Can you imagine finding common ground between progressive bloggers and the New York Post editorial board? I can, because I just experienced it. It's on the issue of open, transparent, and accountable government.
Yesterday afternoon I had back-to-back meetings, first with the New York Post and then with a group of political bloggers on a conference call my campaign organized with the help of Joe Trippi.
And I was pleased to discover at least one issue that resonates across that wide ideological gulf: transparency in government.
The idea is that access to information should be expansive as possible, because when people are armed with the ability to find out what matters to them, we can get greater accountability and efficiency out of the institution that is supposed to protect the common good known as "government." And furthermore, that the Internet, and the many-to-many communications that it enables, needs to be understood as THE place where that civic revival is happening.
Call it "the power of many" or "citizen journalism" or "distributed journalism" or "the wisdom of crowds."
The basic insight is that many hands make light work, or, to take the open-source software developer's variation on that, "with many eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." When a lot of people are engaged in looking at a problem or investigating a story, and information can flow freely, better solutions can rise to the surface.
Talking with the Post editors, I made the point that one way to reduce waste in government (we have a mini-scandal at the moment over a six-figure city council grant that went to a Church of Scientology group at the behest of a city councilor who is running for higher office and who has received big bucks from the group) was to require all requests for city funding be made public and online, with information on which office-holder is making the request and the names of the board members and officers of the group seeking the funds. That way, members of the public can judge for themselves. The Post editors clearly liked that idea.
And the odds are, if there's something untoward going on, it's a member of the public or someone involved who is going to be able to tell us, far faster than if we just rely on the press. That's how the news that Hillary Clinton's Senate opponent Jeanine Pirro had received campaign contributions from a Mafia-tied company made the news, for example: a citizen tipped a blogger. Bloggers everywhere understand this power, by the way, including the ones I was talking to yesterday.
Or take 311, a centralized phone information system created by Mayor Bloomberg to give New Yorkers a simple way to find out all kinds of useful information--instead of having to call around to 20 different agencies to find out when alternate side parking is suspended, or how to get sanitation to pick up an old sofa, or to report a noise complaint, now you can just call 311.
But, in my opinion, that's not good enough. Why can't we see on our screens what the 311 operator at the other end of the line sees on his or her screen? Furthermore, why can't we collectively see the data coming into the 311 system in real time? It's a million calls a year. Maybe some neighborhoods have a higher rate of garbage complaints than others, or more reports of rat infestations or crime, for example? Why should the Mayor be the only one who knows that? The Post editors liked this point, too.
Furthermore, why don't we think more about using the powerful computers that most of us now carry in our pockets (i.e. cell phones) to get more efficient government? If the Mayor went out tomorrow and said, we need an up-to-date picture of what city roads, parks, school buildings and playgrounds need fixing, and we want everyone to take a picture with their cell phone camera and email it to us at potholes@wefixnyc.com, or playgrounds@wefixnyc.com (you get the idea), I'm sure tens of thousands of people who care about their neighborhoods would take a few minutes and join in. And if, a month later, he asked people to report back whether those problems were fixed, in the same manner, you can be sure we'd see an improvement in services take place.
By the way, we've created WeFixNYC.com and people are starting to use it to report potholes. No need to wait til getting into office to create a public advocates network, I figure.
There's a germ of a new idea in all of this, one that the Democrats--the traditional party of government--ought to pay attention to. We should stop treating citizens as clients of government programs and start seeing them as full, active participants. It's happening anyway.
The political establishment's failure to understand all of this reminds me of when in 1996 I started a conference called Plug-In, about the coming age of digital distribution of music and record industry executives refused to attend. They claimed that people would never stop wanting to look through the bins at their local record store, and would always want a piece of physical product. Much to my delight, within four years, every major record label president was begging for the keynote speaker spot. At the risk of sounding cliched, the future is now.