Behold the potential of the political web
March 20, 2008 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. Same thing with Congress, right?
Well, maybe not. Be sure to check out two things to discover how the web could very well change the nature of how we practice democracy.
- Lessig Launches Change Congress: Political Reform a la Creative Commons and Wikipedia — Andy Carvin
- Change-Congress.org
The Internet, with its (mostly) ubiquitous presence and many-to-many relationship model could be the platform for transforming the way we handle our politics and community policy development. That alone is worth reading about.
But if you also believe our representative democracy is neither representative nor a democracy, then this is a movement you need to know about.
For the last 15 years I've done what comes naturally to anyone with degrees in English, earth science and education: I taught high school for a year then worked as an IT pro in healthcare, banking, consulting and government contracting (of course!). But I also spent nearly 5 years in Alaska's largest public media company, taking the traditional radio / TV / statewide news operation online and realizing traffic gains of more than 700% in just 18 months. These days I simply turn over the occasional public media rock and tell you what I see.