Evolving Web

Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012

Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp”, we are now nearing Kaizen Camp:  Seattle 2012. (We did have a name change, so as not to confuse us with another set of camps with the same name.)

This year, Kaizen Camp is the July 24-25. Again we are at the beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture. We also have award-winning food trucks (with vegetarian options) catering the event. So, no boring food! The event is nearly half full already, with attendees from software, government, health care, manufacturing, education, and more.

The diversity of ideas and voices are unparalleled – which is exactly what we were searching for. Lean ideals and principles will be discussed. People share success stories as well as challenges. Different disciplines work together to create new ideas. Continuous Improvement is explored.

Last year we were blessed with great conversation, learning, food, and near gender parity. This year looks even better.

What to expect

1. Great sessions
2. Conversations with other smart people
3. Learning about what is working
4. Strategizing about sticky problems
5. Learning ways to create better working environments, systems, processes, and policies

What you will be spared

1. Boring speakers
2. Bad boxed lunches
3. The inability to speak
4. Canned presentations
5. Sales pitches from consultants pretending to be speakers

See you there!

Whitepaper: Enterprise Mashups Change Everything

Tonianne and I just completed a new whitepaper as part of our association with Hinchcliffe and Company. Profitability, Predictability and Performance through Enterprise Mashups is now available for download.

JackBe’s Chris Warner wrote about our EMML whitepaper on the JackBe blog.  In his post, Chris addresses one of the whitepaper's central points - that businesses today need the ability to rapidly respond to major changes within the business context. 

He quotes this section of the whitepaper:

"However, discussing such typical uses for mashups might be missing the point. The mashup's strength lies in discovering the atypical, in exploiting data in new ways. The fact is, any information your business needs can be analyzed with a mashup, often more quickly, with minimal effort, and at much lower expense than hiring consultants or using traditional and more time-consuming SOA approaches to do the same work. Rapid experimentation with data leads to invention."

And then he adds:

“In short, every specific enterprise mashup example misses the [perhaps more important] point that enterprise mashups are good for whatever use the users find. Mashups are genuinely applicable to areas as diverse as situation intelligence, real-time business intelligence, classic decision-support, and lightweight application integration, to name a few. Every day we get more great uses and examples from our partners, our customers, and our mashup developer community members. And I am sure we haven’t even begun to cover all the possibilities.”

You see, we are creating data at an exponential rate. This unprecedented growth is accompanied by the consumer's assumption that products will constantly improve and evolve. Time to market for new products and features has been greatly reduced. This data can be combined and analyzed (via mashups). As data becomes more accessible, products to create the mashups have become easier to use.

Increasingly, anyone can create sophisticated business intelligence, an act previously reserved for highly trained business analysts. In the end, mashups represent a fundamental shift in the way we can create value and test hypotheses. Enterprise mashups take this one step further by creating predictable datasets and useable interfaces.

Download the whitepaper and keep the conversation going.

Vision Makes Policy – Collaboration in the Obama Administration

During the Clinton Administration, I had the good fortune to be a certified National ITS Architecture expert.  That meant I could travel around and help local, state and regional governments build their regional Intelligent Transportation Systems architectures.  At the center of this was a cooperative element: regions needed a cooperative regional architecture that had at least a modicum of information sharing in order to get federal ITS dollars.

It worked like a charm.  I saw regions that previously and pervasively were at each others’ throats come together to create partnerships.  When the Clintonian soft-fuzzy handcuffs were taken away by the subsequent administration, many of these partnerships predictably fell apart.

Why? Because it’s hard to collaborate in a combative environment.

Policy, in corporations or business, isn’t a neutered word.  Vision, policy, and culture are often as easy as stating an intent and then putting some good rules behind it.

For Clinton, it was to make money contingent on good regional collaborative governance.

For the Obama administration, it is transparency, collaboration and participation.  The stimulus package has ample hooks in it to support these goals. 

The Obama Transparency and Open Government memo defines the benefits as:

Transparency: Promotes Accountability

Participatory: Improves effectiveness and decision making

Collaborative: Engages the general public in public sector work

I will add a few outcomes I can see here:

Introspection: Government and the public will become less hostile because information and respect is now a currency.

Cost Cutting: Procurement inefficiencies, poorly understood value streams and duplication of effort will become much more visible and less tolerated.

Grumbling, Bitching and Contention: Yay! When you discuss some things they can really annoy you.  Government is huge and it does a whole lot.  If you think you are annoyed at some of the policies of the company you work for … well, this is going to be like working for 30,000 companies simultaneously.  Prepare to have an opinion and for others to have one too.  In short, it’s politics!

Does Grumbling negate Introspection?  Nope.

Collaboration isn’t easy, especially in a political world with hundreds of years of historic drama.  We are bringing in as many people as want to participate, many of whom have felt disenfranchised, have agendas of their own, and are generally undereducated about what they are complaining about. 

There will be growing pains. 

Today’s communications technology gives us a new and unique ability to have an actual participatory democracy.  Recent advances have led people to gravitate to camps of like-minded individuals, creating camps of group think and spin-up.  This is natural.

Government 2.0 initiatives could well be the place where people of differing opinions can come and have good and vital conversations.  Whether Government 2.0 sites will have the savvy community management to foster productive conversation remains to be seen.

Technorati Tags: Government,Government 2.0,transparency,collaboration,participatory government,obama,clinton,intelligent transportation systems

The Significance of Music in Second Life

co-written with Johnvon

Music has always been a social art form, created and enjoyed by people in groups. Some argue that music was one of the primary means by which early groups of humans communicated and maintained the social bonds that held their communities together.

Since the invention of music recording however, about a century ago, technological developments have made the experience of music a more and more private activity. Once music could be purchased for listening at home, the possibility of enjoying music in private by yourself became a more and more popular alternative to attending performances. This has led to our current iPod era, where the most iconic image of a music listener is of a solitary individual dancing with mp3 player and earphones attached, rather than the more social concert or club audiences of earlier periods.

More recently, networking and new online media technologies have reversed this trend to some extent, giving us new ways to form communities around music. Napster showed us all how badly we want to share our music, and in spite of the dogged resistance of the 'mainstream' music industry, technologies for sharing music and other media online continue to grow in sophistication.

Most recently, virtual world environments such as Second Life have introduced a significant new development, creating a virtual 3d space in which groups of fans can listen to and experience music together in real-time. Of course virtual reality tech like this has been around since the early 90s, but the last couple years mark the first time that they have been easily accessible by a large simultaneous user base.

We anticipate that virtual world technologies are likely to have a major impact on the world of music in the near future. We will focus on Second Life here as it currently has the most sophisticated in-world music scene.

Sharing the Experience of Music

People want to share music. This doesn't only mean passing mp3 files back and forth, it means sharing the experience of music. It means sharing feelings about it, sharing opinions and reactions, and talking about it in real time. For example, we all spent time as teenagers lying on the floor listening to new music and talking about it, and for many of us our musical tastes were one of the main ways we identified with our friends.

While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene, they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one's own recent music purchases or of a live concert.

The Internet, the Web and related networking technologies have brought great change to the music world in the past decade, from mp3 music distribution to the profusion of indie bands and producers promoting themselves on a MySpace page or through their own websites.

Last.fm is a great example of how Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, folksonomies, ratings and recommendations from users with similar tastes can be used to help listeners find new music they will enjoy.

However, although Last.fm bills itself as the 'social music revolution' and tries its best to connect you with other listeners, even going so far as to show you a page of images of other users whose tastes are similar to your own...

...yet just seeing some names of people who like the same music you do is not the same thing as actually being with them and hearing the music together. The 2d asynchronous nature of the Web does not allow for this level of interaction with others. Until now none of these online technologies could replicate the experience of going to see and hear a live musical performance in the company of other listeners.

Second Life provides an interesting and exciting extension to this. Through avatars, users can seek out not only social experiences to listen to new music in a shared context, but they can also search worldwide for the musical subculture that best meets their tastes. A Second Life user can experience a live performance from their dorm room in Ames, Iowa while the performer may be in Berlin and other listeners/clubgoers scattered around the world.

While the user's avatar is dancing, the user can be speaking to fellow attendees from all over the world. Casual conversations can easily happen, even more easily than they could in a real life club.

Add to this one very un-real element of Second Life -- distance is never a barrier. Users can teleport from one club to another merely by using the search utility, finding another club with music they like, and clicking the teleport button. The barrier of time and space is utterly nullified. The only barrier to leaving would be social.

But, regardless of where the user ends up, she'll be there with other people. They will experience the music at the same time, they will "share" the experience of the music in the truest sense of the word.

Are We Not (walk)Men?   No!

Until the advent of Second Life and similar virtual world technologies, the Internet had really only extended pre-existing trends towards music listening as an asocial private activity. As with iPods and the Walkmen before them, listening to music online has been largely a solo activity so far. The iPod advertisements were somewhat foreboding in this respect, the individual reduced to lone dancing silhouette -- action without social interaction. In so many situations, we listen alone.

However, Second Life is re-creating music online as a truly social event. The music played live and streamed through Second Life is simultaneously experienced by those gathered. This is a fundamental shift -- with Second Life broadcast media and experiential media coalesce.

In Second Life, individuals gather to listen to live music and DJ mixes from unknowns and mega-stars -- all from their own homes. Clubs in Second Life are often hosts for after-hours parties. After clubbing in their home cities, people will log in to Second Life to wind down before bed, visiting their favorite virtual clubs and seeing their SL friends. As an artist is performing, so is the audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.

Impact

Stay Tuned

In upcoming days Johnvon and I will examine Second Life and Music more closely. Articles will include:

• Culture, Networking and Music
• Monetization and Sales of Music heard in Second Life
• The flow of music from real life to second life and back again
• Music Production in Second Life
• Leveraging of External Networks in Second Life

Technorati Tags: second life, music, lastfm, social networking, social media, monetization, broadcast media, experiential media

Communities Do Not Live Alone

 Historically, US Foreign policy has been chaotic.  Why?  Ask Kevin Rose.

Yesterday, the HD-DVD decryption code was hacked and someone posted it in a blog.  Where would one expect that to show up first?  Did you say Digg?  Well of course you did!

That's where it ended up.  Kevin Rose and the Digg crew received a cease and desist.  So the Digg crew started to cease and desist.  They removed dugg stories and those that linked to them.

They told people to knock it off.  When they didn't knock it off, people were suspended.  This was the diplomatic response to external pressure.  It was Digg's foreign policy.

Why?  Because communities do not live alone.  And communities often have different desires than their leaders.  The Digg community of people who would care about this code live inside Digg.  There are other communities in Digg that don't care about the code.  Digg lives inside other communities.  The social media community.  The startup community.  The Web 2.0 community.  The VC-funded community.  The corporate community.  The legal community.  And on and on and on.

Digg initially tried to respond to the outside pressure.  But then digg users went crazy and dugg a jillion stories with the code in it.  Soon nearly everything on Digg had the code.  What's a Digg to do?

They had to give in to the internal demands and change their foreign policy. 

The Digg users are a democratic organization at best, a mob at worst.  But like The Moral Majority, the NRA, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, NARAL or any other democratic mob - they knew the way to get their agenda on the table was to take direct action.

Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and the rest of the Digg crew responded to protect the community from an outside threat.  The community on the inside rapidly responded that curtailing freedom in its defense was unacceptable.

In the end, the Digg crew stopped deleting stories.  They stopped searching and destroying offending posts.  And threw up this internal community white flag:

... after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Commentary on the cease and desist order may come later from me, but right now, I'm once again fascinated by the parallels of on-line communities to other human communities.  How we act and react.  How governments and citizenry debate.  How policy is generated.

"Yeah great," Kevin Rose is thinking, "meanwhile I'm the guy that has to pay the lawyers..."

 

Technorati tags: digg, kevin rose, emergent democracy, foreign policy, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Blogged at the Interbay Starbucks in Seattle Using Windows Live Writer

Don't Blog Stupid

I have a long standing rule never to blog angry.  "Don't Blog Angry" is a topic I've written about in this blog and others - and have led discussion at conferences as well.

Don't blog angry seemed to be enough.

Now I see I need to add "Don't Blog Stupid" to my list (now grown to two).

Last Month, Kathy Sierra was horribly mistreated by some people with very puerile senses of humor.  It very much upset the entire blogging community.  In response to this, the blogosphere has begun to draft a Blogging Code of Conduct. 

I'm not quite as annoyed by this as others, I see this as a community (or uber-community) taking the time to lay out some fundamental community values.

There are six major values:

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

2. We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.

3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.

6. We ignore the trolls.

These are great as they are.  But these are writers and bloggers and they can't stop.  So the embellish with statements like:

We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it.

We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others

These bullet points are vague concepts masquerading as concrete statements.  Absolutely everyone in blogging knows that copyright and trademark infringement is an utterly gray area.

This is also highly focused on comments.  Perhaps this whole event should signal the need to lose the blogging "comments" format and push for blogging tools that allow actual meme tracking and multi-site discussion.

I vote for keeping the 6 tenets of blogging above and to lose, quickly, the "supporting" text.   Or, of course, to just lump them all under "Don't Blog Stupid."

 

Technorati tags: bloggers code of conduct, tim o'reilly, kathy sierra, blogging

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

The Social Life of Small Virtual Spaces

In the early 90s, I was working as a regional planner for Metro - the regional government in Portland, Oregon.  We were creating the Region 2040 plan, which was very exciting work.  I recall one day I was working with my boss John Fregonese and I was telling him how I almost got a ticket the previous night for jaywalking.  I said, "I think jaywalking is great."  He agreed vehemently.  And we proceeded to go on a 20 minute mutual rant about why everything we were doing culminated in jaywalking as a public good.

You see, we were trying to do things like reduce street widths, mandate on-street parking and do other things that facilitated cars, but made them part of the environment and not the elements that controlled it.   Thinner streets, slower cars, more controlled intersections, less surface parking lots, all made it easier to walk.  Easier to walk is easier to cross the street.  That's jaywalking.

In the 1960s, William H. Whyte and his band of "hippie" students went out into the New York streets and used time lapse photography to study how people used the urban outdoors.  Why were some plazas heavily used while others were not?  It often appeared counter-intuitive, some beautiful courtyards were utterly unused while other plain or ugly ones were used heavily.

They found many elements that induced use - but the major one was ... people.  People beget people.  We are herding animals.

On the plains, you'd see ruts cut in the grasses that showed where others had gone before.  In your grade school library you could tell the popular books because they were all beat up.  In Whyte's popular gathering places there were people present.  These are visual cues to usage. 

On a web site or in a computer program, we have few cues as to the popular destinations or usage patterns.  We have cues as to how the designers want you to use the software, but we can't see the direction of the swarm.  We are all numb bees.

For the consumption of information or culture, we have all sorts of trailblazing or wayfinding tools now.  Digg, del.icio.us, and my god it is a long list.  But all these tools requires self-reporting which doesn't come naturally to many people.  And they don't tell the whole story. 

Web site owners have plenty of stats as to where people go on their sites.  But we find that we lack some key information (or at least have to really dig to get it).  We don't know why they show up, if it was an accident, if they had a good time, if they (the particular they) will come back, what will stop them from coming back, etc.

In my wondering about wayfinding on the net, I also wonder about destinations.  How do we record our movements, our trailblazing?  How do we provide visual cues to the rest of the swarm when we find something good?

Technorati tags: William H Whyte, Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, jaywalking, urban form, urban planning, social software, wayfinding

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Who is Responsible for Your Protection?

Mark Goldberg is petitioning to allow Telus and other ISPs to block illegal hate content.

His first example is very extreme.  Involving direct threats of murder and terrorism.  A clear and obvious case.

Over the years, I have fought for the passage of various hate crimes laws in the US.  I have been mildly, but measurably, victimized by hate groups in the past and know others who have spent time in the hospital after run-ins with such groups.

But telling an ISP to "block hate" might be starting down a slippery slope.

Mark Evans says:

I agree with Jon (Arnold) that ISPs (carriers, cablecos and re-sellers) and governments have a responsibility to block content that is clearly illegal.

Blocking hate is like blocking spam or winning a war against terrorism.  Distributed systems are extremely difficult to fully stop and in doing so, you inevitably give up freedoms.  In this case, you'd give up the freedom to go to non-hate sites that were mistakenly blocked.  Similar to good emails that end up in your spambox or honest citizens detained in jail.

I have no problem with adding a hate filter to your Virus Scanner.  Make it a service.  But Telus or other ISPs are in for future legal battles when the loose concept of "Hate" is suddenly transferred to them to define.  Plus, in this case, the Canadians require the ISP to approach the government and ask permission.  The Canadian government is not known for its dexterity any more than the US Government is.  So blocking hate will always lag way, way behind the hate itself.

In addition, there are many ways to thwart that ISP-based filtering. 

ISP based content filtering is onerous, gives ISPs too much power, and shifts the responsibility ultimately to entities that are not built to support it.

Photo by: I don't think I want to know.

Technorati Tags: telus, net neutrality, hate, hate crimes, neonazis, canada, canadians, government, telcos

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Mind Map 4: My Relationship with Community

Prologue

I had a curious experience last night.  I went to a party at my friend Jon Ramer's house and I had a lot on my mind.  Everyone at the party was well acquainted with each other and I was well acquainted with my wife.  So I was keeping my wife company and working out a lot of things in my head and not really integrating with the party.

But most things with Jon are about community.  His parties are no different.  His new house has a bizarre little quirk - a viewport from a landing which serves nicely as an impromptu stage.  Now, it is safe to say that Jon is a "save the world" type.  So everyone was invited to stand at the little stage and talk about how they might, in some little way, "Save the World."

It's been years since I've been consciously trying to save the world.

So I was musing about my days with The Names Project and wishing that I could talk about that as part of my present.  But, in the end, I got up and gave an impromptu story about being with the NAMES Project.  It was well outside where my headspace was about 10 minutes before that, and my delivery showed.  But the thing that was interesting was the NAMES Project story opened a rapidly developing map where I asked myself "Well, how did I get here?"

And it was oddly coherent.

"As The Days Go By" or "My Relationship with Community".

Make No Small Plans (or Posts)

Depending on who you ask, either Daniel Burnham or Niccolo Machiavelli said

"Make no small plans: They have no magic to   stir men's blood, and probably themselves will not be realized.  Make big   plans; Aim high in hope, and work,  remembering that a noble, logical diagram   once located will not die."

This week's mind map is about how we as a society have been reduced to small, shortsighted plans.  I am breaking from tradition to talk about politics - or at least the structure of current American politics.  I believe that our current system is unsustainable and is structurally flawed.  That this system leads to such small and shortsighted plans. And that we, as a community or a group of communities reflect this dynamic in our lack of commitment, direction and vision.

Big Brother is Big Business

All businesses have, or should have mission statements.  Mission statements help orient the activities of the business by providing an easy-to-grasp micro-vision of what the organization stands for.  The two political parties in the US are no different. 

As an organization grows, the ability to boil down the organization's ethic into a single sentence or paragraph becomes more and more difficult.  As a result, they become more and more vague.  For example, here is the Procter & Gamble mission statement:

We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers. As a result,consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit, and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders, and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.

Too vague.  So the P&G mission page augments the mission statement with thirteen (13) bullet lists of additional values and principles.

So too is it for the two political parties.  Their vague missions have become so difficult to define that neither party even attempts to do so.  Neither party's web site has any type of mission statement.  Both pick a few (about 10) issues to discuss on the sites and both include the party platform (See PR below) to serve as proxies for what they might stand for. 

These mission statements / issue statements are carefully crafted on both sites to balance the other party.  Never being too far away from what the other party believes, but far enough to bicker about it.  This is key to a duopoly.  In the US, we take pride in our freely elected governing bodies.  These bodies are justified by the concept of choice.  We choose to elect certain individuals.  So if either party became too powerful or, conversely, died, we would have a political monopoly - which would destroy our choice.  So both parties rely heavily on the existence of their loyal opposition.

Given that the first duty of any organism is to survive, the parties have naturally become bound to a dysfunctional but supportive marital relationship.  And this fragile ecosystem has worked fairly well for 200 years, but has experienced entropy.  As information flows more freely, as people become inured to scandal, as the vision of particular elected officials becomes shorter and shorter, the long term sustainability of this ecosystem is being damaged.  As it is damaged, the quality of governance we receive declines.

As these forces work, we see the loyalty of elected officials being governed more and more by the parties themselves.  We see increasingly more party-line votes every year, meaning we are seeing less free thinking, compromise, or thoughtful decision making.  Given that the parties overall self-concepts are so vague as to not be able to engender even a mission statement, it seems unlikely that all party members would be inclined to vote party line with such frequency.  This is a strong indicator that electeds are voting not with their conscience but via fiat.

The system itself sustains this behavior.  You can't "get things done" in Washington without playing within the system.  Getting things done equates to keeping your job and power - sustaining the system becomes the same as sustaining yourself.  Ideology still plays a part.  Both sides of the isle have genuine disdain for the other party - like Yankees fans have disdain for Red Sox fans.  They have ideological elements to point to.  "I can't lose my seat and let them take X away from Y."  But, in the end, X and Y are about 1/1,000,000th of the daily activities of the government.  The electeds themselves become blinded by their self-created wedge issues.

Protecting the increasingly conceptual America, then becomes protecting them from the other party's vision of proper governance of these 9 or 10 wedge issues important enough to make it to the parties' web sites.  And thus, less than a dozen issues end up framing our entire political debate while we all ignore everything else the government should be doing and what we should be doing to support our society.

Talkin' 'bout Public Relations

The age of PR is rapidly dying and PR people are rushing to keep up.  Blogging and democratized conversation tools, and both political parties have shown signs of utter chaos in the wake.

When you have a diffused product, you sell it by creating a PR or advertising campaign that surgically selects certain elements that you can focus on.  Tide is great at making your clothes cleaner and really difficult to remove from your waste water at the treatment plant.  So ads are going to focus on clean clothes and not even hint at toxicity.

The political parties can only sell their product by having a focal point.  But politics does not clean your clothes.  We are now all predisposed to distrust the personalities involved.  So, they cannot really focus too much on their solutions.  The 9 or 10 issues are so complicated that no one is going to trust or be satisfied with a specific solution set. 

Therefore, we are left with negative campaigning.  "My opponent is 27% less trustworthy than I am!"

Then end result of this is disenfranchisement of the intelligent electorate and a stronger push to voting party line.  The people, as you move forward, matter less and less.  They are automatons that have a (D) or (R) next to them.

If it's assumed that most of the people who still participate at the voting booth are voting for your parenthetical and not for you, you are more likely to "play to your base".  Which means your speeches are geared not to what you might think as a thoughtful person, but to what your party has told you is important to say.

You are to stay on-message. The "party-line" as it were.   Ape the party platform.  A platform designed to carefully differentiate the parties, not to allow thoughtful governance.

Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail

The current system guarantees that long term planning will always suffer for short term gain.  Political expediency is now paramount because no one (elected or otherwise) has a level of comfort that would come with a long-term vision.

This directionless movement means that our infrastructure, both social and capital, is planned and maintained via expediency.  The 800 pound gorilla in our public systems is that we don't maintain anything.  Government money is spent almost entirely on construction projects.  This is why we have new highways and decaying bridges.

It is not politically attractive to fix something that's already there.  It is politically attractive to build new things that people will admire.

Our elected officials need the steroid injections of highly visible public works projects or, conversely, of killing projects elsewhere and crowing over the reduction of "porkbarrel projects".  The game is to improve areas under your party's control and remove projects from the other side.  The vision is not to make a better or safer country - even if such rhetoric is used to support projects in your area.

Spending is an obvious outgrowth of this.  We are spending at an uncontrollable rate.  We have gone from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the largest debtor nation in 4 short years.  The fact that we've done this while the party largely considered to be fiscally conservative controls all three branches of government is a strong indication that spending is not a party issue - it's a control issue.

The best way in a two party system to control spending is to have control of the branches split between the parties so their in-fighting will keep the country from over-spending.  Note that this isn't saying the planning will be better, it just inhibits them from getting into too much trouble.

Divide and Conquer

No genius is required to realize that when people feel disenfranchised they are less likely to take part in their community.  We've managed to help out voter disenfranchisement through bad urban design and a host of other short-term plans, certainly, but the party system can be seen on its own.

When 9 or 10 issues are all that divide us, but they divide us so vehemently, cooperation and community are difficult to achieve.  We fall to more and more narrowly defined notions of community and blame the wider issues on people not in our narrowly defined communities.

We begin to believe that community = homogeneity.  That groups we belong to must conform to our every mindset.  Even though we know this isn't possible or even desirable.  But we've been told that these issues are so important and that others who think differently are so evil that we become scared of conversation, debate or human contact.

Conclusion

Community is ultimately divided, confused and diffused by these activities.  And the worst of it, this is not a system with a purpose.  While it's obvious what's going on, no one feels empowered to stop it.  Not the President of United States or the Leaders of the two parties.  This situation is a natural outgrowth of a system based on two parties that have no competition.  The sad fact is there may be nothing to stop these ill effects from happening.

Except ... more political parties.

technorati tags:mindmap, politics, twopartysystem, democrats, republicans, community, community_indicators

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