In this video produced for The Nation and FixCongressFirst.org, Lessig describes his concern over President Obama's limited approach to truly "changing Washington," and his view that Congress is a deeply broken institution that needs reform. He believes:
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress.
Find out Professor Lessig's solutions and ideas in his cover story for the February 4, 2010 issue of The Nation magazine, "How to Get Out Democracy Back". Lessig proposes citizen-funded elections along with "banning any member of Congress from working in any lobbying or consulting capacity in Washington for seven years after his or her term".
The point is simple, if extraordinarily difficult for those of us proud of our traditions to accept: this democracy no longer works. Its central player has been captured. Corrupted. Controlled by an economy of influence disconnected from the democracy. Congress has developed a dependency foreign to the framers' design. Corporate campaign spending, now liberated by the Supreme Court, will only make that dependency worse. "A dependence" not, as the Federalist Papers celebrated it, "on the People" but a dependency upon interests that have conspired to produce a world in which policy gets sold.
[...]Nor can one exaggerate the need for precisely this reform. We can't just putter along anymore. Our government is, as Paul Krugman put it, "ominously dysfunctional" just at a time when the world desperately needs at least competence. Global warming, pandemic disease, a crashing world economy: these are not problems we can leave to a litter of distracted souls. We are at one of those rare but critical moments when a nation must remake itself, to restore its government to its high ideals and to the potential of its people.
[...]What would the reform the Congress needs be? At its core, a change that restores institutional integrity. A change that rekindles a reason for America to believe in the central institution of its democracy by removing the dependency that now defines the Fundraising Congress. Two changes would make that removal complete.
[...]That one--and first--would be to enact an idea proposed by a Republican (Teddy Roosevelt) a century ago: citizen-funded elections. America won't believe in Congress, and Congress won't deliver on reform, whether from the right or the left, until Congress is no longer dependent upon conservative-with-a-small-c interests--meaning those in the hire of the status quo, keen to protect the status quo against change. So long as the norms support a system in which members sell out for the purpose of raising funds to get re-elected, citizens will continue to believe that money buys results in Congress. So long as citizens believe that, it will.
[...]A second change ...: banning any member of Congress from working in any lobbying or consulting capacity in Washington for seven years after his or her term. Part of the economy of influence that corrupts our government today is that Capitol Hill has become, as Representative Jim Cooper put it, a "farm league for K Street." But K Street will lose interest after seven years, and fewer in Congress would think of their career the way my law students think about life after law school--six to eight years making around $180,000, and then doubling or tripling that as a partner, where "partnership" for members of Congress means a comfortable position on K Street.
The first Australian Social Innovation Camp is scheduled for 5th -7th March 2010. Today is the last day to submit ideas to be developed during the weekend. To submit your idea goto http://asix.org.au/content/submitting-idea.
Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds - from working conditions and education to community development and health - and that extend and strengthen civil society. The camp is an opportunity to concentrate on particular ideas and develop working prototypes.
Here's a brief description about how the camp works:
Collecting ideas
The Social Innovation Camp starts with a big, open call for ideas. Anyone can enter an idea for a web-based social innovation. You don't need to be technically skilled - you just need to know about a social need that you've either encountered in your personal or professional life where the web might be able to help.
From the ideas submitted, a panel of judges select between six and eight of the most promising to be developed at the Social Innovation Camp weekend. The public votes will also be taken into account when selecting the ideas coming to the camp.
Weekend event
Then the people behind the selected ideas, together with software developers and designers, those with business and marketing skills, as well as individuals with expert knowledge of social need are invited to the Social Innovation Camp weekend.
From a Friday evening to a Sunday afternoon, participants are asked to organise themselves into teams around the selected ideas and then set five challenges:
1) What’s the problem they're trying to solve?
2) Build the technology with which to do this
3) How will you sustain your idea?
4) How will you build a community of users?
5) What are you going to do after the Social Innovation Camp weekend
At the end of the two days, all participants come back together to pitch what they have built and the judges award a small prize to the projects which have shown greatest potential.
A corporation runs for Congress? Great spoof regarding the absurdity of the Citizens United decision last week. The problem is it's not so far from the truth.
President Obama descibed how the Citizen United decision would mean "a new stampede of special interest money in our politics":
With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. ... We are going to talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision.
The Huffington Post's investigation fund has been running a series of articles on Electronic Health records (required by 2014), and whether their implementation can lead to the care improvements and the cost savings envisaged by President Obama.
The President has praised the Cleveland Clinic for having "one of the best health information technology systems in the country" and holds it as a model for healthcare in America. As a result of this, the Huffington Post analysed their IT practices and how they developed and managed a system of Electronic Health Records throughout the clinic.
The video below examines whether the experiences of the Cleveland Clinic can, and should, be replicated across the country.
The Obama administration is current spending $45 billion to jump-start a national system of electronic medical records. They want doctors and hospitals to digitize their records within five years, as a means of improving care and achieving billions of dollars in savings.
Cost savings
WhileCleveland Clinic doctors say there is no doubt the switch to digital record-keeping has boosted the quality of care, they question whether they have saved money and reduced costs.
The Huffington Post notes how the Cleveland clinic has invested $100 million in IT over a decade, but cost savings have not materialized and hospital officials are not certain when they will. Whether their effort of digitizing records will save money is not altogether clear. This is consistent with some recent national studies that question whether electronic records can lead to lower medical spending:
A study of 4,000 hospitals published in November in the American Journal of Medicine--carried out by Harvard researchers who are some of the most prominent advocates of a single-payer healthcare system--found no cost savings or increased efficiencies with digital records. That was consistent with preliminary results from a separate study of 3,000 hospitals by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, who found no evidence of cost savings with electronic records.
The switch to Electronic Health Records (EHR) has received mixed reviews at hospitals around the country. Other countries, such as the UK, are already advanced in the development of EHRs, but are having their budgets cut as a result of delays and cost overruns. The Cleveland Clinic's experience shows that while EHR's can improve the quality of care and administration, they're not necessarily a panacea for reducing high healthcare costs.
In October 2009, the National Archives hosted the fifth annual McGowan Forum on Communication, Technology and Government. A panel of distinguished experts discussed the transfomative effect of Web 2.0 on the relationship between citizen and government.
They sought to answer the question: "Can Government 2.0 technologies build a new kind of participatory democracy?"
Moderated by Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, the discussion focused on how collaborative democracy can be designed.
Panelists included Beth Simone Noveck, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Mark H. Webbink, visiting professor of law, New York Law School, and executive director, Center for Patent Innovations; Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder, Public Knowledge; and Jason R. Baron, director of litigation, National Archives.
Last month the think-tank Demos released a report called The Power Gap, in an 'attempt to quantify the power capabilities people have in their every day lives'.
As part of this, they produced a Power Map (see below) highlighting the areas of Britain with the greatest concentrations of power. The author of the report Dan Leighton, explains how the map assigns a power score to every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales based on a wide range of indicators. These include levels of personal control, resilience and political participation which are they accorded based on constituency populations.
The map aims to depict where the most powerful and powerless citizens live; what factors make them score higher; disparities across and within regions; and which political parties represent the powerless and powerful. It adds a geographical picture to what is often said but rarely quantified or displayed at a national level.
The map is intended to be the start of conversation about the power in everyday life, and how it's distributed across the country. The Map illustrates the distribution of eight different indicators of citizens’ power and gathers these into one overall index. The eight power indicators include:
education
occupational status
income
employment
freedom from crime
health
voter turnout
marginality of parliamentary seat
One of the interesting factors noted in the report concerns the factors affecting boosting constituencies to the top of the power scale. These include education, occupational status and political power in the form of seat marginality and voter turnout.
Education, workplace power and political power are therefore important areas of focus in terms of moving towards more egalitarian power distribution. Those living in safe seats also tend to score poorly in the other categories, making them subject to a form of double damnation: not only do they lack personal control, they also lack meaningful opportunities to change the wider social and political landscape through a real choice at the ballot box.
The report looks agues that it is power and not income or mobility that is the critical inequality in Britain. It seeks to paint a more informed picture of who in Britain is in control of their own lives, and how equality is distributed throughout the country. Through showing the reality of power inequaluty they aim to 'concentrate minds and advance debate on the types of political, economic and social reform needed to close the gap between the powerful and the powerless'.
After all Politics' real purpose is to spread power to people. As the video below says:
When you understand power, you become powerful.
To download a free copy of the report see The Power Gap.
InformationWeek's Executive editor Fritz Nelson interviews San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, Chief Technology Officer Blair Adams and Director of Innovation Jay Nath, about DataSF.org and building applications from newly open datasets.
Mayor Gavin Newsom speaking about San Francisco's Open data initiative:
I think we're about to go through the most transformational period in how government operates...I cannot understate the significance of open data
For details on some of the applications already developed, check out DataSF's Application showcase.
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