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One of the leaders in the movement to reform copyright laws to catch up with the cultural and technological changes in our society has turned his attention to reforming American politics, and he's using these same new cultural and technological phenomena to help him achieve it.
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University* law professor and founder of the Creative Commons, and Joe Trippi, who made something of a name for himself working the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, have launched Change Congress:
...a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions. Using our tools, both candidates and citizens can pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington. Our community will link candidates committed to a reform with volunteers and contributors who support it.
The home page provides an interactive map where you can find your district and see how much your representative gets from PACs. Some random clicks brought up Representatives all over the campaign financing map. Party did not seem to be a predictor in my admittedly non-scientific sampling.
On the website, you can Pledge your support by indicating....
...the level of reform you support, and we'll give you code to put on your own website.
1. Customize Your Pledge
I believe candidates should:
* not accept contributions from registered lobbyists or PACs.
* support the abolition of "earmarks."
* support reform to increase transparency in Congress.
* support public financing of public elections.
You check off one or more of those statements, provide your zipcode and you get a badge to put on your website like so:
Note that in true collaborative-economy spirit, the site does not require that you give personal information of any kind. It helps to know that they're not out to pick your identity pocket.
Here's Lessig's video presentation on the endeavor.
If you want to see him in the video, too:
The challenge, as Lessig puts it in a Huffington Post blog post, is that...
...not everyone in Congress is eager for change. Whatever they say, and however strongly they may deny it, there are many who have grown used to a system they understand well. And many of those are not about to support radically reforming that system, at least until pushed.
Currently the website is rather simple, but there are big plans:
Think of it as a kind of Google-mashup, but applied to politics. Our aim is not to displace primary reform organizations, but rather to complement and feed support back to these organizations. And in the process, we hope to make transparent just how broad and deep the support for fundamental reform is.
Change-Congress.org will develop in three stages. The first layer will give candidates and Members of Congress a simple way to signal their support for any mix of four fundamental planks of reform: (1) a promise not to accept PAC or lobbyist contributions, (2) a commitment to abolish "earmarks" permanently, (3) a commitment to support public financing of public elections, and (4) a commitment to compel transparency in the functioning of Congress. Once a candidate or Member selects the planks he or she supports, the site will give the candidate code to embed that pledge on the campaign website. Citizens too will be able to take a similar pledge, promising to support candidates who match their own vision of reform. When they do, they will be linked back to reform organizations that support each plank.
But the real contribution of citizens will reach far beyond simply making a pledge. Beginning in April, we will launch a second stage to the site: in a Wikipedia-inspired manner, wiki-workers will track the reform-related positions of candidates who have not yet taken a pledge. If a candidate, for example, has endorsed Public Campaign's bill for public financing, we will record that fact on our site. The same with a pledge to forgo money from PACS or lobbyists, or any of the other planks in the Change Congress pledge. And once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats
