Larry Lessig, the creator of the Creative Commons and a prominent name in Internet law, recently launched Change Congress. Change Congress is a multipartisan movement created to reform politics by combining existing data and ideas in a “Google-mashup” which will ultimately allow voters to see which candidates support change. The problem which Lessig sees in the current government is that there is too much influence from large corporations and the wealthiest Similar to Lessig’s work done at the Creative Commons, which allows users to mark their content for free distribution, Change Congress currently allows voters as well as congressional candidates to pledge for reform in four main characteristics,

1. no money from PACs
2. ban from earmarks
3. support public finance of public elections
4. support total transparency.

Step 1: Users will pldedge a combination of the four characteristics and then get a badge which they can display online; Lessig is hoping to spark a political “Livestrong” trend in which it will be hip to display a pledge (which hopefully will pass a tipping point).

Figure 1: Pledge icon to be placed on voters and candidate’s websites.

Step 2: The website will track reform pledges using “wikified tools” to build a network of users, what types of reform they are looking to support, and match congressional candidates who have the same ideals. This will be done by mapping actual support and pledged support on the Google Map.

Figure 2: Map showing amount PAC donations for Ithaca’s congressional district

Step 3: Fund the reform which people have pledged for by allowing people to directly pledge money to candidates that support reform.

As we have discussed in class, the web is a series of pointers that refers to syntactic data: search keywords point to word matches, urls point to specific files on servers. One of the major changes that the internet is moving towards is a semantic web in which information is connected by the data behind the words. Lessig’s big picture seems not only to be promoting change in Congress but also a progressive movement in how we think about the internet as a tool. Each pledge badge displayed will link back to a user’s congressional representative and can be used to build a network of users. Change Congress is crowdsourcing at its finest. It takes a “Wikipedia” approach in which wiki-users gather data about their congressional districts. By forming a community of users who each do their own research on candidates, their pledge status and their actual numbers, Change Congress can aggregate large amounts of data and overlay it on an easily visible map.

While we don’t yet have foolproof semantic web crawlers that can read a politician’s sentences and understand them, this may be a first step towards aggregating information and using the internet as more than a broadcasting tool but as an democratially interactive tool in which voters can contribute not just money but their effort in promoting transparency. With many semantic search start ups and Yahoo!’s recent announcement of their move to semantic web search, it is not out of the question that we will soon have the tools to analyze data on the internet based on the content instead of the word syntax. Relating back to the course, this would change the game in keyword based advertising because users, instead of searching for certain keywords, would essentially be searching for ideas. Advertisers would then need to buy these ideas in order to secure advertising slots.

If Lessig is successful and does happen to stumble across an internet epidemic with a high stickiness factor, we may see a change not only in the structure of the legislative branch but also a change in how the internet can be used as a collaborative tool.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/fix-congress-first_b_92456.html?view=print

http://lessig.org/blog/

http://change-congress.org/