Here’s my interview with Anna Curran. “Hear what Jim says is the biggest story of our generation. He talks about the promise of the Internet, and why his Dad’s advice just can’t be beat.”
NYC Trip: PdF Conference and ParticipationCamp
I’ll be in NYC from June 26th-June 30th. I’d love to meet up with anyone who will be in town and is interested in what I’m working on with NationBuilder and White House 2. Just drop me an email.
I’ll be presenting at the PdF conference in NYC on June 30th. “Imagining White House 2.0: Making Open Collaboration Platforms Work.” I’ll be at PdF both Monday and Tuesday, and I’ll also be at ParticipationCamp the Saturday and Sunday prior.
How do you deal with competitors in open systems?
I’m struggling at White House 2 with how to make a multi-partisan, yet still collaborative, site work.
The core problem is that there are two very different types of people involved in U.S. politics, people who want government to work, and people who don’t. Please don’t take this as a knock on any given political party, because that misses the point. There are plenty of Republicans and Democrats who want to make government a success. I’m talking about the people who feel, quite rationally, that government is bad and want it to fail.
This same problem exists in the context of a business. While shareholders, executives, employees, and customers may have different goals for the business, they all want the company to be successful. But there’s one group that doesn’t: competitors. They want the business to fail. And that’s the crux of the issue in politics too. Many view government as competition to private industry and their own freedoms, so a failed government is a good thing.
So how do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in an open, transparent, and collaborative system like what I’m trying to build with White House 2 and NationBuilder?
And I’m not talking about trolls, people who are trying to muck up the process itself. Plenty of thought has gone into that. This issue is specifically with people who are sincerely participating in an open process with the goal NOT of making the process fail, but the thing itself fail.
Please comment below or on Hacker News.
Stealing from the Constitution
I’m introducing an important new concept to NationBuilder: branches.
The purpose of the three branches of U.S. government (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) is to provide checks and balances to ensure that none of them have too much power. We’re ripping this off and sticking it in NationBuilder, so you can organize different constituencies with different goals into their own branches.
For example, a corporation might have Management, Employees, Shareholders, Customers, and Partners branches. A government might have Politicians, Citizens, Employees, and Diplomats.
In a company, shareholders care primarily about the stock price going up, while customers want more value (cheaper prices), and employees want higher salaries. By separating them, it provides a way to balance these different interests, and build your nation on a solid foundation.
I’m thinking that each priority page will have a separate ranking for each branch, so you can see that a priority is #5 amongst customers, #55 amongst employees, and #155 amongst shareholders.
There will still be an overall ranking in addition to each branch’s ranking, but what if there was an optional feature to weight each branch equally (or even with different percentages). So if you have 4 branches, all the members of each branch get 25% of the vote, regardless of how many people are in the branch. This could work well if you were trying to balance the interests of a company that has 100 employees and 100,000 customers. It wouldn’t be fair to let the customers completely dominate the agenda.
I’m working on this actively right now, so please weigh in with your thoughts and ideas, either in the comments here, or on the priority at NationBuilder.
Kevin Kelly on the Global Collectivist Society
Kevin Kelly has a big piece in the latest Wired that pretty much nails what I’m working on with NationBuilder. “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online”
The article is a must-read, but I wanted to comment on one piece of it, as it is directly relevant to the problem NationBuilder is trying to solve. Who runs these massively collaborative endeavors?
Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, “Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy network.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.
In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale.
There simply aren’t any tools designed for these types of groups to run themselves democratically, so they are just making do with what they’ve got. That’s where NationBuilder comes in.
NationBuilder is open-sourced and available on github
All the code for NationBuilder/White House 2 is now available via an MIT License at github. It is written in Ruby on Rails 2.2.2 and still in very active development. Installation instructions are in the README file, feel free to fork it and send me your pull requests.
NationBuilder is a radical and fun new way to run your country, state, city, neighborhood, corporation or non-profit completely democratically with thousands of people over the internet. This started life as White House 2, and I will be launching a web service version of this in mid-June that will make forming your own government as technically easy as setting up a Blogger blog or a Ning social network.
Unless you are quite technically adept, I don’t suggest you try to get this running yourself, the web service version is what you’ll want to use. Soon I will be setting up I’ve set up NationBuilder the software to run NationBuilder the company so people all over the world can get involved.
Making the Future
I’m getting ready to launch NationBuilder in the next month or two, so I’m starting my blog back up and even giving it a name — Make the Future. The name comes from Carl Pope, the long-time leader of the Sierra Club. In This Brave Nation, a documentary series we made at Brave New Films about a year ago, he said: “Just take what you love doing, and do it with enough other people, to make it the future.”
Shortly before the election, I started White House 2 to democratically set the agenda for the incoming Obama administration, and track it like the Nielsen’s TV ratings. There was so much to be done, I wanted people to think hard about what the priorities should be — there was just no way he could do everything at once!
I put the first site up in two weeks, and people from all over the world started contacting me about bringing it to their country. I’ve been working non-stop since then, and am about 5-6 weeks away from beta on NationBuilder, a web service that will let anyone set up their own site just like White House 2.
You can look at White House 2 and easily see how this could be used for governments of all kinds, but I believe it can also be used to bring democracy to business. Successful businesses of the future need to involve all the stakeholders, whether they are employees, management, shareholders, or customers. They need to establish the right incentives, and have tools that work better when hundreds of thousands of people are involved, not worse. Oh, and it has to be fun, or no one will care.
At Brave New Films, we pretty much turned the documentary world upside down doing a first generation version of this. We built our own audience, and then involved them as much as we could in making and distributing the films. They hosted tens of thousands of screenings, shot footage, took photos of abandoned Wal-Marts, put up half the funding for our last documentary ($260k), and even suggested the name of the company itself. But the only reason we were able to do as much as we did, is because I could code anything we might dream up. There just aren’t many tools designed for companies to operate like this.
NationBuilder will be a general purpose operating system to run democracies online, and we’ll use the software itself to run the company. It’s kind of a far out idea, and I don’t have all the answers on how it should work yet, but I’m having a ton of fun figuring it out. This blog will track the evolution of the platform, and show how people can use NationBuilder to, well, make the future.
