Friends,
My Missing Life is for all of us moderns living the life. My friend Peter Jones created it.
Enjoy, but be sure to check out the day the business starts on the “sign up” page.
Pass it on…

Well, this is it, my final day at the courthouse during the Libby deliberations. I don’t know if this will be the day that the jury reaches a verdict. I would love it to be, but I have my doubts. So, stepping away from the reporting on minutiae and the speculation about […]

On July 6, 2003, Joseph Wilson wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times criticizing the Bush Administration’s rush into the Iraq war. Eight days later, Robert Novak wrote a column revealing Wilson’s wife’s role within the CIA. We may never know exactly what happened within the office of the Vice President and […]

Hello Folks,
We’ve just migrated greaterdemocracy.org to a new computer, and to new blogging software (Wordpress). The new host should be invisible - URLs will remain the same. Wordpress looks a little different than the old Movable Type blog, but works rougly the same. We’ve tried to minimize differences, and we’ll be tightening […]

Greater Democracy was formed with these broad purposes in mind:

To explore the roots, goals, and intentions of democratic governance in the United States,
To look critically at the governance structures and models currently operating in the U.S., considering what works, what doesn’t work, and (especially) what might work much better, especially in the interest of facilitating […]

At the Journalism that Matters conference, JTM, in Memphis the other week, I was struck by the parallels of the second and fourth estates. For the second estate, I’m thinking of that political class that most resembles the nobility of the Ancien Regime.
For the past forty years, political discourse has been dominated by broadcast […]

Yesterday was a big day for the future of Democratic Politics. Yes, we all know about the importance of the first woman Speaker of the House. I hope many of us were touched by her reaching out to a new generation and inviting children up to the speaker’s chair to touch the gavel. So, instead of talking about that, I want to talk about a different aspect of it being a big day.

Representative George Miller stopped by in Second Life at Capitol Hill in Second Life. For more information about the space, check out Rocketboom’s Wiki entry about the space.

You can read about it on the New York Times’ blog and Beth Kanter’s blog. I recorded various parts of the event using Fraps. Unfortunately, the format that Fraps saves is a bit strange and I haven’t had a chance to edit my two gigs of clips. I did put a couple of them up on blip.tv if anyone wants to grab some raw footage. Also, drop me a note if you want some of my other raw footage.

During the event, we watched the opening of Congress on a C-Span feed streaming in and talked about a lot of different things. Folks from Sun Microsystems and Clearink were there. They had helped a lot with the building of Capitol Hill in Second Space and had some interesting things to talk about.

In particular, they mentioned Edutopia, a project of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. It looks like Edutopia is project that should be looked at more closely.

One of the interesting features of Capitol Hill in Second Life was that the roof was transparent. There were various jokes about promoting transparency in Washington, and Rep. Miller talked a bit about transparency. I asked a question about the Punch Clock Campaign and Read the Bill. He spoke generally about his support of such efforts, and I hope that people stay on top of this.

Also, during a hiatus, I had a great discussion with Katt Kongo. Katt is the editor of The Metaverse Messenger. She claims it is the largest newspaper in SecondLife, with a circulation of around twenty thousand. I was struck by it being a PDF, as opposed to some sort of blog feed with RSS etc. She claimed that she got better advertising rates that way and that M2, as it is known, is self supporting and she is actually managing to earn her living reporting on Second Life.

Other reporters there included Adam Reuters who runs Reuters bureau in Second Life, as well as a reporter for GQ, who was wearing a tux that did not live up to his GQ billing. There were various discussions about how hard it is to find good men’s clothes in Second Life.

It seems as if you can’t go a day without hearing about one newspaper or another cutting staff. The return on investment in the newspaper industry isn’t what investors want, and reporters are finding themselves out of work. Meanwhile on bloggers’ mailing lists, people are asking how they can make blogging pay. On top of this, large foundations are making grants to promote digital media, citizen journalism, hyperlocal news, and so on.

As a person who has had the good fortune to be paid for blogging, I sometimes feel like I’m in the middle of this maelstrom, but I hope I can suggest a few ways in which other bloggers can better support their habit.

This weekend I was at RootsCampDC. It was a gathering of progressive political activists where the issue of how blogging communities can be better supported came up many times. Groups like BlueNC, Raising Kaine, Blue Jersey, MyLeftNutmeg, and BlueMassGroup were repeatedly praised for their roles in the 2006 midterm elections.

Another site that got lots of praise was ActBlue. Could ActBlue be used as a fundraising tool for regional blogs? ActBlue already does fundraising for various national PACs, and it would seem reasonable for them to fundraise for regional blogs. The question that would need to be addressed is how such blogs would organize. Would they be a Federal PAC, a State PAC, a 527, a 501(c)4, a 501(c)3, or some other sort of LLC or other organization? I am not a campaign finance lawyer, so I’ll leave those sort of questions to others to address.

Beyond supporting existing regional blogging communities, the question arises of how to grow additional regional blogging communities. There were a lot of folks from the DNC at RootsCamp and one good session was about the nuts and bolts of the 50 State Strategy. People from New Jersey and Virginia spoke about how the folks from the DNC interacted with BlueJersey and Raising Kaine. It was suggested that part of the tasks that DNC staffers out in the states do is to help build a regional blogosphere. Folks from Democracy for America were also there and there were discussions about what sort of training programs DFA should be considering. Several people suggested technology related programs, but perhaps a program on building regional blogospheres would be a good topic. There were even representatives from potential 2008 candidates saying interesting things about how their probable campaigns were hoping to change the media landscape.

During a break, one of the attendees pointed me to this op-chart in the New York Times. More and more bloggers are getting paid by campaigns. The Op-Chart seems to look at this negatively, but I view it as a positive development and I hope many of my friends interested in advocacy can find jobs blogging for campaigns, as well as for non-profits and other groups needing to find new ways to get their message out.

One of my concerns about the Times Op-Chart is that continue to promote a stereotype of bloggers as activists that have “contempt for the political establishment”. While there maybe bloggers whose activism is driven by contempt for the political establishment, there are many more bloggers driven by a love for our country and an interest in using new tools, both inside and outside of the political establishment to make our country even better. There are also a lot of bloggers that seek to bring about better journalism through the blogosphere, in part, perhaps, in reaction against the shoddy journalism they see in the mainstream media.

Because of this, I think some bloggers might do well to start thinking of themselves in terms of hyperlocal, digital, citizen journalists, or some such combination of adjectives. There is growing interest in funding these sort of journalists and I think a lot of bloggers could benefit from embracing more of what is good happening in changes to journalism.

The changes in the media landscape will continue to affect the way media producers are compensated. Hopefully people can find ways of using these changes to be able to support themselves and to support a much more vibrant media ecosystem.

Last night, I attended Colin McEnroe’s Class on Blogging. It was partly a debrief for people after the Lamont campaign, yet it was also another chance to talk about the wild wild west of the internet and whether or not bloggers are journalists or not. While this is the sort of discussion I’ve listened to too many times over the past few years, Colin and his class always manage to make it vibrant, interesting, and to bring out a new twist.

Last night slothsinabox floated the idea of bloggers as being some sort of Neo-Romanticism movement. Spazeboy joked about this by putting a picture of Fabio on his blog, which prompted slothsinabox to write up a blog post expounding on what she meant.

It is a very good blog post. I agree with some of what she is saying but I think it needs to be pushed further. Slothsinabox spoke about the movement away from “carefully vetted ideas constructed with a keen eye toward objectivity, attention to societal expectations and norms, and the practice of approaching all literary production, acts of authorship and thought with a critical lens.” She expressed concern that “Ultimately, it becomes a question of whether, … we as untrained individuals really have a grasp of how to read with a critical lens and how to write with a nod toward social responsibility.”

She ties it together with this: “This brings us to a basic Lockean and Hobbesian debate–is man basically good, or basically bad? Can we trust individual bloggers’ ethics”.

This then, ties into a meta discussion I tried to get going in the class. There was a bit of a discussion about how to handle trolls on blogs. Do you not allow comments at all? Do you only allow comments from authenticated users? Do you block certain IP addresses? Do you moderate comments, either before or after the fact? I suggested that an important part of this is the process of establishing societal expectations in an online environment.

Perhaps some of the neo-romanticism is that we are interacting in new media where the societal expectations haven’t been clearly defined. We are in the process of defining those expectations, and there are not the clear sources of authority that exist in other social settings. After all, how many people do you know that have taken graduate level courses in blogging? I guess this takes me back to some sort of post-modern perspective. Societal expectations, ethics, critical lens, and even the way we chose to organize information are social constructs.

As an aside, I would encourage people, especially those involved in library sciences, to check out David Weinberger’s blog post, Why Dewey’s Decimal System is prejudiced. We also talked a lot about blogging from a U.S. perspective. I tried to tie in a global perspective, pointing to Global Voices.

So, I do believe that the advent of the internet has given us a wonderful opportunity to look at the social constructs around us, to question them, and to perhaps build new constructs. I recognize the dangers in this that slothsinabox fears. Yet to me, that argument sounds too close to why we shouldn’t have a democracy. Is man basically good or bad? Can we trust untrained individuals to elect leaders that will find the common good? Or should we have some sort of oligarchy or benevolent dictator to make sure that are social constructs are properly defended.

Me? I believe in democracy, both politically and in our communications online. So, I embrace a mix of neo-romanticism and post-modernism, which I recognize is likely to lead to yet another new orthodoxy. Yet, I will fight for democracy and encourage people to question norms as long as I can.

secondlife://Better World/108/95/29
Even before all the votes have been counted from the 2006 midterm elections, progressive political activists gathered at RootsCamp on Better World Island in Second Life to debrief from the midterms and plan innovative strategies to use technology in the 2008 election cycle.

Over the next several days, activists will share ideas and experiences. People interested in actively participating are encouraged to join in. More information is available at http://www.RootsCampSL.org