China. All must bow before the logic of what is ordained.

Next!

“But it is destructive to concentrate only on the negative; we have to shift to the constructive. We need to engage in a positive conversation about positive action. That, one hopes, is what Obama’s theme of hope is really about.”

If you load the entire interview that Obama did with the SF Chronicle and then skip towards the last 5-10 minutes you’ll hear him present this exact vision. After asking to go off the record, he makes a great statement about how broken our system is and about experience within that system being a bad indicator of how someone will be successful in bringing our country together.

However, after that comment, he continues with a GOLDEN nugget about wanting to make sure our government representatives are not only held accountable for the bad things in their legislation - but more importantly - are shown in a good light when they do something positive and all that is possible with the right technology to make it available to anyone who wants to know.

http://cdn.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/MNSNUH7GC.DTL&o=0
(Video)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=5&entry_id=23636
(Audio)

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml

——————————

http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/WyldReportBlog.pdf

“The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0”

David C. Wyld
Associate Professor
Southeastern Louisiana University
Department of Management

Description: Dr. Wyld examines the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the larger revolutionary forces at play in the development of the second-generation Internet, where interactivity among users is key. This is also referred to as “Web 2.0.” Wyld observes that blogging is growing as a tool for promoting not only online engagement of citizens and public servants, but also offline engagement. He describes blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors, and police and fire departments in which they engage directly with the public. He also describes how blogging is used within agencies to improve internal communications and speed the flow of information.

Back in the eighteenth century, there was no alternative other than to have legislators gather in one place in order to communicate with each other, conduct hearings, hold votes, etc. That’s no longer true.

Imagine something called “CongressNet.” Real-time interactive teleconferencing, voting on bills, etc., and all we plebes. . . . . er, I mean, citizens. . . . . could log and watch our Senators and Congressional reps in action.

And since there would no longer be a need to send everyone to Washington to govern, our elected officials would—–GASP!!—–be required to live in their Congressional district (Congresspeople) or home state capital (Senators). Instead of some fancy office in Washington, put them in some shopping mall so we could walk by, look through the glass, and watch them at work.

Since I’m not entirely cruel, let’s send them all to Washington for a couple of weeks at six month intervals to wine, dine, fornicate, etc. But after that we send them back home to Albany, Springfield, Trenton, etc., to put up with traffic jams and the other aspects of normal life like the rest of us.

Periodically Mao would empty China’s universities and send the professors to the countryside to work alongside the peasants. (Mao obviously met too many tenured faculty members.) In that same spirit, let’s empty Washington and send our elected representatives back to where they came from and supposedly represent.

We need engineers to fix the engine of our industrial economy not lawyers. Without that, too many non-engineer passengers will try to fix it and could blow it up in the process. American students now shun the science and engineering and opt for Law, Political Science and Finance. I understand that President Carter had an opportunity to set our goals but instead he somehow lost his engineering marbles. In todays information overload, we need leaders who demand and know how to use an electronic dashboard with drilldown capabilities rather than depending on their secretaries for overviews. I bet 90% of our senior political officers AND Fortune 1000 CEOs do not know how to access a database, let alone datamine information personally to develop the correct mental model of the real world with minimal bias.

Very nice blog. Perhaps think about how to manage those information overloads and how common people armed with partial technical information would not make bad choices for rest of us.

I am not sure that this really belongs in your Government chapter rather than in your Politics chapter but wherever it belongs I think it absolutely hits the nail on the head.

Speaking for myself, anybody who knows me or talks to me or reads me would have no difficultly assigning me to the left-liberal ghetto of the ideological spectrum. I resist the label, however, not because of its inaccuracy but because it is a pigeon hole.

It makes it so much more difficult to form coalitions with those at radically different parts of the ideological spectrum…with born-again Christians who are leading activists on HIV/AIDS or Darfur genocide…with Wall Street free traders who want to liberalize immigration with Mexico…with Cato Institute libertarians who want to legalize narcotics…with centrist Democrats like Jeff Jarvis who want universal healthcare…with neoconservative ideologues working to replace autocrats and theocrats with democrats in the middle east…with non-partisan bureaucrats like Michael Bloomberg who want to switch transportation from cars to mass transit.

Personal Political Pages allow each of us to escape from the conventional left-right authoritarian-libertarian divisions of the political parties and the opinion pollsters. They allow us to align ourselves on each issue discretely, forming ad hoc, opportunistic coalitions not binding ones.

For example, take that latest Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court. Speaking personally, I have no interest in owning a gun or seeing my neighbors own one. But if I could make a coalition with the NRA to persuade it to be more vociferous in its support of the First Amendment in exchange for my support of the Second, I would be happy to, despite the fact that I would be opposing Mayor Bloomberg, whom I happen to support on transit issues.

Personal Political Pages also allow us to prioritize our issues in a way the opinion polls rarely do. I could agree with you Jeff, for example, on the need for universal healthcare, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to prevent neighborhood blight caused by foreclosure evictions. However that surface agreement might disguise a fundamental difference in priorities: you could rank them #2, #3, #1 and me #3, #1, #2 or whatever. Our personal politics would be different because of our priorities even if we were superficially in agreement on each issue.

How to translate these insights into government? In western states they do so by favoring referenda, propositions and ballots. I have the same problems as you do concerning that system’s lack of “representative, republican (small ‘r’) structure of our government with its filters, balances, and deliberative process.” Perhaps the Texas model is better, under which the equivalent of the cabinet is staffed by commissioners, each of whom represents a specific policy area — the Railroad Commision, the Agriculture Commission and so on — and each is elected directly instead of being appointed by the Governor.

Wouldn’t it be cool if this primary season we were not only picking the nominee for President but the nominee for Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Chief Justice, the Federal Communications Commission and so on? Each office could be considered on its own policy grounds rather than the coalition that its relevant interest group happened to be a part of. Call them Personal Political Primaries,

BTW: I finally got to build my first “Memex” in the mid/late 80’s. Tim Berners-Lee gives my team credit for introducing him to Bush’s writing. See this blog post for some of the history (last few paragraphs):
http://bob.wyman.us/main/2005/12/memex_the_first.html

bob wyman

I’ve been in the “computer business” since the 70’s but have always been working on what are essentially “political” issues. I grew up in the 60’s in Berlin, well aware of the Berlin Wall and all that it meant. Hoping to fight the evil that the wall represented, for a long time I assumed that I would have a career in politics. In college, I studied Political Science, Economics, etc. to prepare. But, then I realized that “The greatest determinant of a society’s ability to establish and maintain a democratic form of government is the distribution and effectiveness of the technology available for creating and sharing information.” As a result, virtually everything I’ve ever done in the computer business has had the explicit goal of strengthening democracy through building better tools for information sharing. To me, the computer business is not a “craft” but rather a tool for the accomplishment of very specific political goals. I’m not alone… Look around you in this business. You’ll see that many others are here for what are essentially political “change the world” reasons. We already have government by the engineers in some senses. It just isn’t quite as obvious as what the formal politicians do.

bob wyman

bob wyman

Thanks much for that.

Yes, I wondered about Carter and take your analysis. I didn’t include him because I didn’t think he operated as an engineer so much as a youth minister. But given his performance these days — his belief that he can solve all problems — I see your point. And I didnt know that Hoover was an engineer.

You’re quite right that character — in addition to experience, knowledge, intelligence, and attitude — matter more than the industry on the CV.

But I still want to explore the idea that the world changes somewhat when it is run by engineers, whether they are in charge of the White House or of the fortune behind Google. There is an innate optimism in their worldview about solving problems; that is what I find appealing. There can also be an innate cockiness in that; lord knows, the Valley is the headquarters of hubris. And engineers don’t always look at the world through human eyes; they see it through algorithms and the world does not always — dot not usually — operate with such logical predictabliity. I don’t want Mr. Spock in the White House.

To solve a problem, it is first necessary to recognize that there is a problem. This was not Mr. Hoover’s strong suit, to say the least.

Mr. Carter had the opposite temperament. He saw trouble everywhere and tried to micromanage everything. When none of his a capella meddling worked, he decided the real problem was that we Americans were bad people with bad attitudes. Then we proved it by failing to re-elect him. His post-presidential career amply demonstrates that he has learned nothing from his manifold failures in office.

It would be nice if just choosing people from professional backgrounds different than the usual weasel lawyers who dominate our current political class would somehow magically solve our problems, but I suspect otherwise. Character counts, no matter what you do for a living. Electing weasel engineers to office is not a solution to problems caused by previously electing weasel lawyers.