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Domain: democracyproject.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to democracyproject.org.

Comments · 3

  1. 2002 is 2 years too late by Rolls · · Score: 1 · on Making Technology Democratic
    I think your prediction that something big will happen in 2002 misses the enormous opportunity we have this year. According to a Yankelovich Partners study, 46% of Americans say they are likely to use the Internet for "some type of political activity within the next six months". This is about 90 million US adults, compared with about 12 million who did the same in 1998 (according to this study from the nonprofit Pew Research Center).

    This means that more than twice as many people will use the Internet as an election resource than will buy books, download music from Napster and trade stocks online combined.

    My point is that if you're looking for critical mass, it's already here. But if you're looking for politicians and the government to lead on this one, you're looking in the wrong place. It's up to us collectively to set a high standard for how the Internet gets used for political communication, to make sure that it doesn't end up like Television, The Sequel. 2000 is a unique opportunity. By 2002, most people's expectations of what the "political Internet" is will have already been set.

    Interested? Check out my personal effort to help set that standard, or email me and I'll point you to other like-minded folks who are doing good stuff in this area.

  2. A Serious Question for Jon by ZetaPotential · · Score: 1 · on Making Technology Democratic

    Jon, I've reread your post twice, and I keep getting the feeling that your post has this sort of plotline:

    "Well, it looks like the plane is going down, we seem to be losing altitude rapidly, and the pilots apparently don't want to share the task of piloting with us, but somebody will figure out how to keep the plane from crashing some time in the future."

    I'm not trying to imply that politicians/lobbyists are like the pilots of our societal airplane. What I am trying to say is that very often your articles give good examples of what's going wrong, and then contain absolutely no follow through except for vague prognostications about the future. Why don't you ever include any proposed plans of action for us /. readers? Given this article, you could have had links to the EFF, or to the Democracy Project, both of which are directly concerned with the issues you raise and certainly could use support from the /. community.

    So Jon, instead of collecting a paycheck for merely writing more filler for the "eternal debate," as you phrase it, why not finish your articles with concrete suggested plans of action for us to consider? Maybe that way we can band together to save us all from a "crash landing."

  3. $25 Million Dollars?! by tgw · · Score: 1 · on Scott Reents, Online Political Activist

    The Operational Plan posted on your website states that you're looking for $25 million dollars of funding for the year 2000. That's a lot of money, especially considering that $21.8 million of it is to be spent on marketing and only $1.8 million is to be spent on technology. Two questions for you...

    (1.) There are a lot of websites that have burned through multi-million dollar marketing budgets and ended up empty handed. Why do you think you can build a recognizable brand by simply throwing a big marketing budget at it, when so many others have failed using that exact same approach?

    (2.) It seems that creating an organization which needs $25 million dollars in donations every year to survive is rather unrealistic. Since your organization is totally dependent on contributions, what is your organization going to do to fund itself next year - when there is no election to generate interest in what you're doing?