Personal Democracy - Technology is Changing Politics

The title of this post is not original (it is the tag line for the Personal Democracy Forum), but there is no other way to describe the changes that are happening as a result of President Obama’s memorandum on transparency and open government on his first day in office. We can call it “Government 2.0” or we can call it “Open Source Government” - or just call it an irreversible political shift. Micah Sifry, who I have quoted in the past, is a founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, holding a summit in NYC this week. A thousand people are attending, and from what I understand, it is standing room only.

The movement toward “integrating the public into the government” and into policy is not a mandate, but an irreversible change. Building and utilizing infrastructure to accommodate it is a priority, being worked on constantly to enable the paradigm shift.

I was not there, but from what I understand (thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s blog), there are three recurring themes so far.

1. The prerequisite – the power for change lies with the public

2. The platform for democracy – infrastructure we all need and is being developed and worked on by many

3. Tune in, we can’t tolerate static.

I will make another post about these topics when I have more time, but it is quite an event and Twitter streams are available for anyone with real interest. If you visit the Twitter stream, you will understand number 3 quite well. Filtering the noise. This is another issue solvable with technology.

I was glad to hear that Esther Dyson had some constructive (as always) comments on how we are “focusing too much on health care and not enough on health”. This seems so obvious, but for many reasons (and I need to get my husband to write a post about it) it just isn’t happening – yet. It is a great issue for Government 2.0 to tackle.

There was one common theme referred to by many. The public has to make the promise to “show forbearance” (in the words of Jeff Jarvis) when the government fails, and to grant it a mandate to do innovation. They need to be permitted to fail without risk of recrimination because right now, technology and the changes are provisional, emerging, and scattered. Innovation takes time, and we have to give these efforts the same patience we would with any new technology.

Interesting stuff. Much more later.