Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Technically Speaking Email This Print This View My Personal Library What's Cooking August 2008 • Vol.8 Issue 8 Page(s) 106-107 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Technically Speaking An Interview With Joshua Levy, Managing Editor Of Change.org Joshua Levy is the Managing Editor of Change.org and former Associate Editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, the parent site of TechPresident. by Barry Brenesal CPU: Just to make clear a distinction, here: We interviewed Professor Jay Rosen of NY University a while ago about his plans for Off the Bus. This was a way of getting more varied and in-depth, accurate coverage of all the candidates on the election trail by largely resorting to volunteers, who would be trained in good journalism techniques. TechPresident instead tracks the way the campaigns and individual people use the Web to affect the election, correct? Levy: Exactly. Off the Bus is an experiment in investigative journalism. It uses crowd sourcing, collaboratively authoring articles through volunteers on-the-ground while following the presidential election. TechPresident is not a citizen journalism operation. We’re a professional operation. I get paid to do what I do. We do a lot of “inside baseball” reporting on what happens inside the tech world as it relates to presidential politics, and what’s happening in presidential politics as it relates to the tech world. The people that are writing for our site are veterans of past presidential campaigns. They discuss strategy, grassroots activism, and the way the Web is changing the process by which we get involved in politics. CPU: Speaking of your staff, that’s a pretty impressive one you’ve gathered. I noticed you had the Webmaster of Bush/Cheney ’04, also the former campaign director for the Republican National Committee, as well as the former Director of Internet Marketing for the Democratic National Committee and Kerry/Edwards ’04. Did you seek out this kind of political balance between the two major parties? Levy: From the moment we started developing the idea for this site, we conceived it as a cross-partisan project. The Personal Democracy Forum, of which TechPresident is an offshoot, is itself cross-partisan: a yearly conference that attracts politicians from across the spectrum, as well as technologists. CPU: Why would the casual Web visitor who drops by your Web site find it of particular interest, enough to add it perhaps to his Favorites list? Levy: In 2008, I would say that most of us have at least heard of Facebook, or MySpace, or YouTube. Better yet, some of us have used those tools regularly to discuss or follow the election. I think this demonstrates a lot of people are interested in both the race and the technology. The way that we execute our project gives it a narrow focus that really hones in on exactly how specific technologies such as email, online video, and Twitter are being used—and by whom, and for what intended audience. CPU: In May of 2007, TechPresident issued a challenge: Who will be America’s first Tech President? You then set out six specific policy goals to test the candidates’ awareness of advocacy of the Web. I’d like to review each of these and get a comment from you on it. “1. Declare the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways, or public education.” Levy: It’s a response to what is known as the Net Neutrality movement. We’re trying to ensure that the Web cannot be deregulated, so that companies such as Comcast or Verizon are allowed to charge additional fees on top of their regular ones for Internet access. CPU: "2. Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide.” Levy: This is related to our first goal. If we think of the Internet as a utility that serves the public good, like water or electricity, then high-speed access should be guaranteed to every American. We’ve seen other countries take on very ambitious Internet projects, such as South Korea’s attempts to provide Web access for every citizen. They’ve been largely successful, and the results of that are very clear: The quality of life and the level of education have increased. People have more access to information, and they’re able to take more control over the public aspect of their lives. We think doing the same sort of thing here is a very necessary step to take. CPU: “3. Declare a Net Neutrality standard forbidding Internet service providers from discriminating among content based on origin, application, or type.” Levy: This is the explicit Net Neutrality argument, that we should forbid ISPs from charging on a content basis. CPU: “4. Instead of ‘No Child Left Behind,’ our goal should be ‘Every Child Connected.’” Levy: We think that schools across the country should be wired, full-tilt. Every child at school should be guaranteed broadband access and high-speed Internet, because this is the backbone of learning in 2008. CPU: Just to be clear, what you’re saying is that whoever is elected president should pursue a variety of actions that eventually lead to this goal. Correct? Levy: Absolutely. We’re not saying that the government should necessarily fund this, but that the president should recognize this as a prioritized part of an education platform. CPU: "5. Commit to building a Connected Democracy where it becomes commonplace for local, as well as national government proceedings, to be heard by anyone any time and over time.” Levy: We’ve seen a few experiments on this level. There was a project in Utah started by a state legislator, called Politicopia [www.politicopia.com]. It was a site set up for any citizen to access, where they could suggest, comment, and collaborate on the writing of legislation. We think that these kinds of projects are really positive developments, because they’re leveraging a technology which is inherently democratic if everybody has access. CPU: This has the possibility of being very controversial. While there are some politicians who would obviously favor this kind of citizen involvement, there are others who feel that they themselves were elected, rather than their constituencies. Levy: Sure, and there are some citizens who would say, “We’ve elected you to do this work, and every four years I’ll go back into the voting booth. That’s my job.” Others, though, want a more active part in government. Let’s be clear: There are a variety of ways to enact this Wiki-field kind of democracy. With so many different ideas present, I don’t think we’ve gotten far enough along to say which one is better than the others. CPU: “6. Create a National Tech Corps, because as our country becomes more reliant on 21st-century communications to maintain and build our economy, we need to protect our communications infrastructure.” Levy: This is largely a reaction to the aftermath of 9/11, when a lot of the technological infrastructure went down in New York City. We need to make sure that the technological backbone stays intact, in case another such catastrophe ever occurs. We depend upon the Web and take it for granted. But if we lose it, we don’t currently have any plan in place for quickly getting back in business. This could lead to even greater tragedy than occurred in 2001, given the rate of change since then. CPU: What sort of other resources does TechPresident provide besides daily reporting on the candidates? Levy: We’re very well-known for our charts. We have sets of data that show how many Facebook supporters, MySpace groups, YouTube views, blog mentions, and Eventful “demands” each candidate is getting. Each of our charts details this content and displays it on a timeline. That data has been extremely popular. A lot of journalists reference it all the time. CPU: And the Internet is being used to gather information on the presidential candidates by everybody, far more than it was in previous campaigns. Levy: In 1996, the World Wide Web was barely in existence. In 2000, it was being used to raise money—by John McCain, ironically, who is not using the Web all that effectively this time. I think we can say now that where presidential politics are concerned, the Web has reached its adolescence. A lot of that, I would argue, is thanks to the influence of Howard Dean supporters who found their voices in 2003 and 2004, learning how to blog for presidential politics and how to use the innate social characteristics of the Web in order to organize and take local control of their candidate’s message. It created a strong grassroots movement among Democratic activists that is now playing itself out for the first time on a truly large scale in Barack Obama’s campaign. CPU: You're specifically discussing the way Democrats have mobilized to use the Web, and I heard you criticize McCain. Are you implying that Republicans have handled Web technology less effectively? Levy: There’s definitely a digital divide between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats, largely because they were not in power in the George Bush years, turned to the Web to organize, to raise money, and to get their message out using communications tools online. There was no reason for the Republicans to form grassroots groups that would have competed with their own National Committee, because they were the party that was in power. Until 2006, they had the majority in Congress. They also had the executive branch and the judicial branch, thanks to appointments. So there really was no reason to work online for anything else. The result of all this is that in the 2008 race, we have a political movement started online by Democrats, but no similar movement from Republicans, who are now scrambling. Some very savvy Republican strategists and grassroots activists—who have written on our site from time to time—are trying to replicate what they see online from the Democrats, but there’s not as much money from Web support to attract a great deal of interest on their side. Money for the Republicans still flows mainly from the top. This has nothing to do with his politics or policies. It’s more of an observation about the way the pendulum of power swings, and power was not in the Democratic section of the court over the last eight years. As a result, they built up an alternative powerbase. The Republicans, again, didn’t have to do that, and now they’re suffering for it. CPU: Have you found that the reactions of Republican and Democratic activists are equally favorable to TechPresident, or do you get more positive responses from either side of the divide? Levy: I would say that it’s pretty equal, though there are as yet fewer conservative Web activists than liberal Web activists. It’s definitely disproportionate in the amount of conversations that we are having; but that noted, I would say that we have some of the smartest writers on the Right working for us. These include people such as Patrick Ruffini, a highly respected member of the Republican National Committee, who writes for TechPresident on a weekly basis. CPU: Has anyone taken you to task for not following third party candidates? Levy: We do try to cover other candidates as best we can. We followed Bob Barr, for example, who is running for president on the Libertarian ticket. Likewise, Mike Gravel, who was a Democrat and is now a Libertarian: We find his videos very entertaining, and whenever we find one of his videos, we try to call attention to it. We cover Ralph Nader, although Nader has been very critical and ignorant of the ways the Web can be used in politics. CPU: So in your opinion, TechPresident is well on the way to succeeding in its goals. Levy: I think it has already succeeded in those goals. They were fairly modest to begin with, and we’ve far exceeded them. Right around the time of the CNN/YouTube debates in July of last year we had our sweet spot, when the media realized we were out there. We started appearing on television shows and panels and being quoted in newspaper articles. We were asked what our take was on those debates, and we were very critical of them. We offered a different perspective of use to knowledgeable people. Ever since then, we’ve really been the go-to place when people want to talk about technology in politics. CPU: Have you observed any kind of knock-off effect from TechPresident at the state level? Levy: Oh, absolutely! We’re going to work on creating either a separate site or section to our own site that focuses on the use of technology in Congressional races. Anywhere people are practicing politics, they’re using the Web to do so. We’re definitely tapped into that and remain very interested in the ways that the Web will be used for governance after November. CPU: Do you think that this citizen use of the Web to influence politics—as investigator, provocateur, corrective—will continue past the November elections? Or are we going to see the American populace sink back into “bread and circuses” mode where it doesn’t want to be bothered as long as everything can be ignored? Levy: I don’t really think there’s any going back at this point. It’s not simply a matter of these campaigns, which are obviously glamorous and command media attention. Some of the most interesting work occurring in the political Websphere is much more esoteric, such as creating databases that track financial earmarks linked to specific legislators. It’s less sexy than covering a presidential candidate’s latest speech, but I think it’s much more important in the long run. But I would argue that we’re just getting started. 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