As President Obama recognized in his Open Government Directive, transparency is only the first step towards a more vibrant democracy. The bigger problem has always been fostering widespread participation. After all, one of the most vexing problems facing today’s government – regulatory capture of an agency by special interests – flourishes despite, or perhaps even because of, the openness of the administrative state. The rulemaking process is open to the citizenry, but the public just doesn’t care – at least not to the degree of special interests.

The response from civic society is to proliferate an alphabet soup of special interest groups, from the AARP to the NRA. These organizations serve two vital functions: (1) developing expertise and (2) aggregating collective interest, primarily through membership dues (money) as a proxy.
We’ve reached the limits of this corporate, civil-society-as-special-interest, system. New, digitally networked communities suggest a more fluid and inclusive model of public participation. And, I argue, video games are worth studying for their ability to help us overcome the twin problems of expertise and collective action.

Games for crowdsourcing: Projects like Google Image Labeler illustrate how a well-designed game can harness collective intelligence to do productive work. The small amount of work you’re doing for Google is matched by an equally small motivational reward (a score and the fun of playing). While an interest in the project’s goals might lead you to the Image Labeler in the first place, continuing participation is driven by the game, not charity.

If public participation in, say, legislation or regulatory rulemaking faces a similar interest-aggression challenge, the solution might entail a good Web interface that draws on game design principles. Imagine, for example, Pork Invaders redone as a real-world game, with players poring over legislation to zap pork while preserving legitimate spending. (More on how games can also help define “legitimate spending” in a bit).
Perhaps a game-based front end can have enough mass appeal to aggregate across a broad population, which would be a change from the way we currently divide the public into narrowly-defined interests. This would require the platform be built and marketed to a general audience. I can easily see this falling into the purview of emerging journalism.

Games for values discernment: Special interest groups not only develop expertise, but also make judgments on behalf of their constituents. There are several reasons why citizens might delegate their power in this way – lack of expertise, lack of time (see above), but perhaps most of all a reluctance to make difficult decisions. Because the American lawmaking process is adversarial, with groups like the NRDC battling the coal lobby, we citizens often express policy preferences by picking our proxies. Lost in this system is our opportunity – perhaps our need – to weigh difficult decisions ourselves.

Polls are one way to gauge the will of “the people.” But, I think, a well-designed game can also surface citizens’ policy preference, perhaps in the same way that psychologists uncover our cognitive biases through various sleights-of-hand. I’m not suggesting that we trick citizens, but rather couch difficult policy questions in a way that our puny brains can comprehend. (Evolution has left us with a finely-tuned sense of face-to-face morality but not large-system morality; we tend to reach for big-picture comprehension through small-picture metaphors).

Imagine, then, a Kittenwar type of game in which players pick between two interests until a ranked-order list of priorities shakes out. Or, better yet, players distribute resources among different interests, and the game illustrates – in the compelling manner unique to video games – the results of funding a project at various levels. (Underfunding food stamps, for example, might show children becoming malnourished). Budget Hero provides a prototype of this kind of game, but it remains too abstract for players to really understand the consequences of choices. We need games that make policy accessible to the masses, not just fun for the wonks.

The amount of subjectivity inherently built into these games will make their design even more controversial than that of polls. (See this fascinating piece in the NYT Magazine on environmental decisionmaking). But I take for granted that there is no way to construct neutral questions, as the authors of Nudge point out. Confronting citizens with a pile of numbers and data merely biases their responses in a very different way – and arguably, not in one that highlights their core values. If we are to have true citizen participation that results in a more representative democracy, then we must be bold in rethinking the way we ask people to participate.

1. Patch vulnerabilities. Whether or not you believe legalizing marijuana is a top-echelon issue facing the country, most of the top-rated MJ questions had little or passing relevance to the categories they dominated. The last category of question listed, “Budget,” became a veritable honeypot for swarms of legalization advocates (the first seven of the top ten questions were on that topic), with only the addition of the word “tax” differentiating it from similar questions voted up in the “health care” and “green jobs” categories. I’m inclined to believe this was an authentic grassroots movement, but astroturf campaigns could easily engineer bot or mechanical turk attacks. What’s particularly pernicious about crowd-sourced moderation is that the campaign wins either way: at a minimum, thousands of Americans will be forced to read their submissions, even if only to vote them down.

2. Nuance the moderation: I voted on some 40+ questions and quickly began to realize that a straight up/down/abuse vote wasn’t capturing my opinion. For one thing, it became clear that if I wanted my interests to rise, I should vote against everything else (much like the way voters game multi-choice elections with bullet voting). It’s important for the system designers to realize that they are developing a game — a set of rules that determines winners and losers. For another, I found I had more specific things to say about each one: that a question was off-topic, or didn’t really ask a question, or was too generic, etc. In fact, I guess what I really wanted was:

3. Allow interaction: If the White House wants real civic engagement, it shouldn’t be conceived as spokes on a single hub (citizen -> President). The beauty of the Internet, like democracy, is that it’s many-to-many. I recognize that allowing citizens to talk to each other opens huge and difficult problems that make the deluge of posts demanding to see the President’s birth certificate seem trivial by comparison. Perhaps it’s up to civil society to pick up where Open for Questions leaves off — given enough lead time, citizen associations can build their own online events off the town hall to host more robust discussions that can’t happen in the Presidential site. Still, this experiment is one of the closest things to a true public commons on the Web we’ve seen so far, and it’d be a shame if the only way to run it were a state monopoly that shunts citizen discussion off to private spaces.

4. More personality: One of the strengths of the town hall format is connecting abstract public policy to the lives of real, visible people. The format of Open for Questions (very limited space, no nuanced voting), however, favored generic questions that failed to give a strong sense of the person asking and her specific circumstances are. I felt a very strong difference in affect between Obama’s interaction with online questions (which was practically a press conference) and his live, in-person questions (which felt much warmer and more personal). This is, in part, because there was no person Obama had to make eye contact with and get verbal or nonverbal feedback from.

5. …Or focus on the Internet’s strengths. Scratch that last suggestion. Maybe nothing will ever beat the face-to-face conversation for warmth and authenticity. Why not focus the online town hall on the very kinds of questions that town halls are terrible at: those best answered nonverbally (whether numbers, charts, or time-lapse illustrations) or which require the President to draw on his advisors and not just the talking points he’s memorized. (We want the President to manage a team, not to be a one-man savant, after all). Stretch the new media team’s capabilities and see if they can create interactive charts, videos, or even games to frame or illustrate the President and his team’s responses.

Finally, let us acknowledge what has just happened: President Obama and his team have engaged over 93,000 people in an online town hall conversation. I hope this is just the first step towards an even more robust system of citizen engagement.

Other interesting data:

• 28% of new/lapsed voters have watched a homemade video about the election on YouTube, vs. 22% of all voters.
• 25% have sent a text message, vs. 16%
• 21% have joined an online social networking group for either campaign, vs. 8%
• The spread of confidence across internet media, MSM, fed gv’t and financial industry are interesting as well. New voters have little confidence in any of these, but have the most (least least?) confidence in Internet media.
• Despite this, they claim to get and trust the news from cable news channel above MSM and print/online newspapers. Despite stereotypes they don’t rank late night shows, social networking, or blogs very highly. (However, I tend to distrust self-reporting on whom the respondents “trust.” Peer influence, e.g. through social networks and blogs, would be very hard for someone to recognize on themselves.)
• Despite a stereotype that young people don’t join (and these are mostly young voters, though there’s no cross-tab), 23% identify themselves as “strong Democrat,” the largest percentage of any of the other options (19% identify as “strictly independent”).
• 65% of respondents use Internet network (MS, FB, etc.), and 35% have a cell phone but no landline.

Whether or not Gonzalez and Palin violated the law in their use of webmail to conduct business is one question. But there’s also a question of whether the actions of “anonymous” might be seen as vigilante FOIA enforcers. And then there’s the very serious business question of whether Yahoo!, Google, et.al. should and will be on the hook to abide by government and corporate retention laws whenever relevant personnel (whether governors, CIOs, or desk clerks) conduct corporate or government business on those channels. I doubt, for example, that the bits constituting the inbox of  gov.palin at yahoo.com are forever gone.

If we are to dampen the use of private communication channels for publicly-relevant business, it seems the best bet is to enlist the help of webmail hosts, who are probably not all that enthusiastic about being legally required to retain messages for years or even decades.

Given the reality of Internet trolling (The Trolls Among Us, by Mattathias Schwartz, Aug 3), the New York Times’ own reader comment system is hopelessly naive in its architecture. Head over to the Caucus blog, read the comment threads, and ask yourself: how many of those who claim to be an “Obama supporter” or a “Republican in Iowa” can be believed? How many, instead, intend to sow discord or harvest “lulz”?

The question mattered during a Democratic primary where Clinton and Obama supporters seemed to trade vitriol directed as much at each other as at the candidates. And because the character of candidates’ supporters continues to matter (Obama supporters are “elitist;” McCain’s, “racist”), trolls can easily spread mistrust among the electorate.

Political trolling, whether coordinated or freelance, may be the newest weapon in politics’ arsenal of dirty tricks. But the Times need not serve as a proving-ground. Take a lesson from the Robot9000 example and patch your own blogs before real harm is done.

(See also “Don’t Let Internet Trolls Get Your Goat“)

In 1974, Congress amended FECA to limit the total amount that individuals can contribute to individual candidates. One of the goals behind this cap was to somewhat equalize citizens’ voices by muffling the wealthiest (and therefore “loudest”) individuals. In reality, the cap remained high enough ($1,000 in 1974, $2,300 today) that while the filthy-rich could no longer buy the vote outright, the merely wealthy still had an outsized impact on elections. In 2000, of donors who contributed $200 or more to any given political contribution, those who gave more than $999 made up only 44% of contributors but constituted over 86% of the total dollars taken in.

Then Howard Dean came along and upended this cozy arrangement. The progressive Netroots helped Dean raise over $30M from small (under $200) donations during the 2004 Democratic primaries — just $4.4M shy of what Gore raised for the entire 2000 race. Suddenly, small donors became a viable way to fund a major campaign. And even though Dean was far more successful than his peers that year at galvanizing small-donor support — they made up 60% of his individual fundraising — both major parties’ 2004 nominees relied far more on small contributions than in 2000 (See chart).

Law matters, because without caps on the amount of hard money any one person could give to a candidate, neither Dean’s nor Obama’s army of small donors could keep up with the astonishingly deep pockets of the American mega-rich. Technology matters too, of course, because it is the mature Internet — one that citizens trust with their credit cards — that makes small-donor fundraising efficient enough to pursue as a serious fundraising strategy. But it took 30 years before fundraising technology realized FECA’s goal of (somewhat) leveling the playing field across campaign donors.

Policy — even if it’s no policy at all — always tilts the playing-field in one direction or another. Capping campaign contributions dampens the voices of the very rich; conversely, removing them would reduce the relative power of the small donor. Banning cash contributions altogether would favor those with time rather than money to give. Our laws define fair play: we can’t ban campaign money because it’s a Constitutionally protected form of free speech, but we don’t want it to be too influential, either.

For any given policy landscape, there’s a set of technologies and tactics that best advances the players’ strategic goals. It would seem that the Obama campaign has struck one such optimal combination, fusing Dean’s Netroots with old-fashioned grassroots. But lest Democrats feel too smug about striking that sweet spot, they might do well to recognize the Howard Dean of the 2008 Republican field: Mike Huckabee muscled his way to third place with half of his contributions coming from small donors. Broad-based, Internet-enabled fundraising has no ideological bias, only a small nudge for those with wide grassroots appeal.

I understood her distrust. I also worried about it, so when an anti-Hillary message showed up on an Obama mailing list, I shared my Facebook story and pleaded for civility. Soon enough the author of that email sent me a nasty message, questioning my judgment and obliquely threatening my family. A few discreet inquiries later I learned this fellow had been doing the same to other members of the list.

My email adversary was revealed as an “Internet troll” – someone who gets his kicks from goading others into emotional responses. Like their counterparts in folklore, Internet trolls live under bridges across the gulfs that divide us and exploit those divisions for their own perverse pleasure.

Trolls, of course, pervade all media. Clinton’s “iron my shirt” hecklers in New Hampshire were contemptible pranksters affiliated with a Boston radio show. But as the durability of that condemnable prank demonstrates, trolls had a big effect on this year’s political discourse.

One reason for this is that the compelling nature of this primary drew many people online not just to donate money, but to engage fellow citizens in conversation. Some were new to the rough-and-tumble of online discussions. I remember how one email list member who kept forwarding rumors became distraught and finally dropped out when others admonished her about listserv etiquette. I felt terrible that this person – clearly new to email lists – fell victim to a culture gap. That same gap can lead other relative newcomers to become easy marks for trolls. Those of us who’d engaged in meaningless online debates about TV shows or hobbies have developed some resistance to their antisocial behavior. They still anger us, but we’ve learned to discount their “flamebait” as background noise inherent to the medium.

Mainstream media also played a role in feeding the trolls. News shows regularly read from blogs when their pundits need to catch a breath of hot air. Despite polling data that, until recently, showed relative harmony between Clinton and Obama supporters, reporters kept hawking the acrimony storyline until it came true. Meanwhile, media stalwarts like the New York Times were busy trying to out-blog the blogosphere, creating poorly designed discussion spaces where trolls and newbies swam in a toxic mix, surely contributing to both reporters’ and readers’ sense that the Obamaniacs and Clintonistas were all rabid wingnuts.

So I’m not surprised that my friend saw me as a troll on Facebook. That’s what’s so pernicious about trolls: they are scammers who steal not money but our civility, and like other scammers, they erode our trust in each other. We might be tempted to run at them like the Billy Goats Gruff and knock them out with righteous fury. But unlike the fairy tale, Internet trolls are only emboldened by indignation.

The heated primary that just ended presages a general election that will be contentious enough without the meddling of trolls. So let’s remove the habitats that spawn them. Websites can redesign online discussions to dampen bad behavior, just as good email programs filter spam. Journalists can deny trolls the public attention they crave. And we, as individuals, can stay cool the next time some outrageous pundit, blogger, or email correspondent tries to get our goat. We might even work to heal the divisions that necessitate the bridges where they dwell in the first place. Personally, I’m looking forward to having lunch with my friend next time I’m in town. There’s no better cure for political distrust than a good dose of empathy, humility, and good cheer.

Twentieth century mass media offered a first-pass solution to the problem of scaling democracy to a rapidly-growing American republic. Whatever its virtues, the solution that radio and television provided is incomplete. Mass media atrophied our understanding of democratic participation, offering instead a politics that mimics the one-to-many structure of broadcasting. In that conception, we citizens participate directly in government through the singular act of voting. It’s a view that draws on a powerful strand of American culture: rugged individualism. But it is not the totality of our political traditions.

If the Internet offers another way to scale democracy to an even larger and more complex society, I believe it will be by pulling on a different thread of our political heritage: community organizing. The genius of America resides in our desire and ability to form associations that, regardless of political intent, can wield political power. From this perspective, groups – not individuals – are the building-blocks of our democracy.

Relationships are the cement of organizations; as it happens, relationships are also the very stuff of the Internet. Where broadcast shows unite yet isolate us from each other, online we are wonderfully fractured yet connected directly together.

Mass media politics turned our ballot into a synecdoche of democracy and fetishized campaign war chests. Such views postulate that American political life comprises nothing more than the sum of many arms-length transactions. Yes, the Internet offers a fundraising goldmine, and perhaps even a new venue for voting. But mistaking the outcome of political power (voting, donations, etc) for power itself is like confusing footage of King’s March on Washington for the Civil Rights Movement.

Really, I think, the Internet will be most powerful as a system that multiplies the scope and reach of our relationships, dramatically enhancing our capacity to form powerful organizations. Whether sharing photos of our cats, spontaneously expressing communal art, or engaging in virtual battle, we are coming together in astonishing ways. Some of these ways are powerful, and some will surely become more so.

Here are some qualities I suspect will remain crucial to politically powerful organizations:

1. Relationships. Unlike mere transactions, human relationships have the capacity to transform us, but for that to be possible, we must find ways to deepen trust and authentic communication online. As video streaming, virtual reality, and just general user interfaces continue to evolve, I expect the barriers to establishing robust human connections across geography will continue to fall.
2. Accountability. Fundraising succeeds online because it’s easy to see and measure. We haven’t yet found a reliable way to bridge the divide between offline action and online networks, and until we do, money remains an awkward currency by which we translate commitment into action.
3. Leadership. Leadership need not rest in a single/singular person, but every organization needs some process for making strategic and tactical decisions.

Among these elements, leadership will perhaps evolve the most dramatically in the shift towards online networks. In the coming years and decades, I expect to see organizational leaders offload more and more of the routinized aspects of their work to an increasingly smart system, and to discover that more of that work is amenable to such offloading. Still, even as their leverage grows, leaders themselves will remain indispensible, offering passion, personal skills, and savvy intuition – a human remainder that cannot be squared into an automated system.

A politics built fundamentally on relationships rather than transactions can (and probably will) also depart radically from our more liberal heritage. If it does, we will go from a politics of isolated individualism to one of hyper-connectivity, a middle-school lunchroom writ large. A wired North Korea may just figure out how to turn social networking sites into the most powerful snitchnet ever.

But before this imagined fall, let us first realize the promise. Today we face challenges of such magnitude that “thinking global, acting local” no longer suffices. If I have hope for 21st century politics, it is because our capacity to extend our organizing powers have grown as well. It will be the great test of democracy whether our power to act collectively has grown commensurate to our challenges.

Fish may as well be describing Wikipedia, for Wikipedia exemplifies the quest for truth in a deconstructed world. Wikipedia harnesses individuals’ faith in truth, yet ultimately tempers it within a fundamentally relativist framework. Wikipedia ultimately guarantees not so much the truth as the ability to argue for the truth by appealing to a common cultural understanding — the Neutral Point of View — as the final arbiter of truth. In short, Wikipedia resolves the postmodern dilemma of truth by ultimately relying on process. Through the give-and-take between many committed individuals who hold strong beliefs in what is true, as well as a common commitment to what truth means, a truer (or truthier) encyclopedia of knowledge emerges.

Wikipedia’s emphasis on process puts into action theories laid out by philosophers who have tried to slip the noose of relativism, from Rawls’s theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Taken to the extreme, a reliance on formal process leads to the kinds of absurdities we’ve seen newspapers engage in when they present “both sides” of a scientific controversy rather than emphasize empirical findings. But the blame for such pathologies lies not in postmodernism itself, which merely revealed to us that power shapes “truth,” but rather in journalism’s failure to evolve its cultural understanding of truth.

Thus, Wikipedia is best understood as a cultural practice (the NPOV) rather than mere technology (the wiki). What’s more, it’s a cultural practice that, by adopting a postmodern superstructure, puts into service the power and energy of modernist conflicts. Nothing can guarantee truth or accuracy — neither the wisdom of the crowds nor elite editors. But the key to Wikipedia’s thriving is that its process is both open and transparent. The levers of power are not destroyed (Foucault taught us that this is impossible) but simply visible. So long as Wikipedians feel they have access to those levers and a faith that “the process works,” a more perfect truth — but not a perfect Truth — will continue to emerge.

Update: Got an email from Jimmy Wales himself, in which he notes (after the jump)…

I can contribute only a little bit to this discussion by saying that a large part of my thinking when I came up with the NPOV concept revolved around it as a response to my imperfect and uneducated understanding of postmodernism.

We want what is written in the encyclopedia to be true, but what do we do when someone questions very idea of truth (in various sophisticated or unsophisticated ways)?

NPOV is basically a way of responding by saying “Thanks, but, um, please let’s get back to work.”

“We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so.”

Yes, Postmodernists really can. NPOV allows them a way to do that while relaxing a little bit.

But the interesting thing is that NPOV also works for those of us who happen to believe that there is a reality, that we can know reality, that statements are true when they correspond to the facts of reality, and all sorts of mundane old fashion objective things like that.

That is to say: NPOV was designed not on the belief that truth is defined by common cultural understanding, but rather as a tool to allow for common cultural understanding to help us sidestep sticky philosophical arguments about truth vs. Truth vs. situatedness, etc.

Thanks for that feedback, Jimbo!

I will add that this post emerged from discussions I’ve been having with my partner about the intersection of evangelical Christianity and postmodernism. It struck me that secularism would really benefit more from the religiously devout participating robustly in the political and social arena than being strictly excluded — but to do so while respecting pluralism. It’s the kind of walking-while-chewing-gum that postmodernism enables. And it’s thrilling.

The problem of micropayments has plagued the Web since the late 1990s, and a combination of Adsense and iTunes has band-aided several aspects of the problem. But, as Doc Searls’ Project VRM asks, why are the vendors managing consumers rather than the other way around?

I think most of us now realize that good content is rarely free, but I am not content paying for it with my “eyeballs” (and mindshare). Imagine, instead, if a plug-in like Adblock Plus replaced all your ads with a tip jar — either one that passively paid the site $.01 from your kitty with each view, or that offered you the affirmative choice to throw a few coins in the hat. Why not cut out the middleman?