Bringing Politics BACK to the People

This is rather long, but well worth the read!

I would like to introduce my readers to a new business/technology, Politic20, and invite you all to attend our Proof of Concept Event online.

First, the background. Politics in our country is pretty much broken; I think we can all agree on that. In fact, it’s been broken for quite a while. When (if ever) was the last time YOU attended a Town Hall Meeting with one of your elected officials? When was the last time one of your elected officials directly addressed your personal concerns? When was the last time you felt like your politicians actually knew or cared which issues truly concerned you? When you last voted, did you feel like you KNEW the candidates, especially the incumbents? Have you ever felt like you had any sort of a relationship with your politicians? Are you ever flabbergasted that the people that supposedly ‘represent’ have absolutely no clue what you think? You know how they are always producing poll results and telling us how we feel about things? When was the last time THEY asked YOU what you thought? When was the last time you felt like you had an input into all these polls that are supposed to represent you? When was the last time you even paid attention to a poll? Are you like me, and you just think ‘whatever’ when you hear them start reading polling data? Does it frustrate you to no end that our politics seem to be decided by a ‘statistically significant scientific poll of the nation that included 2,000 people’? Politics have become way more religious than some people would like – and it’s because all you can do is PRAY that somehow we’ll make it through as a country in SPITE of what the politicians are doing. The final questions have to be – did you vote in the last election? Did you feel like your vote counted for something, or did you not vote because you’re convinced it wouldn’t matter?

These are all things I’ve been asking myself for years. I’m sure that most of you answered the same way I do – I barely know WHO my politicians are, and they SURE don’t know me. I can’t stand polls, they irritate me. I vote, but I’m often skeptical of my impact. That’s the way I feel, and I actually make an attempt to keep up with politics, I can’t imagine how others feel.

So there’s the background as to why I set off to create this company and what my motivation was. I want to help change politics. I want to help Bring Politics Back to the People – where it belongs. Given my background, I naturally turned to the web, specifically web 2.0 technologies and trends, to try to find a solution. What has now resulted is Politic20, a mash-up company created from two separate companies, several open source technologies and lots of web 2.0 ideas.

TagJungle:
My regular readers know that TagJungle is my web2.0 startup, but let me explain how TagJungle’s data is mashed up with Politic2.0. TagJungle is a pure relevancy based blog search engine. It is uniquely capable of organizing the blogosphere by what blog posts are actually about; this has the effect of weeding through the mire and providing a significantly accurate list of which blog posts are talking about the topic you are searching on. TagJungle also has the ability to determine what other terms are significantly related to the term you are searching on and can provide an actually accurate list of who is the most passionate on their blog about that topic. We’ve also spent the last couple months building an analytics engine that is capable of analyzing the blogosphere much, much deeper than any other system I’ve seen. I’ll cover the importance of these features in Politic20 in a minute.

WikiReview:
WikiReview is a new startup that has spent the last year adding multiple feature capabilities to wiki’s. Most importantly, they’ve removed the need to know wiki markup, which is an awful invention. They’ve also added an almost Amazonian feature set to wiki’s. You can comment, rate, review, and recommend off of any article on their review wiki. Their philosophy is similar to wikipedia except they WANT everyone’s opinions. They are also logging attention data and are able to determine where people’s interests lay.

Daniel Holsinger, the CEO of WikiReview, and I started talking about 2 months ago about the synergistic opportunities our two technologies offer. By working out agreements between our two companies, we have been able to create a whole new company that is strictly a mash-up; it exists only as a combination of our two companies. We have jointly developed new technology that combines both our technologies in a very unique way. We’ve also mashed that up with several other technologies and ideas such as:

Darwin, for video streaming

Amazon’s S3 for video storage

Amazon’s EC2 for scalable video streaming servers

Pligg for topic voting and control

Aggregating data from other sites, like opensecrets.org and VoteSmart to give a full perspective of what the politicians are doing.

I think the best way to describe the result of this mash-up is by describing our first event (which is starting locally, but we intend to do this nationwide with every level of politics – more on that in a bit), which will be this week, and explain what will happen.

On April 11, 2007 at 9:00 am MST, we will be hosting our first ForumNext. ForumNext is most easily described as an E-Town Hall meeting, but it’s much more than that. Utah’s 3rd District Congressman, Chris Cannon, will be present at this event. It will be attended by about 40 bloggers and 10 reporters. Congressman Cannon will be having a conversation with the bloggers, starting with him presenting a few things for the first 10 – 15 minutes followed by him addressing questions and topics that the community is interested in hearing about.

That might sound pretty simple, here’s the rest: video of the event will be streamed live to the internet with anyone interested being able to watch. Both those participating live in the room and anyone participating on the internet will be able to control what Congressman Cannon is talking about. There will be a live topic voting system, similar to Digg.com, where anyone will be able to submit topics they would like the Congressman to address. Everyone will then be able to vote those topics up or down, resulting in a list ordered by what the community would most like him to discuss. Once Congressman Cannon is finished with his presentation, he will begin addressing the topics from the voting system, working from the top down. The system will continue to be live and as he finishes on each topic, he’ll discuss the new number one topic.

While this is going on, two other things will be happening. The bloggers in the room and those paying attention on the net will be encouraged to write blog entries on each of the topics Congressman Cannon is addressing (instead of one big blog entry about the whole thing, although they can do that if they want). These posts will be automatically discovered by TagJungle and reported to Politic20, causing them to automatically show up on Politic20.com under the topic that is being blogged about. Participants will also be strongly encouraged to participate in rating, writing and commenting on the Politic20 wiki pages about the event.

The event pages on Politic20 will have two columns; the left column will be the wiki side, showing sections for ratings, reviews, comments, discussions, etc. The right column will show the most recent blog posts that are relevant to the topic of the page you are on. TagJungle will also be harvesting links from all blog posts and will be providing Politic20 with lists of the most popular video, audio, documents and urls related to the topic you are viewing. These lists will be displayed above the blog posts from TagJungle.

Creation and voting on topics will open before the event, and once the event is over, a new topic board will be opened – to be used for the next event we have with Congressman Cannon. Video of the entire event will be posted on the Politic20 pages for the event once it is over. This will allow anyone who couldn’t attend live to come back and watch the video, read blog posts and participate in the discussion on the wiki pages.

[DISCLAIMER: I want to reiterate at this point that this event is a proof of concept test - there is a real chance that there will be failures with the new technology, we HOPE not, but as of now it is unproven! If there are issues, we'll post about them on the politic20 blog.]

After the event, Congressman Cannon will be presented with analytic information from the event – he’ll know what the people were the most interested in, be able to know how many people did or didn’t want to hear about particular topics, and be able to get overall ratings information on each topic from the wiki pages. He’ll also be able to easily read all the blog posts made that were relevant to what he was discussing.

For the first time, Congressman Cannon will be able to fully understand the impact of his presentation on each citizen that participated! He’ll know your thoughts and concerns and what you were most interested in. He’ll know what you did and didn’t like and because the live event is dynamic, if you want him to expand on an issue, he’ll know! With analytic information, he’ll also have a summary of what bloggers thought of the event and the things he was talking about.

This gets me very excited! I hope YOU are excited about being able to have this kind of interaction with your politicians. What gets me even more excited about it though is that Congressman Cannon is EXTREMELY excited about this!

Our goal is to not only do this with every politician in Utah, but to very quickly expand outside of Utah and do this across the entire country! Congressman Cannon’s ForumNext presentation will be the first of many, we plan to have several ForumNext events each month all across the country. Our system is designed so that in the future, politicians will be able to schedule these meetings themselves, as frequently as they like, and interested bloggers and other citizens will be notified.

Imagine actually having so much information and personal touch with your politicians that it is TOO MUCH information! We truly hope that we can gt to that point and Bring Politics BACK to the People! I would also point out that this is a totally non-partisan, non-activist movement. While we’re launching with a Republican, that is merely coincedence, we will never provide preference to any side.

We are also planning on doing something very similar for elections, called ConventionNext, where the candidates are required to address what the citizens want to know. This will include debates where the candidates MUST answer the questions from the people; there will be no scripting and no preparatory work. Each of the candidates will be rated on each of their answers to each topic and once it’s done, we should be able to actually identify candidates that are OF THE PEOPLE. Our goal with ConventionNext is to try to change the realm of campaign financing and spending – you shouldn’t have to have 25 million dollars in order to run for President!

So, that’s the layout of the company. Now I would like to invite you to participate online at Politic20.com in our first event, which is in a pre-alpha, proof of concept stage, meaning we need YOUR feedback on our system as much as Congressman Cannon needs your feedback on topics!

WHEN: Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
WHERE: Politic20.com

Hope to see you there!

If you are a Campaign Manager for a politician and would like more information or would like to set-up a ForumNext Meeting, please email us at info@politic20.com. If you are a citizen who wants to be kept up to date with what’s going on at Politic20, please sign up for our notification list at Politic20.com

If you want to help spread the word in our Grass Roots effort to change politics, please blog about this, invite your readers to sample the event on Wednesday and let us know what you think! Thanks for reading this whole thing!