical fingers on the pulse of the world, a live wire tapped straight into a global, wired, world nervous system —pulling out the real-time flow of public opinion, or market penetration, or product usage, or the number of parking spaces left in a parking garage.

This sort of stuff, this sort of information – and the underlying tools that let us manipulate it – makes possible real-time feedback about markets, or electricity consumption, or seats on an airplane. It also makes possible real-time plebiscites, voting on this or that idea or candidate, participatory democracy at its finest—or, at a slightly less noble end of the spectrum, “American Idol.”

So, what’s does this have to do with social networking?

People hear the wrong thing when they hear “social networking.” They hear the first word, and miss the second. They hear “social” and stop listening. Then they start thinking MySpace, or Friendster, or something weird like Twitter. That’s bad branding at work. It belies its power, masks its pervasiveness and importance, and makes it seem all together kind of silly. It’s not silly, but it’s also not that social.

We all know what happens once you start ambling down the mental road towards MySpace, you start thinking of pictures of people barfing at keg parties. I know I do. Now, don’t get me wrong, truly such photos are a gift to the world. But let’s not be fooled by this red herring. It’s not about the barf — herring or otherwise —it’s the “network.” Don’t mistake the application for the revolution. It’s also about the network.

Sure, part of social networking is about people being social, working together, and connecting for common purposes, sharing, barfing, mixing, and mashing and mapping. But, the true revolution is about network, and the true revolution is about the machines. It’s the machines that are social – and they are apparently real party animals, constant keggers.

Through their diligence, they’re delivering an increasingly real-time flow of data about the tiniest aspects of our world. They are the essence of the third force, my eleventh megatrend, the move from “sampling to monitoring.” These talkative, social machines are collapsing time, eliminating the distance between data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Moreover, the network is being potentiated this mystical thing called the “mashup” — machine-to-machine structured (and open) data exchange. It’s stuff like voting information from Catalist seamlessly “mashed” and mixed with DemocracyInAction’s magic advocacy engine – one system sharing with another, where the sum, and the power, if done right, is greater than the collective parts, heralding either the spring of hope or, perhaps, the winter of our despair.

It’s Google Maps and apparently just about everything in the universe. It’s my own true love, sweet Jane the GPS lady, loaded and locked with the locations of every Starbucks in the galactic federation. The revolution is all about the real-time flow of information about our world. We’re diving into that flow like we’ve never dived before. Hopefully it’s headfirst into the season of light.

Here’s a mundane, yet telling example: right now, like it or not, traffic congestion is being measured by monitoring your cell-phone. You’re just a little node, my friend, a simple single data point on the net. Unknown to you, your fancy-pants iPhone or your sleek Blackberry, is secretly working for Traffic.com. It, and thousands like it, they’re part of an active social network, busily creating their own “user generated content,” day in and day out, in the form of tiny data points that measure the traffic “flow” through our transportation veins.

Taken in aggregate, all that content, mixed and mashed with some mathematical magic and a map or two, becomes a real-time picture of vehicular time, speed, and distance. There is no wisdom to this crowd; it’s simply the ebb and flow that adds value. The wisdom of this crowd is the crowd itself.

What’s the end result of all this social networking? Well, the result is my Blackberry moans (kind of like a cow on Prozac). Up pops an email message telling me that my particular highway home is jammed — all before I’ve left the office. As a result, I sigh and work late once again. Heisenberg is now happy, as observation has once again changed reality. Meanwhile, “Captain Jack and SkyTeam Traffic Copter” — the old sampling system that had to wait politely for its broadcast time on the six o’clock news — is a relic of the past.

Here’s another: a social network that gets to the essence of this age of wisdom, and proves, in reality, that it ain’t really all that “social.” Like all social networks, this one is built around a common goal — the simple goal of not getting lost in Yonkers. In this case, TomTom has done it by turning their customers into thousands of tiny (or not so tiny) data collection robots.

I, Robot; I work for TomTom – more accurately — I volunteer for them. (Either that or my paychecks have gone missing in the mail.) I’m part of their distributed robotic army of sensors and monitors. Through my minute and irregular contributions, I maintain and update their database of roads and bridges and Starbuck locations. When I find a road closed, or a bridge under repair, Jane (the GPS lady) and I flag it, and the world is wiser.

Automagically, that data speeds its way (via Bluetooth) across my own tiny personal area network, into my cell phone. From there, it hops and jumps and snuggles its way through the ‘Net, eventually wending its way into the Borg-like shared collective machine consciousness. My contribution feeds the giant GPS Wiki, and benefits the collective.

I am but a social node on the network, helping monitor the ebb and flow of the reality called road repair (also called “summer” in Michigan). If they added pictures of people mooning me along my route, I might even contribute more often – social networking comes full circle. Well, maybe not.

With TomTom, once again, it’s not so much crowd-based wisdom as it is simply recognizing, enabling, and capitalizing on commonly held needs, and having the wisdom to know that your customers or constituents are your greatest asset. They’re the networkers feeding the machines that provide real-time data collection, real-time analysis and reporting, and innovative mashups between previously disconnected things, like pictures and maps, or voting records and campaign donations, or your membership, national or state voter files, census data, and, who knows, perhaps their petroleum purchasing habits. Together, we’re collapsing time.

This third force is all about collapsing the time between action and effect, between impact and reporting. Once collapsed, it’s about being able to mash that data up to show you new things, in new ways, or just so it lets you keep track of it a wee bit easier. It’s about turning data into information, and information into wisdom or foolishness, lightness or dark.

This third force is about our radical move from sampling our world in little bits and pieces to monitoring our lives in near-real-time, gulping it down in great big chunks, as it happens. And, it’s also about the distribution and representation of this new world of information – these great chunks of stuff – in ways that that change lives, change markets, or simply change the length of your workday. It’s about the network. We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. Whichever way we’re going, the traffic is moving briskly, or so says Jane the GPS lady.

I often [...]]]> The grass is always greener. We all wish we were something we’re not. I wish I were younger, perhaps better looking and less of a romantic, too. Mail room clerks dream of being CEO’s and CEO’s dream of working in the mail room. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”*

I often hear that nonprofits should act more like for-profits. It’s a perennial lament — that wish for the “discipline of the market.” And, every time I hear it, I have to stop myself from blurting out “be careful what you wish for.” That discipline is not all it’s cracked up to be.

From my perspective, usually the lament is from a techie that feels that “technology is underutilized” or “the role of technology is not properly understood” or “properly appreciated” or some such within their organization. It’s followed by the thought that if only nonprofits were more like businesses, well then, naturally, there would be more appreciation of the integral role of technology, the power of the internet, etc. It’s revolutionized business in the space of a few short years, after all. “If only”… then all would be right with the world.

The argument: If only non-profits were more like for-profits, then the invisible hand would guide investments, shape management decisions, and generally improve things all around. The hidden message is, of course, increasing investments in ICT would enable increased “return,” resulting in more appreciation of, and more investment in, ICT; a perfect feedback loop. It would make Adam Smith proud.

Whenever I hear it, I flashback to a (very) short consultancy I had many years ago. Then the litany then was that if only government were more like private business, everything would be right with the world.

To paint the backdrop, put The Clash’s “London Calling” on the turntable and tune your way-back machine to the early 80′s:

It’s the Reagan years, I’m new to DC, and hungry and pretty much unemployed (err… a consultant, I should say). So, I take a tertiary sort of gig — to do some work for some folks who were working for some other folks who were working on a project called “The Presidents Private Sector Initiative.” It was a big name, big project, and bigger bucks (not for me, however, I was way too far down the food chain).

The initiative was all about how “Business” (with a capital B) was better than “Government” (with a capital G) in doing just about Everything (with a capital E). It was all about Privatization (with a capital P).

The job was to do grunt-work research on how great it would be to privatize the military. I didn’t last long. I had the bad habit of saying that I thought it was about the stupidest idea I had ever heard. I kept pointing out that history was rife with examples of how mercenaries tended to be relatively, umm, “mercenary” in their approaches to things like loyalty, policy, goals, human rights, etc. Tongue in cheek, I went so far as to suggest that, instead, we consider creating the 21^st century-version of Janissaries. As I said, I didn’t last too long.

I still think that privatizing the military was a pretty damn stupid idea. (And, it seems to me we’re learning that lesson again, right now. What’s the expression: Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. History is a relentless unforgiving tutor.)

Then too, my vision at the time was tainted by reality. I had just left a rather large trade association, and had been doing work for businesses, large and small, for some time. From my experience, there was no way that government had the market cornered on idiocy. There were plenty of competitors in that space, businesses large and small.

I will say that, looking at the various consultants and management firms that were involved in that Reagan-era initiative, there was one clear example of the efficiency of private business: these folks were very efficiently taking gobs of money from the government; busy writing silly thought papers on how the military could be less hierarchical, and busy designing (I kid you not) new age-type uniforms. Less hierarchical?… Ok, I can get with a net-centric sort of management arrangement, flexible, autonomous field units and the like, but not if everyone is wearing soft pastels and carrying crystals. Crystals, ok, but these folks were going to look like South Beach on a Saturday night, in the 80′s. I shudder: soft pink and rounded shoulders, Miami Vice with an M16. The mind boggles.

Back to the present-future, I still find today’s lament about nonprofits peculiar. Moreover, I think it’s wrongheaded. It assumes things that are just incorrect. It seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature and the economics of organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit.

First off, not all for-profit businesses are driven solely by the bottom-line — faceless corporations, maybe — but not small to medium businesses; far from it. If they were, then most every restaurateur in the world would quit tomorrow. So too would half of the small-business owners, sole proprietorships, and the like. Successful restaurateurs, small business owners, sole proprietorships, they’re all driven by love of what they do, along with money.

Secondly, as I mentioned, business is not a towering example of modern technological efficiencies and sound decision making. Far from it, if that were true, well, then General Motors would be humming right along, we’d all be driving cars that got 100 miles to the gallon. You need only to look at the ranks of failures, from Enron to Worldcom. Business makes boneheaded decisions, decisions based on whimsy, greed, politics, and just plain stupidity.

Take Worldcom, for example. They’re gone now, so I can pick on them. I used to work with Worldcom. They were the largest collection of B-School bozos I had ever done business with. I couldn’t figure out why the market liked them so much. They couldn’t manage to send out an invoice, accurately and on time, to save their eternal souls. While they managed to make sales, they couldn’t come close to fulfilling their promises. Eventually the market agreed with me. The telephone business is still out to lunch, IMHO. They can manage to market and sell services, they just can’t manage to deliver them, or support them, or properly bill for them. If you need another example, just look at U.S. Airlines. They all appear to be in the bankruptcy business.

The truth is, only one in four new businesses survive more than four years. Most go bust because of simple things, like failure to track expenses, or send invoices, or the like.

Acting more like a for-profit business is not a panacea. It’s not the cure for bad management, or bad decision making; nor will the discipline of the market make a nonprofit CEO suddenly a better manager or strategic planner.

In a nut shell: the lament simply gives too much credence to the invisible hand, gives way too much credit to for-profit businesses, assuming they act at all rationally, and fails to truly understand how and why businesses operate or why they fail or succeed.

Worse, the lament fails to appreciate the underlying essence of what it means to be a nonprofit. The underlying essence of a nonprofit is dedication to mission. The goal is the mission. Money — wherever it comes from — is a means to that goal.

Just between you and me, I also find it ironic that we seem to be simultaneously wishing, hoping, and proxy-voting that business — big corporations — start to act more like nonprofits, all the while thinking we should act more like them! As I said, the grass is always greener.

Don’t get me wrong, the nonprofit sector needs to prize efficiency, good management, good planning, and good leadership. Sadly, there are few nonprofits that meet all those benchmarks. I’ve worked with too many that were pretty poorly managed, lacked any long-term thinking, and constantly made the mistakes that would (and should) put a business out of business. Nevertheless, market discipline alone is not the answer. Nonprofits should operate like nonprofits — be driven by mission.

All that said, it is equally true that the economic incentives and feedback mechanisms of a nonprofit are, for lack of a better word, perverse. This perversity is the crux of the issue. The problem is: mission success is not directly related to organization success. You can have substantial success at mission, and yet fail as an organization; conversely, you can fail at mission and yet continue to thrive as an organization. The simple economics are perverse, the feedback mechanisms, incomplete or irrelevant:

• Better outcomes — regardless how you measure them — do not necessarily translate into increased funding.

Moreover the reverse is also true:

• Increased funding does not necessarily translate into better outcomes.

What makes the difference, in my opinion — that thing that links mission to outcomes to funding to management — is long-term thinking, thinking beyond the next quarter to the next quarter century. It’s long term thinking that should drive strategic investments, in both people and technology. With long-term thinking, you get wise investments in tools and people.

Once you starting thinking long term, the rules change, management gets smarter, and decisions get clearer. Long term, the invisible hand gets just a little smarter. Outcomes, put in the perspective of years, instead of months, become clearer, easier to identify, and easier to measure. Part of what sets the nonprofit sector apart from the for-profit is its perspective, its focus on the long-term good over short-term profit.

In the end, in fact, rather than non-profits acting more like for-profits, I think the reverse. The for-profit world would be better off if it thought more like the non-profit; eschewing short-term gain in favor of long-term sustainability.  Once you think beyond the next quarter, to the next quarter century, clearly the common good is also good for the bottom line.

…“require human interaction (by answering a question or retyping displayed letters/numbers) before the email could [...]]]> This is a copy of a reply I posted on the NTEN-Discuss listserv. The original post was a call to action about Congress implemeting an "anti-spam" feature on constituant email. The plan called for implementing a system that would:

…“require human interaction (by answering a question or retyping displayed letters/numbers) before the email could be submitted to [Congress]” and thus make the “use of 3rd-party email vendors impossible.”

I think I’d like to take a whack at this issue, even though the discussion has died down a bit. First off, let me just state, up front, that I believe in democracy, really. And, in line with that, I believe that all people should have a voice and that voice should — indeed must — be heard. Deep down, democracy is the first exercise of the concept of the wisdom of crowds. I would like to believe that, eventually, wisdom will win. And, while lately we (as a crowd) don’t seem all that wise (at least not to me), I live with the constant hope that — over time — we slouch towards the common good. (Although, today, looking out across time and space, we seem to be slouching more towards bedlam, than Bethlehem.)

That said, it’s clear to me that we have several broken systems here. And, this particular change, to me, is a little like debating whether or not to use Little Mermaid or Mickey Mouse-themed Band-Aids on a patient with broken bones and severed limbs.

I’d like to look at the other broken systems — First, the people’s voice is kind of broken, second, email is kind of broken, and third, government itself seems broken too.

IMHO, the "people’s voice" is broken, especially the people’s ability to make their voice heard. Power is unequal, influence is unequal, and government is ruling by inciting fear, championing ignorance, and shrouding things in secrecy. Clearly, for example, those with more money seem to speak louder (and are heard more clearly). The Supreme Court, for example, has even gone so far as to equate money and speech (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976). (For more on this, see "Money and Politics" by Donnelly, Fine, and my friend, Ellen Miller.) While I agree, in principle, that I should be able to do anything with my money that I want to, it is also clear to me that, in the case of politics and democracy, to quote Bob Dylan, "Money doesn’t talk, it swears."

Things are out of whack.

Again, to me, things seem out of control and moving against the will of the people. But, back to the point, anything that might help this would be a good thing. If a logic test would INCREASE the efficacy of the people’s voice that’s a good thing. If it such a change would have the effect of actually increasing the voice of the people by removing the chaff from the wheat, so to speak, and letting that voice be heard, then it would be a very good thing.

However, as others have observed, I am not convinced it would have any effect on the real problem here. That problem is: all this email stuff — thrown at Congress — is just so many wasted electrons. And, this is where government is broken. (I am also going to say, up front, that I don’t know the answer here at all. But, I know that there is a problem.)

As someone else observed, Congress doesn’t read the stuff. I am not even sure they count it. With all this bot-generated stuff, I am sure they (Congress) know that it’s not indicative of anything but the power of someone’s server to trigger a knee-jerk (liberal or conservative) reaction from a pre-selected list of pre-polarized monkeys. Worse, I AM one of those monkeys!

Years ago, one of Bob Dole’s LA’s told me that they just weighed it. (This was in the days of letters and postcards). Two tons for, one ton against. I’m not teasing here. According to her, it was measured it in tons. Today, it’s just so many bytes into the bit bucket, and even easier to ignore. Perhaps they count it, but the analysis probably stops there; so much for hearing the people’s voice.

Now I am going to speak heresy: I think what we (the collective we) have done of the past few years has been to introduce VOLUME (and by volume I mean quantity) into the discussion, but we have not substantially given the people any more voice. Perhaps more people are involved and politicized — and that’s a good thing — but the unintended consequence has been that we have so devalued the available communications channels that they are worthless.

(Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about online organizing — clearly that seems to be working in many ways. But, when these tools are pointed blindly and without any personal investment from the sender, they miss their mark, and instead decrease the overall value of all communications. The voice of the people is lost in the din.)

We have built massive technological towers of babble whose whole purpose is to try to rise above the din by shoveling it out faster and faster. They have not succeeded, and in the final analysis, I think they have actually done the opposite. I would argue that we have exacerbated the problem, first, by filling up the channel and hence turning it into so much spam, and, second, by selling modern day indulgences in the form of email "action systems."

When I say indulgences, I mean we make it easy to assuage our outrage, and in the end, that outrage is impotent — just go to this web site and click this link to send a letter to your congressperson. Now you’re done, you’re sins are absolved. We have linked action to information, we have succeeded in educating someone about an issue, or bill, or latest attack on our privacy or civil liberties, but we’ve also succeeded in channeling that action nowhere, defusing that outrage by clicking a button with no real effect.

The problem is that the voice of the people has been muted and I am not sure if technology is changing that. All of this (including the proposed need for a logic test) points out that Email, in general, is broken too. Clearly it is. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not an advocate of the GoodMail/"pay for delivery email" scheme. I think that that system has perverse incentives that reward the wrong entities. However, I can state that there is a problem.

Fact is, all of us are "paying" in one way or another for the broken system. Simply put, we need a reasonable way to authenticate the origin of email. IF we could be reasonably sure that the originator was really the originator — perhaps just at the domain level — and if such authentication was priced accordingly (read: cheap), then spoofing email addresses becomes a thing of the past.

Naughty people could be quickly blacklisted, naughty domains could be blocked wholesale, and then when you complain to Abuse@ it might really have some effect…

I cast these electrons to the aether.

Gavin Clabaugh – June 2006