The idea for this conversation came about a year ago when things started heating up around net neutrality on Capitol Hill and on the Internet. But if you look back a little bit more the roots of it actually are in electronic voting. When electronic voting came into the vision of technologists, it was kind of neat to see -- people seemed to be personally offended by electronic voting machines. It was really poor technology. Anyone who had a sense of technology thought, 'hey, this is where politics and technology are interacting.' And this is something I need to be involved in because people aren't doing it very well.

Let me be clear about my agenda today. My agenda is to encourage people who aren't politically active who get technology to become politically active. Why is that? We need you. Your country needs you. I worked on Capitol Hill for about five years and during that time I liked to tell people a story about why we need technologists who are more politically active. It's probably apocryphal -- I don't think it's actually true -- but everyone knows that al Qaeda is from the Arabic word for "base," but the story goes that it actually comes from the database that Osama bin Laden used to keep of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan. There are people who get this.

Contrast that with what's going on in DC right now, and the lack of knowledge of technology on Capitol Hill. You can't really overstate how poorly technology is understood in Washington. During the net neutrality debate, Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the Energy and Commerce committee at the time, said -- whether you like him or not, I think he was on to something when he said this: "the average congressman doesn't know what the term means." That's pretty on. There are a lot of things that congressmen are good at. This isn't one of them.

Then we have Vint Cerf -- many of you probably know as the creator of TCP/IP who works at Google now. He came up to lobby on Capitol Hill and it was kinda neat to see his reaction -- the level of understanding was so minimal that what we need on Capitol Hill is a comic book called "How the Internet Works." That's the level of understanding we're working with. The problem is that politics is a stimulus-response business. And we haven't stimulated congressmen, politicians to respond in the way they want them to.

So what ends up happening is that we have something like the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. What that bill did was make it so that any library or school that received federal funding had to block children from accessing commercial social networking sites, to be named at later date -- the FCC had to define what those commercial social networking sites were. It was a poor piece of legislation, a really crappy bill -- overly broad, really impossible to enforce. There's not much that Congress agrees on, but this is one of them. In the red [chart shown] you have the congressmen who spoke out against this ban on social networking and the green are the ones who said, 'yeah, let's go ahead with this ban.'

You're talking 410 members of Congress who agreed to ban social networking sites in schools and libraries. Part of the problem with this is that we may look and say, this is silly, but this problem is -- Henry Jenkins talked yesterday about the "participatory divide" that we're seeing. We're sort of moving past the digital divide. But the "participatory divide" is kids not having access to these social networking technologies that are really going to define their futures in some ways. So that kids who are relying on public computers in schools and libraries, they're going to be disadvantaged when it comes to dealing with these technologies in the future.

About a year ago, I went to work for a guy by the name of Mark Warner, when we thought that he was going to run for president. Warner founded the company that became Nextel and was a high-tech VC for about 25 years. The reason I went to work for him was -- I kid a little bit, but there's some truth to it -- coming from a technology background, people said, "why Warner, you're a one-term Governor, why would you run for president?" He said, well, I have a value add because I have a technology and business background. And he said, "I could not imagine going back to your shareholders and saying 'okay, we really didn't do anything this year but we made our competitor look bad.'" He said, "but both sides do it in politics and it's just fundamentally baffling."

And that's absolutely the case. Beating down the other side counts as progress in politics. The reason why I'm here making here making this pitch is that it's fundamentally different in this world. This world attracts problem solvers. I think that's why a lot of us get into technology, because we can accomplish things. That problem-solving inclination is incredibly valuable in politics. A lot of people who are in politics don't have that. So that's why I would encourage you to consider the value add that you bring to politics. There's the sort of hands-on technical skill that everyone sort of has. But beyond that there is a vision and way of seeing the world as a system of networks that technologists, have but a lot of people don't who are in politics.

So where do we go from here? Three things we can start with.

First, use your knowledge. We talked a little bit about net neutrality when we started. But that's one issue. And frankly, the debate has ramped up where we have people fighting on both sides, pro and con. Not to say that net neutrality is a dead issue, but the forces have aligned in a way that there's not a lot of room to maneuver at this point. But that's one issue. How do we get past it? What's next, what's after net neutrality?

What I would argue is first off, media reform. I think that's where the next debate is, that a lot of the issues that a lot of us care about, where we'll be fighting them. Things like wireless spectrum, spectrum allocation. Copyright -- this is a big one, control of creative content more broadly. Broadband rollout. Access to technologies. Culture and participatory culture.

Fracturing of the global network -- I think that's an important one that could stand to have more debate around it. What I mean by that is that's is an umbrella term for a way of looking at censorship, and things like the situation in Cuba where Castro created this walled garden Internet that's a completely enclosed Internet. I would argue that we need to learn to place those things in the broader context of the issues that we all care about. Once you start fracturing the global network, it's a slippery slope.

Wireless and municipal wireless. Social technologies -- MySpace and so on. Gaming and video game ratings.

And then, the energy grid. This gets back to the idea of vision. We understand things in a way that can link disparate things together. The way the political world function is that we build silos, and stuff issues into different silos. That helps politicians understand things. But it reduces our power, because if we're understanding the world in terms of networks, we're breaking apart these networks by dividing and conquering these issues.

One of the things I would encourage you as you do get politically active...one of the things that I think happens to people when they start out in politically activism is that they adopt the terms of the debate that already exist. What I would argue is that we have a responsibility. There's a friend of mine who is in the room who talks about the responsibility to be "keepers of the medium" -- the medium being the Internet and all its related technologies. One of the responsibilities there is to define the debate in the way that makes sense to us. Net neutrality was sort of nice because the way that the debate was defined was good. A lot of other ones aren't.

We talk about the DOPA bill being the "MySpace bill," but that's not beneficial to those of us who want to understand these things more broadly. Just because lawmakers and lobbyists want to talk about an issue in a certain way, I would encourage you not to co-opt the ways they're already talking about them. Define them for yourselves and amongst yourselves. "Keepers of the medium" -- I think is important and is a responsibility to be taken seriously.

That's the first one, this idea of using the knowledge that you have acquired and your way of seeing the world, and applying that to politics.

The second one is hands-on skills. For a while in politics, there was this race to build new online tools. We saw that in 2004. What's sort of amazing is that we've ramped up to the point that there are established firms that just do this work. There are Democratic firms and Republican firms that tackle building the best tools since the Dean era. It's sort of neat in the 2008 presidential race that we're seeing now, there's this space race going on to be that campaign that "gets" social networking. If you go on John Edwards '08, he has 34 different social networking tools that you can plug into. I had never heard of the majority of the things he's trying to get into. My argument there is that there are people who are doing presidential politics.

There's a lot more out there. Don't leave home. Don't move somewhere to work for someone somewhere else. There are campaigns in every corner of the country, thousands of campaigns every election cycle. Beyond that, there is the day-in day-out governing that goes on. Find a city council member who is working for or against an issue you care about. Find a local initiative to glom onto or start your own. Where do you go from there? Build a wiki, start a blog. Show up at a local candidate's door and say, "I know what you need and I'm going to build it for you." A lot of times they're going to recognize the need for you to be there, but not necessarily what you can add to the organization. Sometimes you're going to have to be your own project manager. You're going to have to define the need, and roadmap out how you're going to get there.

The thing I want to leave you with is this: you have the inclination towards problem solving, that is going to make you incredibly valuable in politics. Be a relentless problem solver when you insert yourselves into political contexts. I would argue that that should be the way that you present yourself to an organization, what sort of value you're adding.

The third way that I'd argue to get politically engaged is to be someone who is willing to have a political identity. Be willing to be identified as someone who has political inclinations. It's difficult sometimes in this world. There is a reluctance to be someone who identifies as either a Democrat or a Republican. And that's fine. I would argue that if you can get over that, it's good in the long term.

But even if you don't get involved in party politics on either the state or national level, there's a distributed resources, networked way of seeing the world that is pretty central to modern technologies that is a progressive vision, in my mind. There's a history of progressive politics in this country and you may well fit into that history. If that makes sense for you, it makes sense to exploit the history and resources that exist there.

Let's talk about what that hasn't happened yet, why we do see technologists not overly politically engaged.

The first one is: politics is messy, extremely messy. Technology appeals to those of us who like controlled environments. When you're building something new, like a new application, you know the terrain. In some ways it's a bounded universe. You know that this is the code I have to work with. Code is code.

We don't have anything like that in politics. If you were sitting in a room coding something and someone came in and said, "yeah, that variable you're using, we just can't use that anymore. Our competitor doesn't like. Some folks from his old variable told him not to use that variable any more. So you're going to have to learn how to work around it."

It seems absurd in the technology context. It happens all the time in politics. The nuts and bolts of technology are off limits. There are no off-limits nuts and bolts in the political world. To be honest, it's incredibly frustrating. And it's a pretty poor environment in which to create new technology.

This is the third reason why we haven't seen the level of political engagement that we might otherwise expect. This is a little bit of a touchy subject, but this is from an article from 1996 by a woman by the name of Paulina Borsook. It was called "Cyberselfish." This about Silicon Valley in the 1990's and the people who lived there. The quote goes:

They were violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation. These are the inheritors of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in technical education the planet has ever seen.

But like the ungrateful adolescent offspring of immigrants who have made it in the new country, they take for granted the richness of the environment in which they have flourished, and resent the hell out of the constraints that bind them.

She talks about this as "cyberselfishness." You sometimes hear it talked about more positively as "technolibertarianism." It's a touchy subject, but it is something you hear in tech circles, particularly in California. It's part of this frontier mythology -- go west and create new technologies out of whole cloth. To be honest, it has worked pretty well for folks for a long time. The getting has been pretty good.

What I would argue is that there is a trend toward that no longer being the case. We saw with net neutrality, something that we sort of thought was off-limits -- the Internet was neutral, that was an operating principle and the way that the Internet was built. Nothing was going to change that. Suddenly we saw Washington's fingers mucking in the Internet, and the neutral Internet was threatened. People took a step back and said, "woah, this could happen on other issues other than just the neutrality of the Internet, and maybe this is something we need to be more aware of."

And you saw folks ramping up. Just on the industry level, we saw seemingly within weeks of neutrality becoming a big topic of debate in DC, you saw Google opening up their new lobbying shop and that happening with other companies as well. What I would argue was that neutrality was a warning sign that we're on a collision course between what we care about in the technology world and what these folks on Capitol Hill, the White House, and even the Supreme Court cares about in terms of technology.

In the past these debates have peaked and died back down, about things like H-1B visas, outsourcing but those decisions are going to need to be made. And I would argue that we're quickly coming to a time when we're going to have to make those decisions. The question really is: those debates are going to happen with or without us -- are we going to have a voice in that debate?

The third and last obstacle is that it's incredibly difficult -- in the context of the Warner campaign, for example -- to get people hired on to do hands on technical work and really hard to encourage people whose backgrounds where in technology, thinkers in the field, to come work for us. One of the reasons is that campaigns are especially messy environments. You don't necessarily who's paid staff and who's not; you work for someone and now one day they work for you. Things change every day.

It's difficult to create technology in that environment. A lot of people don't want to. And it's crude, but here's what you can make in technology [big dollars] and that's what you can make in politics [small dollars], in broad strokes. It's tough. People are trying to tackle it in different ways. But what I would argue is that we need to get past this thinking that when we do really good work, we're going to get compensated for it. And if we do amazing work, we're going to get compensated really well. There's no comparison with what you make in politics with what you make in technology. That's probably just something we need to accept.

That's it for main points. I'm going to run through a few of the organizations currently working in this space where technology and politics meet. And they I'll finish with one brief case study of some work that was done in political activism right here in Austin.

Robert Scoble asked the question on his blog a few weeks ago, 'is there an NRA for technologists?' Is there one group that we should all just belong to? And the answer is no. But here are some of the groups doing this work.

EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. CDT is another group doing policy focused work, in Washington. They're pretty moderate and do really solid stuff. IPAC is a new political action committee focused on copyright and some broader issues. They're small and growing, and might be a great vehicle if you do want to get involved, because there is plenty of room to grow their mission. Save the Internet led the net neutrality fight this summer and fall. They recently introduced an agenda for 2007 that talks about affordable Internet access and broadens out from just the neutrality debate.

In Texas, there is the League of Technical Voters. This is great for the programmers among us. They do these things called Codethons where for 48 hours you get locked in a room and build Drupal modules for non-profits. This is a little further afield but the Open House Project is a group that is working to create transparency in the House of Representatives. A lot of the things that we're dealing with are technical issues, figuring out how to make Congress more open and engageable.

GovTrack.us is a project that a linguistics student built in his free time to track bills through Congress. It's XML-driven, and it's sort of amazing that no one had done this before. Along these lines, there's a need for someone to build a bill tracking application for technology-focused legislation, so that we don't learn about DOPA three weeks before -- we learn about it months before. I encourage someone to take that up. Free Press is working on media reform. I think you'll find that if you look into their mission, they do a lot of the work that I think are the next steps for issues that I think we're going to be interested in.

The last one is OpenID, that some people are working on in the political context. Which I think is neat -- taking a non-political technology and seeing how you can apply it to politics. There are probably other ones out there. I can't think of them yet, but you can take existing projects and port them over to politics.

Last, the case study I wanted to talk about was a group here in Austin [Save Muni Wireless] that in 2005 was fighting a bill in the Texas legislature that would ban municipal wireless networks. There was a group of about 20 or so activist/technologist types that got together and built a wiki and a blog, and just focused a whole lot of attention on this bill. Beyond that, one of the neat things that they did was not stop at building online coalitions. They went out and found people in communities who had municipal wireless networks or were thinking about building them. They brought them into the capitol to talk to legislators, to tell them how important these technologies were to their day-to-day lives.

They brought two teachers in from the small town Falfurrias, Texas, who had gotten a grant for a municipal wireless network. They brought them to the capitol and put them up against the SBC lobbyists in their suits and professionally printed materials. In the end, the bill died. They won, which was pretty cool.

That's pretty much it.