The Future of Self-Governance

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted October 11, 2004.

"A countervailing force is not going to come from inside the Beltway regardless of who is in office. The bigger challenge beyond winning in November is the restoration of true self-governance and self-determination. It's what the Founders had in mind 200+ years ago, and a Kerry Presidency per se is going to do little to bring it about. So this topic, how we can restore democracy and bring about real reform is going to be subject of the dialog here. Please join in."

So ends Mitch Kapor's first blog entry on his newly founded web site Of, By and For. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, which helped bring personal computers to the business world. He is also an investor, social activist and philanthropist. Mitch has recently turned his attention to his concerns about the state of our republic and the lack of civic participation. He established Of, By and For to give a voice to the problems he sees in our government. AlterNet recently visited his office in San Francisco to learn more about it.

Mitch, what is Of, By and For, and why did you found it?

Of, By and For is a web site that was designed to do several things. One is to be a forum for a forward-looking political discussion. By forward-looking I mean, both beyond the 2004 election, but also trying to ask a different set of questions — not about whether Democrats or Republicans should be elected. Important and as critical as that kind of discussion is, I feel that there are some much more fundamental questions. For instance, what ought to be the nature of self-government in the 21st century? Based on the feeling that we have wandered pretty far from what the Founders of the country had in mind when they set this country up. There is a serious need for a discussion about political reform and the future of the Republic.

So the website was designed to be a place for those discussions to take place. One of the things we’ve done, is try to use different ways of engendering the discussion. We’ve run live streaming broadcast of the discussion group we had with Joe Trippi about restoring the republic, with a chat room going on simultaneously alongside. It seemed to go rather well — the discussion was interesting, and the reader chat rooms buzzed. That was the first one of these we’ve done, but we’ve got another one coming with Bill Greider, author of the "Soul of Capitalism."

You come from a tech background and now you are making the jump to talk about politics in the 21st century.

The first thing is, I've always voted and followed elections quite carefully, but from a captive point of view. And I think, like a lot of tech people and the population in general, there's something about the way that politics is conducted that is a huge turnoff. The amount of spin, the lack of straight information, the negative campaign advertising, the lack of public participation in the process – it all created a kind of tension because I felt very civically-minded, but who wants to follow politics and government in the way it is now? That has been my mindset.

But it was the Dean campaign that began to change the way I thought about it. I wasn't directly involved with the campaign from the start, but I began to participate with Dean's high-tech council shortly before the campaign came to an end. But even as it was falling apart, I recognized that the Dean campaign had a totally different approach. I witnessed the mobilizing of energy of hundreds of thousands of people. The campaign was raising money – huge amounts of it – in ways that defied all predictions. But it wasn't just about raising money. It was about building a community.

To me, the Dean campaign pointed out that if there were a real political alternative, not politics as usual, you could mobilize people – organize a community to advocate and bring about serious reform of our government. The tech side is a big part of it, because without the Internet, you couldn't have had a Dean campaign. The Internet gave the Dean campaign an alternative to broadcast television as its main medium, as well as allow for a bottom-up system that promoted and facilitated grassroots involvement – both of which the campaign relied on. So I recognized that campaign relied on web technology – that the campaign was really on the Internet.

But ultimately my involvement in Of, By and For, and politics for that matter, is as a citizen, more than as a tech guy.

You wrote in a passage I found on Of, By and For that "the whole concept of open and equal access to information could do wonders for our politics. Placing information in the open, allowing people to debate both general and very specific aspects of software, and then creating a process for decision-making about implementation could be very important lessons.... There are many other interesting aspects to the open source community that may very well help define new participatory processes that can help us revitalize our democracy." Is this something you are looking to work on in your projects?

Jan Frel is AlterNet's political editor.

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