Jill Resigns

Jill Miller Zimon resigned today from working for the Plain Dealer on the Wide Open site. I can't even imagine how difficult it was for her. This was her vision.

Jean and several other people at the PD and in the blogosphere know that for almost two solid years, I’ve asked and written about and pushed issues related to integrating traditional journalism, new media, bloggers and citizen journalism - all in the name of providing better and more content for readers who consult more and different types of sources for reading news and information. Someone confirmed to me this afternoon, when I said to him, “I know there must be some folks saying, about how my efforts to integrate these groups were in vain, ‘I told her so,’” that, yes, some people are saying, “I told her so.”

She's right to see this as the future, and shouldn't let the bad planning and implementation of others dissuade her. It was a gutsy move. Unfortunately it all ended just when I thought it was really hitting its stride.

The post I had been working on concerning Wide Open was called Harmonic Convergence. You can see how we disseminate information is becoming more plastic and less bound by any single media. Print media has the most to lose from all this... thus their klutzy overreactions. Unfortunately, they have yet to realize that they also have to most to gain.

This all makes me sad. It was nice seeing people trying new ways to rise above the static.

The old rules are dead. At this point it's all about the old referees fighting to keep their jobs.

An Obfuscated Dealer

For over a month now I've been wrestling with a post about the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Wide Open blog initiative, an experiment in hiring four partisan bloggers to create an online political dialog. Today's events made things moot when they fired the Ohio political blogger that I have more respect for than any other, Jeff Coryell, aka Yellow Dog Sammy. Their reason was simple: Congressman Steven LaTourette complained about Jeff because he'd been critical of LaTourette's campaign in the past.

I was curious to see how the paper would deal with the double edged nature of hiring two bloggers which have been lauded in right wing circles for leading the charge in trying to paint our current Governor as a champion of NAMBLA. Personally, I found it to be the most disgusting smear campaign I had ever seen. To turn a difficult non vote of conscience by a trained professional and try to twist it using the basest, most pretzel-like forms of twisted faux-logic was the kind of intellectual dishonesty reserved for the archest of partisan hacks. Back when I myself was a "partisan blogger" their actions in the matter caused me to pull links to their sites; an action that pained me given how BizzyBlog had stood up for me in the past. I must confess that it did give me a certain amount of ironic joy in knowing that their actions actually helped elect Governor Strickland and Senator Brown by promoting a Republican strategic campaign completely devoid of substance or integrity.

I was wondering how the PD would deal with things when their dark craft resurfaced the next time the GOP decided to anoint an obviously empty suit. Well... today's story has instead shifted things in an entirely unexpected direction.

The right thing to do for Jeff's fellow Wide Open bloggers is to resign. The actions by the Plain Dealer have proven the exercise to be a farce. Before last years Governor's race I had a lot of respect for NixGuy and BizzyBlog, and as I like to say, it's never to late to do the right thing.

You can read more about the situation at Buckeye State Blog as well as Jeff's post here.
Here's Jeff's release on the subject:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
30 October 2007

My name is Jeff Coryell, although I have also written on political blogs under the pseudonym Yellow Dog Sammy.

Today I was terminated from my engagement as a freelance blogger at the Cleveland.com blog "Wide Open" as a direct result of intervention of Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Bainbridge Township) of the 14th Ohio Congressional District, in retaliation for my previous blogging about his re-election campaign and my financial support for two of his election opponents.

In August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer hired four Ohio political bloggers to contribute to a daily political group blog called "Wide Open," located at http://blog.cleveland.com/wideopen . In order to assure balance, two bloggers with liberal leanings were chosen, and two with conservative leanings. The other participants are Jill Miller Zimon of Writes Like She Talks ( http://www.writeslikeshetalks.com), Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog (http://www.bizzyblog.com), and Dave of Nixguy ( http://www.nixguy.com).

My participation in the project soon came to the attention of Rep. LaTourette. I had written extensively about LaTourette's 2006 re-election contest and I explicitly supported his challenger, law professor Lew Katz (D-Pepper Pike). I also wrote about what I regard as the suspicious connection between large amounts of campaign cash LaTourette received from the Ratner family of Cleveland, of the Forest City real estate empire, and their receiving an enormous contract to develop 44 acres of the Southeast Federal Center in Washington DC. LaTourette was a member of the powerful Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and Chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management, which oversees the agency that awarded the contract (the General Services Administration). That writing is at http://ohio2006elections.blogspot.com/2006/10/cong-oh-14-latourette-r-awash-with_12.html , and was picked up at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=172&topic_id=19905&mesg_id=19905. My wife and I also contributed a modest amount to Katz campaign.

I have been told by Cleveland Online Editor Jean DuBail that Rep. LaTourette complained about my involvement in "Wide Open" to Cleveland Plain Dealer Editorial Page Editor Brent Larkin. I was also informed that LaTourette brought up the matter of my participation during an interview with Cleveland Plain Dealer political reporter Sabrina Eaton, when she talked to LaTourette about the retirement of Rep. Dave Hobson (R-Springfield). LaTourette mentioned that I had contributed the sum of $100 to the campaign of LaTourette's current opponent, Bill O'Neill (D-South Russell). Eaton suggested that LaTourette raise his concerns with more senior people at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. However, as a result of that conversation, Eaton reported my contribution in her story about third quarter campaign fund-raising by various Ohio Congressional candidates.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Online Editor Jean DuBail raised the matter of LaTourette's displeasure with my participation in "Wide Open"in discussion with the four bloggers on at least two occasions. We discussed the possibility of my making a disclosure of my support for LaTourette's opponents whenever I wrote anything about LaTourette on "Wide Open."

Today Dubail called me and asked if I would agree to never write about LaTourette on "Wide Open," as a condition of my continued participation. He said that the arrangement was sought by Susan Goldberg, Editor of the Plain Dealer. When I declined to agree, after further consultation with Goldberg by DuBail, I was terminated by DuBail.

"As a political blogger, I am a partisan. My political orientation as a progressive Democrat is an integral part of what I do and is completely transparent to my readers. This is a crucial component of being a political blogger/activist, and sets us apart from journalists in the classic sense. It was understood among the four participants in "Wide Open" that we are political partisans and that we would engage in political debate from our respective political points of view."

"I am extremely disappointed that the Cleveland Plain Dealer bowed to pressure from an elected official, to the extent of attempting to limit what a freelance political blogger could write on a hosted group blog and of terminating the services of the blogger to please the offical. To me, this sad episode strikes a heavy blow at freedom of expression and the purported journalistic independence of a once proud newspaper."

My political blog is Ohio Daily Blog, at http://www.ohiodailyblog.com. I previously blogged at Ohio2006 Blog, at http://www.ohio2006blog.com . I began my began my professional life as a successful private and government attorney, and subsequently earned a Masters in Fine Art degree and pursued a second career as an artist ( http://www.jeffcoryell.com) and art teacher. I live in Cleveland Heights, Ohio with my wife and two golden retrievers.

Beyond Corruption

Lawrence Lessig is one of my heros. I returned to computers after a ten year absence when I had finally figured out a good use for them: church hymns. I had taken on a job directing a small Lutheran church choir in Stockton, California. I was quickly frustrated trying to find easy music that we could sing that matched up with the weeks Bible readings. This would be a great job for a computer program I thought... a sort of database driven digital hymnal. I quickly got to work learning as much as I could about computer databases and the maddening world of copyright law. Time and time again Professor Lessig's name came up as the one positive counter to the forces trying to pervert copyright laws in favor of corporations over people.

I was thus with great interest that I read that he was switching his efforts from copyright reform to the greater issue of political corruption. One thing worries me though... he's arguing the negative.

To me it's not enough to just fight against "corruption." There are too many shades of gray in politics. It's my money... show me how it's spent. Today there is no easy way to do that. Everything is couched in the vaguest of terms and only then during the biannual feeding frenzy that is the election cycle.

I am a process man. It's not enough to just stick a label on your lapel and show how well you can recite your party's focus group tested talking points. Until it is easy for every American to hold their representatives accountable for the trust that we've given then, we can never really trust any of them. Anyone who's ever run a business knows that your employees will steal from you. If you don't monitor what they are doing with your money you are asking for them to steal from you.

It's not just about corruption... it's about accountability. If the bottom line you hold your employees to is that they aren't stealing from you you've got one fucked up company. Well my friends... welcome to the United States of America.

Lessig on "corruption"

(via Boing Boing)

On The Radar

• Open Congress > "Congress, I'm Watching" Widget
  Cute little blog widget that lets you show what bills you're monitoring. I like the direction it's going in.


• The Fix > Dems Seek Upper Hand With Atlas Project
  Boy, I'd love to get a gander at this baby!
  

The wonderful Open House project has a post up of a video presentation by open government pioneer Carl Malamud on his Washington Bridge project given at a Google Tech Talk on May 24, 2006.

There's also a web page for the talk that includes a business plan for the venture. The idea was to provide streaming archived video of Congressional committee hearings.

I haven't been able to find anything recent about the proposed plan, however since then he has sent an unsolicited report to the Speaker of the House on streaming committee data and on August 3rd provided an update that does look promising:

... The analysis of this short-term solution by the Advanced Business Solutions unit has concluded: “from a technical stand point we now know this is very easy and inexpensive to do.”

3. As a long-term strategy, the Office of the Speaker has conducted a large number of meetings, as has the Committee on House Administration, the Chief Administrative Officer, and several other groups. There is a concrete, funded set of initiatives to finish the wiring of the rooms so that all hearings have video coverage, and it is clear from a technical point of view that it is possible to achieve the goal of broadcast-quality video for download on the Internet by the end of the 110th congress. The recommendation to adopt that goal is currently awaiting action from the Office of the Speaker and the Chairman of the Committee on House Administration.

The thing that's really interesting about the video is how the Google people (25' in) latch onto the problem that fascinates me the most: annotating real time data streams. There aren't enough hours in the day for me to listen to my collection of old time radio shows let alone watch everything that is going on in Congress. How do I make it easy for the public to collectively annotate information in real time so that it can be easily processed and reused?

It's hard as hell to annotate video and unless video is annotated it's hard as hell to leverage it with automated tools. You need to be able to make a media clip start at a specific moment rather than playing the whole thing. You need to be able to easily sync up the video and transcripts using some sort of marker. I'd like to be able to drag it onto my blog editor, and have it automatically embed the clip at that point as well as add default folksonomy. Beyond that synchronized transcripts so that I can do quick quotes. As he points out the transcripts are out there but they take months to be made available to the public if they ever are. How do we synchronize video and audio to transcripts so that people can easily quote from it?

We need tags that work against a common ontology so that everyone is working off of the same page. When I say HR1515 am I talking about Representative Harris Fawell's amendment to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the 110th's Congress' bill to amend the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 or the Georgia General Assemblies bill honoring the life of Linton Webster Eberhardt, Jr ?

Ideally websites and tools should take care of those headaches for people. For instance... if I drag a bill in Thomas onto my blog editor, it knows that that is the one I am writing about, grabs the embedded meta-data from the page, and ads it as a folksonomy tag.

A True Congressional Record

I received an email last week from Derek Willis @ the Washington Post concerning a post I did last week. He works on their Congressional Votes database and has been kind enough to let me reprint his email. First off here's what he was responding to:

If print media wanted to cement their place in 21st century information streams they would work together to provide such semantic web reporting services. The Washington Post's US Congress Votes database is a start in this direction, even if it's crude and doesn't dive below the surface of what's really going on on Capitol Hill. Maybe I'm just super cynical, but I've always felt that the votes made in Congress are just misdirection in the 3 card monty game that is public governance.

And here's Derek's email:

Chris,

Saw your posting on media and the growth of the semantic web, and I'm interested in hearing your ideas about how to improve our votes database (although I don't agree that it is crude and barely scratches the surface, given my experience as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly). If you've got some specific suggestions on ways we could make it a better service, I'm all ears.

Derek
--
Derek Willis
Database Editor
washingtonpost.com

First off, I want to apologize for coming off so snarky in talking about work that I think is really cool and obviously took a lot of effort on their part. That was wrong of me and a sin common online. The Washington Post is clearly leading the way in an area that I think is an extremely significant step in 21st century democracy. However, leading the way doesn't mean that you've completed the journey. In hind sight I could have chosen a much better way to describe something that I think is really innovated both from technology as well as media perspectives.

For me the interesting aspect of blogging is the interaction between streams of thought. Much more so that just writing in a vacuum. As such I'll confess that one of my tactics as a writer/debater is to throw off quick confrontational asides in order to provoke reactions from people. This opens up a much more dynamic discussion of issues than what one would usually see in academic circles. And so, here's why it's crude and doesn't scratch below the surface ;-)

In examining the Washington Post site I'm going to use the two criteria that I think are most significant in terms of evaluating a semantic web application: depth and plasticity.

Depth. How deep is the data? How much does the reflect that's really going on?

For example: I'm playing a gig with my band.

OK... When? Where? What band? Who's in the band? What do they sound like? These would be the minimum data dimensions that I would think needed to be provided in order for people to be able to understand what's going on. Does the online listing for that gig reflect the true depth of what's going on?

Plasticity. How flexible and reusable is the data?

With the above example the basic thing would be the event having some kind of meta-data so that visitors can easily import it into their calendars. Adding hCalendar Microformat annotations to the listing on the page is one way to do this. Then if I had the Operator extension for Firefox I could import the event to my Google calender with the click of a button. Automated spiders looking for that kind of meta-data could also add it to their listings, making it easier for other people to find out about my band.

I could go even further by offering a FOAF file for the band, listing contact information and relationships that the group has with other bands. An hCalendar annotated blog that would make it much easier for people to keep up to date with our future gigs.

The easier it is for tools to export information into other tools, the more plastic it is. Plasticity is what the semantic web is all about.

So lets do the same thing with votes in Congress.

The Washington Post US Congress Votes Database focuses on specific votes. It provides an RSS feed for each member that one can subscribe to allowing you to find out about the votes as they come in. This is a great way to keep up with what your member of Congress is doing. It lists the name and number for the bill, which way the member voted, and provides links so that you can see more voting information about the bill and even go to the Library of Congress to view the text of the bill.

As much as I love the site and think that it's very innovative and an indicator of this to come, it isn't deep, and it isn't plastic.

How is it not deep? First off there's the actors. From the database's perspective there is only one type of actors= involved with the bills in Congress: Congressmen. But we know that by the time a bill goes to the floor a lot of fingers have been putting their thumbs into the legislative pie. Lobbyists, corporations, constituents, activists, and members of other government entities all play a part in the magical journey of a bill becoming a law. If we want our information to be deep we need to have those actors classified and provide a way for link them back to the legislation.

The other primary dimension to legislation besides actors is impact. Now it's difficult to classify such dimensions as the social impact of legislation, but when you get right down to it, there's only one dimension that really defines what everyone cares about: money. In order to go deep into the impact of legislation you need to be able to easily examine its financial impact. Earmarks... effects on national debt... benefits to corporations... what it is that the money is buying... etc... these things need to be spelled out if people want to really have a deep understanding of what legislation is all about.

Now this is no small undertaking, and I am not criticizing the Washington Post in any way shape of form. I am simply saying that if we want to have a real fundamental understanding of what the legislative process is all about we need to be able to examine these dimensions.

So how do we pinpoint who the primary actors are in the legislative process? Right now it's a dark science relegated to the back alleys of our nations capitol. Who benefits... how much does it really cost... how much is it really worth; finding the answers to these questions are difficult even when you ask the people creating the laws, let alone voting on them. More often than not, those who do know would rather that you didn't, seeing this information as a privilege coming from their exalted status. Information is power, and in our age power equals capitol.

Until the time comes when we can make truly open government the standard by which our representatives operate, there are several ways that we can look under the hood and deduce who's who and what's what. The biggest clue is what happens in the committees. What are the votes? Who is testifying? What is their roll? While all of this information is theoretically available it is difficult to find and never in one place.

How is it not plastic? To truly empower citizens with the information they need in order to keep track of what their representatives are doing all public governmental information needs to be classified in a standard way so that they can analyze the information, relationships and their impact. Beyond that, there needs to be a central, easily annotated record of what's said and done in Congress. We are paying for it, but you need a high prices staff to be able to figure out what we are really paying for.

One would think that that would be the Congressional Record, but sadly, that is not the case. This brings up one of my biggest complaints against Congress. Their actions are deliberately obfuscated online. You can't just easily link to it. Everything is walled away behind temporary links that you can only get to by filling out forms, and the only way to see what it the content really is is through a PDF reproduction of the printed version. Sure, they broadcast the floor debates and a few of the committee hearings, but live video streams are the polar opposite of something that can easily be annotated. Congress makes it as difficulty as possible for people to use their words online. (The REST style of architecture is designed as a good solution to these sorts of problems. - Chris)

In order for it to be plastic, it has to be textual. The modern age is a revolution of type. There would be no Reformation or American Revolution without movable type. Being able to easily copy textual ideas is a cornerstone of modern civilization. Yet, the only simple way to get a textual representation of what is said and done in Congress is to us a private service such as LexisNexis. This gives a huge advantage to big money interests over public citizens. Even then it is a crude version, without any sort of cross referencing or annotation.

A true Congressional Record would be one that included all committee activities and was organized in such a way so that it could be easily annotated. You should be able to directly link its sections, and it shouldn't take millions of dollars to figure out what impact the words really have. With this Congressional Record a true political revolution would take place that would go beyond the trivialities of Partisan gamesmanship to true democratic empowerment of every American citizen.

Imagine a Congressional Record that was as plastic as the entries in the Wikipedia. There I can see exactly who made changes to an entry. I can create tools to figure out who are the best editors. I can hold people accountable when they try to hide something. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily diff between versions of a bill and see who took what parts out?

What are some other data dimensions that we can add to our Utopian Congressional record? The most important thing has got to be to show me the money. What is being spent on a specific piece of legislation? Who benefits by it? If they do they should be identified so that we can track their relationship to the legislation. That will include information on industry, company health, and geographic locations. Most of this can be easily garnered from other places.

In order for a data feed to be useful, it needs to be defined. This is my biggest criticism of the current Washington Post database. It uses RSS, but it doesn't use RDF. If I want to parse automatically what's going on I've got to write my own scraper and munge the numbers. The semantic web is all about eliminating the need for that step and providing annotations so that you can more easily find matching patterns of data. With that than any other tool can easily lock onto the data and have fun with it.

That means we're going to need an RDF Schema for legislative data. If we had that, then we can turn the whole Internet into a collective tool for analyzing and shaping legislation. Show me which industries in a Congressman's district benefit from legislation? Add census data to the mix so that we can compare money spent in a district to its economic health.

I could see this as being a big part of the future of media. If entities got together to work out a standard for reporting on legislation, they could collectively use that to bring value to their products. Creating hooks into data is easy. Annotating what it means is harder. That's the real value in today's media. That's what big companies are paying a lot of money for.

I could see a large part of a 21st century reporters job being to connect the semantic dots of the legislative process. They could even add their readers and others online into the mix becoming a collective swarm analysis tool. Things like that already are happening online, but just like the Washington Post site, our work is crude and we are barely scratching the surface. Still, it is amazing.