Below are two interviews from last August–one video, one audio–during the middle of the Democratic nomination race. I think they provide a great primer on who this guy is.

I followed Biden really closely this year. I don’t agree with him on everything, but what I found great about him was his critical mind and his willingness to tell us things we don’t want to hear (especially regarding Iraq and health care). Because of this, he was the only candidate I contributed money to.

BUT…these are critical interviews that ask pointed questions about Biden’s experience and views. That is, I’m not simply peddling pro-Biden propaganda. If you want to be an informed voter, give these a look/listen:

On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Joe Biden (will open a page with a dedicated audio player)

1. Early on, I said my big concern was avoiding the legal landmines that forbid the federal government from accepting free work. Tom Bruce at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute felt my pain and connected me with some former government IT acquisition executives. They have been incredibly helpful, making light of technicalities that would have taken me months to discover on my own. The gist of what they’ve told me:

• The federal government is loathe to accept products for free, unless they are also offered to everyone else for free.
• Charging the government $1 for a service or product is better than giving it away; that means the buyer and seller have agreed on a price, a point that may not be disputed in the future.
• You cannot attach for-profit maintenance/service agreements to a low-cost sale or giveaway. That’s rightly seen as non-competitive.
• Educational institutions are great vehicles for ideas like this one. They are funded outside the government and have the public interest at heart. When working with such an organization, government buyers can be confident that the sellers do not have any plans to make a mint off of taxpayer dollars.

Finally, and most importantly:

• Almost all federal acquisitions have to be competitive. In *most* cases, it would be illegal for an agency to go directly to an organization, non-profit or otherwise, and retain their volunteer software development services. Instead, that agency must go the usual route of requesting bids from the rest of the industry; if the volunteer organization’s bid wins, only then could they proceed.

Ah, but I said *most* cases. The exception is the infamous sole source, aka no-bid, contract. (Disclosure: I was awarded a sole source contract in 2006. It wasn’t dirty, though. Promise. In fact, any sole source contract that awards little or no money should not draw suspicion. Sole source contracts appear to be the only means for achieving the Open Source for Government goal. Is this means an honorable one? I think so, as we would be working for free. But I’m open to dissenting opinions.)

So, when is a sole source contract justifiable? There are seven circumstances, all outlined here under section (c). Of particular interest to me were 1 (”the property or services needed by the agency are available from only one responsible source”), 2b (”to establish or maintain an essential engineering, research, or development capability to be provided by an educational or other nonprofit institution”) and 7a (”the head of the agency determines that it is necessary in the public interest to use procedures other than competitive procedures in the particular procurement concerned”).

Our charge is clear: to identify government buyers who think our model can achieve things the current model cannot, who like our price (not hard), and who think our organization will benefit the public good.

Keep in mind that this applies only at the federal level; states’ policies could be identical or the complete opposite. Because of that, I am keen to identify states with looser acquisition policies, as they’d be ideal early adopters.

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2. A few weeks ago, I attended the inaugural BarCampMil in DC, a sort of one-day expo for tech tools with defense and humanitarian applications. While there, I found this juicy nugget buried in the House Armed Services Committee’s report on the 2009 defense bill:

The committee is concerned by the rising costs and decreasing security associated with software development for information technology (IT) systems. These rising costs are linked to the increasing complexity of software, which has also resulted in increasing numbers of system vulnerabilities that might be exploited by malicious hackers and potential adversaries…

Open source software (OSS)…provides greater rigor in the software development process by making it available to a diverse community of programmers for review, testing, and improvement. The Linux operation system and Internet Protocol internet addressing system are examples of high quality products developed within the business sector using the OSS standard.

The committee encourages the Department to rely more broadly on OSS and establish it as a standard for intra-Department software development…The committee believes…the wide-spread implementation of an OSS standard will not only lead to more secure software, but will also foster broader competition by minimizing traditional constraints imposed by an over-reliance on proprietary software systems.

This made me beam. This is as close as we could get to a government body saying, “Open source software developers deserve sole source contracts, because they can do things the current model cannot.” Within the government, the notion persists that openly visible code is inherently more vulnerable. Having a House committee on our side will do wonders to help us dispel this myth and win those sole source contracts.

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3. In case you missed it, Dave Witzel hosted an online interview with me a few weeks ago. Most of it focused on the open source project.

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4. I came across an editorial in the Times on Sunday, blasting the government’s effort to fix the terrorist watch list. Railhead, as the reform project is called, has cost the government $500 million. And yet the resulting product cannot perform basic searches. (There’s more information, including a link to the House reports, here.)

Downright shameful. It’s time for a better model.

This means it was published in the resulting book (Amazon) along with essays from Clay, Doug, Aaron, Susan, Esther, Yochai…quite a group.

If I had it to do over again, I would have summed up my chapter like this:

Despite being one of the top physics minds of his generation, Richard Feynman once admitted in a lecture that “nobody really ‘understands’ quantum physics.” The world has had the Web for 16 years, and I think I can safely say that nobody really understands it, either. Even when we think we do, we wake up the next morning and it surprises us with something new. But we’re ready to propose Constitutional changes based on our elementary knowledge of it? Such changes would become obsolescent as quickly as the Web churns out new surprises. So let’s not get too eager to cure our net anxieties. Instead, let’s prepare our government to face all tech revolutions, not just the current one.

A few months ago, I was watching the New Hampshire Republican debate. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee got into an argument when Huckabee accused Romney of not supporting the surge:

MR. ROMNEY: Number two — number two, I did support the surge. On the same day the president announced the surge, I also…laid out my plan that I thought made sense — actually, even before the president’s speech — calling for additional troops; I called for a different number. So I also supported the surge from the very beginning.

But look, I — you know, Governor

MR. HUCKABEE: I’m way over.

MR. ROMNEY: Don’t try and characterize my position. Of course, this war has

MR. HUCKABEE: Which one? (Scattered laughter.)

MR. ROMNEY: You know — you know, we’re wise to talk about policies and not to make personal attacks.

MR. HUCKABEE: Well, it’s not a personal attack, Mitt, because you also supported a timed withdrawal. And Senator Pryor, from my state

MR. ROMNEY: No, that’s

MR. HUCKABEE: — was praising you for that, and

MR. ROMNEY: I do not — I do not support and have never support a timed withdrawal. So that’s wrong, Governor.

When the dust settled, Charlie Gibson just went on to the next topic, leaving every viewer wondering, “Well, what’s the truth?” The two candidates had made completely opposite claims about a historical event, and the journalist moderator made no effort to explain the contradiction or call out either candidate for being untruthful.

What good are these debates, I thought, if all they do is confuse voters while giving each candidate free air time for their own rhetoric?

On TV, it’s easy for a speaker to slip something past you if you’re not paying close attention. There needs to be a way for people to watch these debates through a filter that gives context to politicians’ words. This is what inspired Speechology. This need for context is even more important for campaign advertisements, which, along with liberal use of sound bites, add dramatic music and voiceovers to boot, making it easy to convince people without even saying anything factual.

I brought Dan on because I had no hope of doing it by myself. He’s even busier than I am, so it’s astonishing that he was able to bust out both the code and the design so quickly, and for free.

Well, almost free. Thanks to Micah Sifry, we got a mini-grant from the Sunlight Foundation. Without that validation of our idea, we never would have had the energy to carry it forward. So thanks, Sunlight!

Speechology.org. Check it out.

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“Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, `What are you going to do about the farm question?’ And he knows right away – bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. `What are you going to do about the farm problem?’ `Well, I don’t know. I used to be a general, and I don’t know anything about farming. But it seems to me to be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can’t tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I’ll try to use…’

“Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It’s never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around.”

This is how Richard Feynman explained modern politicking in a 1969 lecture. I often quote this passage, because I think it describes our ideal candidate: someone who puts time into making decisions, who gathers facts before doing so, who doesn’t make false promises in exchange for votes.

That’s why I was excited to see Larry Lessig consider a Congressional bid. But my first reaction wasn’t positive: Is that really the best place for him? He wouldn’t really fit in, and his ideas would fall on deaf ears. Eventually, I got it: not fitting in is exactly the point. The most fundamental way to change Congress is to populate it with a new breed. While Lessig would have been very lonely during his first term, his run would have inspired others among us to do the same, and slowly, the tide would turn.

Lessig decided not to run; thankfully, it was not because he felt Congress was the wrong place for him. I believe that it is, and that his decision not to run makes him an even better fit for the job. Congress needs more people who think about running and decide against it. Such a person is ambitious and passionate, but also humble. Such a person thinks things through and makes prudent decisions, without regard for celebrity or public perception.

If I were to suggest a more long-term goal for Lessig’s new Change Congress campaign, it would be to transform the public’s idea of what constitutes a good public leader: I would replace charisma with gravitas, expedience with prudence, celebrity with humility. I’ve noticed the latter qualities in many of the people I work around—many of them have scientific backgrounds and cannot avoid making wise decisions in spite of themselves. I know it would be hard for them to leave their research-grounded jobs in hard science for the daily life of a politician, and even harder for the average voter to become acquainted with their style. So I’m not expecting this to happen soon. But if we’ve quintupled the number of scientists in Congress by 2016 (there are currently four), I think we’ll be on our way.

She didn’t like the Intelligence Community’s work, and in her eyes, the longer I stayed, the more it would corrupt me. I’ve always thought of it in reverse: the longer I stayed involved, the more opportunities I would have to change it. Afterall, if you want something to get better, should you entrust the job to those who caused the problem in the first place? Or should you take care of the problem yourself? To me, it’s a pretty simple question. (That’s why I still work with the Intelligence Community as an outside consultant.)

Unfortunately, among my colleagues—fellow politicos and geeks who are trying to reform the U.S. Government—my mentor’s philosophy seems to be more popular than mine. It’s a philosophy that won’t get us very far. By not engaging our government directly, and instead choosing to merely blog about it from afar, we are surrendering the most important, most influential roles to the very people we want to get rid of.

Our community of would-be reformers consists of bloggers, Web developers, engineers, activists, philanthropists and writers. We believe in things like government transparency, election reform, and weakening the influence of lobbyists and campaign donors. And we are using technology to help make these things happen. The Internet has given humans an unprecedented potential to influence our government. Partly because of the independent, libertarian spirit of the Web, and partly because this community is by and large ashamed of the last eight years, we see our work as challenging the establishment.

Perhaps that is why so much of our work is about influencing that establishment in a bottom-up, grassroots fashion. We are preoccupied with outside action—blogging, fundraising, flash protesting, and building Web sites that get the public to collaboratively fight government opacity—as a means of changing what we don’t like about DC. There are some notable exceptions: John Wonderlich’s Open House Project is connecting House members with information architects to create a more transparent, coder-friendly Congress. But for the most part, we are doing little to change the government from the inside out.

Recently, I’ve seen two glaring examples of my mentor’s philosophy taking hold:

1: I attended David Isenberg’s Freedom2Connect conference. An early session on “Politics, Democracy and the Internet” focused on how those of us in the room—engineers, developers, writers, and advocates—could use our skills to reform politics. Most of the discussion was about getting politicians to endorse network neutrality, make their schedules transparent, etc. Everything was fine for me until Donna Edwards, a panelist and, come November, a likely rookie Congresswoman, offered advice on building a government we can trust. A commenter from the audience corrected her: We should suspect our government, NEVER trust them.

The conversation turned to Barack Obama’s Google for Government initiative, a concept for a Web-based clearinghouse of government contracting information. It is an honest attempt to make the contracting process more transparent, and those of us in the auditorium were perfectly suited to help make it successful. But while the panelists discussed it, the audience carried on their own conversation via a simultaneous chat room, where one guest suggested that any DC-born government transparency effort was just a ploy to cull citizens’ private data: “Google government = the NSA logging our data forever?” he quipped.

While probably a joke, it was nonetheless a joke rooted in a mindset: our mission is to fight government, not improve it. This attitude is not constructive. It shows not only an unwillingness to cooperate with the government, but a refusal to even take seriously the government’s own reform efforts.

The session ended without anyone mentioning government service, which is just as much my fault as everyone else’s. I left with the sense that many of my colleagues are not about to start helping their government.

2: After the conference, I ran into a Dave Winer article called What if our political process became conscious?. One passage struck me:

I’m not expecting very much from people who live “Inside the Beltway.” I don’t live there, never have, don’t even like visiting the place. To me it’s much like the arrogance of Silicon Valley. You can’t pop out every four years get us to vote for you and then go back into your nest. Politics belongs to all of us, in this country, the people are the government.

Dave’s article is about the Web’s ability to make politicians more responsive to the public. He’s right: it’s great that the Web can force bad public servants to pay attention to us. The Web has even brought down a political veteran or two, and it has been essential to the popularity of a few reform-minded presidential candidates. But by devoting ourselves to Web projects that target elected officials, we are missing out on the ripest opportunities for reform. In characterizing DC as nothing but a swamp of politicians, Dave ignores a fundamental fact:

Elected officials don’t run our government. Government employees do. Every citizen interested in changing our country must understand this.

Even if we elect good people to write good laws, those laws still need to be executed. That responsibility falls to the three million people who make up the federal workforce. They are the ones responsible for the day-to-day operation of our government. If we want to change the government, we can’t ignore the bureaucrats who make it run. There are problems to be solved at their level as well. All our talk about Congressional transparency and election reform hasn’t made the government more efficient or less wasteful. Such problems will not be solved by a Web site that lets the public track Congress.

Even if Web activism reaches remarkable heights and forces every member of Congress to be a slave to the citizenry, those 3 million employees won’t notice a thing. No matter how much we influence DC from the outside, the government will always be run by those on the inside.

I’m not suggesting that such sites are a waste of time. If I thought they were, I wouldn’t spend so much time creating them. I think they have the potential to create an informed, active citizenry, which is essential to a strong democracy. But most government functions start at the desk of a federal employee, something our Web sites will never be able to monitor. That employee can execute the policy, quickly, slowly, or not at all. They can facilitate illegal policies, or they can blow the whistle on them. In the future, such responsibilities will fall to employees like Jim Comey. They will also fall to employees like Monica Goodling.

Comey is the former Department of Justice official who protected his bed-ridden boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, while the White House tried to usurp the AG’s authority and the law.

Goodling is the former Department of Justice official who, at the behest of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, fired federal prosecutors for not giving preferential treatment to the White House’s agenda.

I chose these two examples for a reason. Comey and Goodling prove that the idea of government reform is not owned by any single political party. Both Comey and Goodling are conservatives, but with radically different understandings of good governance and their responsibilities as public servants. When under pressure, Comey remembered his pledge to defend only the Constitution and the law. That is the kind of person we need in the government: the kind of person who, in addition to working hard, does their job without regard for the Top Boss’s opinion. Goodling, on the other hand, blindly supported a person and a political platform. This philosophy—regardless of the platform it serves—will always lead to injustice. The government needs to rid itself of such people.

The only way to change the population of DC is by engaging the government. If we don’t, DC will backslide. Dave Winer says he avoids DC because he doesn’t like the place. Maybe it’s the other way around. By staying out, it only becomes more inhospitable.

If reform-minded citizens shun their government, their ideals will be poorly represented where it matters most. And as they forego opportunities to serve the public, those positions of influence are necessarily filled by more and more people who don’t give a damn about our cause.

Am I expecting you to move to DC and take a desk job at the USDA? I’m assuming this essay has a narrow audience, so, no, I don’t expect you to do that. What should you do instead? Two suggestions:

Encourage government service

Tell your students, your nieces, and your blog readers how important these jobs are. Redefine the connotation of the word “bureaucrat.” Cast it as an opportunity to help this country at a time when it truly needs it.

They’ll complain: The government is slow and inefficient. You can’t get anything done there. And the money is terrible.

These are all fair complaints. The federal government is not a dynamic organization. But if you’re a dynamic person, you’ve got an advantage: you’ll stand out. The government is teeming with problems that need solving. If you like that sort of work, you’ll have a field day. The bureaucratic roadblocks are infuriating at times, but while getting traction is hard, impressing superiors is not. While laggards are common, the people at the top are sharp. They get it. And when they see good work, they recognize it.

As for pay: The first year will suck. I remember my starting salary: $31,397. Pretty rough. But had I stayed, it would have tripled by my fifth year. Not bad. Why such a fast rise? Cubes are emptying faster than the government can fill them, leaving lots of room to move up. Half of today’s government supervisors, and almost 40% of the entire federal workforce, will retire in the next three years.

Reread that sentence. That statistic should be enough to entice college grads away from finance (if not, show them this). But it also underscores the importance of changing public attitudes toward government service: 25-year veterans are being replaced by 25-year-olds. The CIA just doubled its workforce. Someone is filling those jobs. Let it be people we know and trust.

Provide your services to the government

Working with the government doesn’t mean living and working in the Beltway. You can contribute from anywhere now. As Web addicts, we understand this. Many of us prefer working remotely. So if you’re like Dave and hate going to DC (and I’ll be honest, I don’t like it either), you can still compete for government grants to help them do their jobs better.

I do. I work from New York on Web apps for the Intelligence Community.

Such opportunities used to be monopolized by companies like Lockheed and Northrup Grumman and SAIC. But this summer, when the Director of National Intelligence launches a Web platform called A-Space, this will change. A-Space uses an open development platform that can be extended by third party applications, the spy world’s version of Facebook Apps. Any American coder can make a Web app for the Intelligence Community. This is a seriously big development; the IC is asking for your help. Consider offering it. If you don’t like the work they do, that’s all the more reason to have a hand in improving it.*

But if you aren’t convinced, there are plenty of other government bodies that could use your help. Approach the Library of Congress about building a better THOMAS. Or the Social Security Administration about correcting the errors in their database. Or FEMA about streamlining their response efforts. Or the FBI about improving their stone tablet-based FOIA process. These organizations could use our knowledge. We should tell them it shouldn’t cost that much to build a content management system. After that, we should build it for them.

I make this sound easier than it is, of course. You can’t just email info@fbi.gov and get them to deploy the script you wrote last night. You need to establish trust and have a line of communication with the agency first. That means that citizen-based software development must be institutionalized.

What we need is a foundation that serves as the middle man between government needs and programmers’ abilities. Even better, we need a community of coders who are committed to improving the inner workings of DC, and doing it in a way that inherently promotes transparency while fighting government waste. We need a Mozilla Foundation for the government. A stateside Geekcorps. A geeky Americorps. An army of impassioned programmers committed to improving the government’s information services, both internal and those it provides to the public. It would make government more organized, accountable and effective, and it would save them a lot of tax dollars. And the result—open access to the code that runs our country—is a great first step toward the kind of government transparency we’re after.

This is still just an idea, but I’ve floated it with people in both the free software movement and the national security community, and everyone has reacted positively. I’ll be writing about it more on this site in the near future.* (I’ve also discussed it with Doug Rushkoff, who recently proposed a similar idea, which may or may not have slipped into my subconscious.)

So, why do I help The Man?

I help The Man because he needs help. If you think our government is broken, then you should help, too. I’ve just given you two suggestions. If you have other ideas, let’s talk.

Two weeks ago, I was in DC for a meeting sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation. The room was filled with people involved in various Web-based efforts to make legislation more accessible. Most of us, myself included, have recently tried to reverse-engineer the Library of Congress’s anachronistic legislation archive, THOMAS. But near the end of the meeting, we discussed the idea of directly engaging Congress—as someone put it, doing something WITH the government, not TO it. The reaction to this suggestion was heartening.

“What we’ve learned from the Open House Project,” said Sunlight’s Greg Elin, “is that whenever we sit outside and build things, we learn that there are people inside who want to do the same thing.” Looking around the room, CivicWiki’s Maclen Marvit said: “We have a lot of development manpower in this room, and it’s all committed to the cause of better governance. Why not work more closely with those who are doing the governing?” Congressional staffers in the room said they were open to it.

The opportunity for real reform is there. But we, the would-be reformers, first have to acknowledge that cooperation with the government might be the best approach.

This philosophy goes against the grain of the reform community’s favorite mantra: “Change won’t come from the top down.” They say we have to focus on increasing public participation—registration, voting, Web-based fundraising, Web-based transparency, and so on—so that those in Washington understand whom they are beholden to. I believe in those causes, and all that bottom-up, power-to-the-people stuff is inspiring. But even if we do change our government from the outside, our success will be short-lived if we don’t have guardians on the inside who can enforce those changes.

*If you want more information on becoming an A-Space developer, or to discuss the open source government software idea, please write to me.

Thanks to Laura, Clay, Nancy and Doug for reviewing drafts.

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Update: Reactions and responses, Tuesday, June 24, 9:30 PM

For the most part, reaction to this essay has been pretty positive. The comments I got from others at PdF this week were a huge validation. I’ll be posting here in the near future with updates about where this is going. Stay tuned.

Here are some responses to others’ questions and criticisms:

Where’d you get those retirement statistics?

The statistic about federal workforce retirements is from this document (PDF). See the second chart on page 35. Just before I published the essay, I discovered that the file had vanished from its original author’s site. But I found another copy.

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The netroots is a political movement. The policy prescription here is another animal completely…Just like bloggers and netroots dreamers, they’re in the game to steer public opinion towards some end…the direction the executive branch takes are steered from the top and the top is run by politicians and everybody wants to be on top.

This is from the first commenter, chmiel. Chmiel’s a friend of mine from ITP. He’s also a former Hill staffer, so it’s understandable that he thinks bureaucracies are controlled entirely by politicians. But he’s wrong. I’m sure that’s been wrong for a long time, but it’s especially been true for the last eight years, when the executive branch has operated completely independently from the will of Congress.

Regarding his first thoughts about netroots = politics, netroots people being disinterested in government, etc…I agree. That is why I wrote this. My thesis is that the netroots are way too concerned with politics and not enough with government. My hope was to convince them that they SHOULD pay attention to government. As he said, they’re “in the game to steer public opinion towards some end.” They think that end is better politicians. I’m saying, that’s not enough. As Doug Rushkoff wrote on Monday, and Mark Pesce talked about on Tuesday, something more has to happen once your dream candidate gets into office. Change won’t just start magically happening.

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Another friend wrote and said that better public servants wouldn’t lead to better public service:

Bureaucracy is an inherent part of any large organization.  I’ve worked at many where everyone I met was dedicated, smart, and decent, yet the system as a whole was just one big piece of shit.  It was impossible to point a finger at anyone and say that they were contributing to the problem, yet they all were.

I’m not claiming that dynamic, reform-oriented people will make our bureaucracies any less bureaucratic. To understand their effect, refer to the Comey-Goodling comparison. Government will always be enormous. So if it’s going to be enormous, isn’t is better that all those people be honorable instead of slimy?

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Finally, Mike Tanji, a former colleague from DIA, posted on his own blog about this. He had a few comments, but there’s one in particular I want to talk about, because it made light of something I failed to make clear:

Focusing on the functionaries is important, but without influence from the top there is no hope for real change. I have lived through numerous “reforms” under various guises but none succeeded to any significant degree because the fundamental metrics never changed. If the bottom line is that I’m rated on how many widgets I produce, I’m not going to give two-s***s about whether or not I follow the TQM approach or use my mad ‘black belt’ skillz or if my efforts were culturally sound: I’m friggin’ going to show up at the end of the year with a ton of widgets.

I agree. It’s not enough to have better people at the bottom. We need better managers as well. But what I failed to explain was that the new people who fill seats at the bottom will eventually (and these days, quickly) rise to the management level, where they will have a real say over what the priorities should be. Remember: 40% of the workforce, half of all managers, gone, in three years.

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

Below is my blue sky response. It’s also here.

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The House of Representatives should expand to make room for a new at-large delegation: the Delegation for Future Interests (DFI). These seats will be restricted to scientists and people under 35. The representatives will be elected by a nation-wide vote with no geographic apportionment (afterall, the candidates for these jobs will be familiar with the decreasing relevance of geography). The members of this delegation will have equal status with all other members of the House, including voting rights and committee membership.

The DFI will bring something new to Congress: ample representation of future concerns. Congress has always been a reactive body, responding to what happened yesterday instead of foreseeing tomorrow’s problems. Its members are unfamiliar with new technologies and the problems they present. It shows in the demographics: Of our 100 senators, 56 are lawyers. Nineteen are lifelong politicians with little other professional or research experience. Zero senators have science doctorates; only four congressmen do. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the current Congress might be the oldest ever: of 537 members, eight are under 35. We trust this body to keep our democracy up-to-date. We shouldn’t.

Our population includes people much better suited than your average politician to keep democracy in touch with the future: scientists engaged with emerging technologies that will define how we communicate and work in the future, and the young people eager to embrace, understand, and challenge these technologies. Just as seasoned lawyers bring historical perspective to our legal code, scientists and young people could bring foresight. Just as our armed forces are run by military experts, and our economy is regulated by economists, so should our science policies be guided at the highest levels by those with expertise.

Creating the DFI is a low-tech response to an essay prompt that is laden with high-tech overtones. Opportunities abound for Web-based citizen engagement platforms and crowdsourced government corruption discovery wizards. But no matter what widget we create, and no matter how we customize the Constitution for today’s Internet, three things will certainly happen in the next 100 years:

• Both the widget and the Constitutional changes will become obsolete;
• One or two more technological revolutions will pass us by; and
• Those revolutions will pose new challenges to our democracy, challenges that our generation will never foresee. Challenges that will require their own essay contests.

In short, no Net-centric solution to our problems will last long. Even if such a solution is an extraordinary success, the chances are good that it will be short-lived: our understanding of the Internet undergoes a radical shift at least once every election cycle. High-tech solutions may sound sophisticated, but they are ultimately limited by their focus on the Internet. My DFI proposal may not make for the most exciting reading. But it is adaptable beyond the current definition of the Internet. When today’s problems are long gone, the DFI will still be relevant.

That is what we must seek when changing our democracy: staying power. Major changes to a democratic system take decades to root themselves into the public consciousness. By then, the nation may have forgotten what inspired the changes in the first place. Our job is to make sure that when that day comes, our changes are still relevant.

“How would you redesign American democracy for the Internet age?” My solution may not be custom-built FOR the Internet, but it is certainly inspired by it. The Internet has taught me a lesson: when challenged by a new technology, our democracy convulses for a few years. (It hasn’t yet taught me what happens after that.) If given one redesign opportunity, we should heed that lesson and try to solve the root of the problem: a lack of foresight by our leaders. Technical solutions can certainly help; that’s why I spend most days trying to hack American politics. But the DFI will help us not only through today’s challenges (Task #1: fund the projects proposed by other Reboot essayists), but tomorrow’s as well. Let’s reboot for the future, not just for the Internet.

I fear that people’s votes are too easily influenced by Things That Don’t Matter. This blog is a collection of articles that shift attention back onto things that do matter: The Wise Voter’s Reading List.

First, I want to explain why I think self-employment is so crucial to happiness. I’ve learned that it’s not just about waking up when you want to and having as many vacation days as you like. It’s about spending your life—or at least, a third of it—pursuing your own curiosities instead of someone else’s. It means no office culture. It means you can pursue multiple tracks and avoid the ups and downs of any one industry, staying safe while your friends get laid off. It means you can navigate into other fields when you become bored with others. And when you wake up in the middle of the night with the stomach flu, there’s nothing more comforting than knowing that your boss will have no problem with you taking the day off.

How did this happen?

I wanted all of these things. I did it through work and luck: hard work put me in the position to get lucky.

1. Publish your name

Without question, publishing my writings online is the best thing I’ve ever done for my work life. Every job I’ve ever had–with the exception of selling videos at the Pentagon City mall—was the result of someone seeing an article or paper of mine. Most of those jobs were unsolicited—I didn’t apply for them. Instead, they found the paper and contacted me. That ability to attract work without looking for it is vital if you want to work independently. You attract it by stamping your name on things that help people.

Don’t be shy about this. Post anything and everything that someone else might find useful or interesting. The first thing I posted online was a software manual I wrote for a nonprofit. That got me a job at the Duke library, where I helped faculty use computers. After that, it was a few mediocre research papers I wrote in college. One got me my job at DIA. Another got the attention of a media nonprofit that I helped with some cool projects. That job was unpaid, but it gave me even more exposure.

Then it got serious. On my own time, I wrote a diatribe about the Intelligence Community’s shoddy intranet. It got some attention. I got some praise. Then I decided—again, on my own time—to adapt the paper for the CIA’s journal, precisely because I knew it would help my ideas gain traction.

It did. I spent the summer working in DC helping the Intelligence Community do exactly what I proposed. A few months later, Clive Thompson bumped into the article, and just like that, I was the lead for a New York Times Magazine cover story. That article comes up again and again when potential clients write to me out of the blue and ask me for help.

The unsolicited offers are nice, but I think the most gratifying experience so far came last April. I was down in DC having dinner with some friends, and some friends of friends. In talking to one of the latter, we discovered that we work in very similar fields. I eventually asked him if he’d seen my article. Not only had he seen it. He said that his company refers to it all the time, and that he even had a printed copy of it in the bag at his feet. Priceless.

Now, this will be somewhat frightening, but people attach incredible value to a printed name. It is, whether warranted or not, the ultimate symbol of expertise. Let’s say you write and publish a paper about Garfield. Congratulations: you are now a Garfield expert. You may not feel like one, but expertise is more about the public’s perception of you than about your actual knowledge. See? Frightening.

Even more frightening: it doesn’t matter where that name is. This rule of expertise applies even if you’re “published” on Blogger. Of the papers I mentioned earlier, only one of them has been published outside my personal Web site. So get yourself a personal site this instant.

To modest for/disgusted by self-promotion? Redefine the term.

2. Do free work

In the last section, I mentioned more than once that I wrote all those things for free. I did so in the hopes that the free work would pay off later. It did. This attitude is vital. When you’re young, you have to prove yourself to people who aren’t willing to risk money on someone of unknown ability.

There’s a book out there called The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers. The authors explain what they call the “permission paradox”: you can’t get a job without prior experience, and you can’t get experience if you don’t get the job. How do you work your way out of that one? Their solution: give yourself permission. Start making your own experience.

I couldn’t get hired to do what I wanted to do. So I started doing it on my own time. I helped a few nonprofits with their technology issues, developed their Web sites, ran mailing lists, and, of course, wrote about what I wanted to do (again: paper = expertise). After that, nobody could tell me I didn’t have experience.

An added bonus of working for free is that you’re free to screw up–that is, experiment. Experimenting helps you learn. Free jobs will, in the long run, be much more rewarding and valuable than being a paid Yes-man.

Where did I get the time to do that stuff for free? I did it at home when I got off work. Brutal. Exhausting. Worth it.

3. Ask for advice and help

Here’s how to turn someone you admire into your mentor:

• Make a list of people whose work you admire
• Write to them and ask them to be your mentor
• Set it and forget it

It really is just that easy. Wouldn’t you be flattered if someone emailed you out of nowhere and told you they loved your work? These people are no different. They are very eager to give you advice. But there’s very little chance that they’ll contact you first, so it’s up to you. Tell them what you like about their work. Ask them about their path, and for advice on the path you should take. Tell them you want to do X, Y and Z over the next few years. Don’t be surprised when they respond and ask you for your resume because a friend of theirs is looking for people that do X, Y and Z. (You’d be working for someone else, but you’d be doing what you love, and that’s a good start.)

Even more useful than job leads are the motivation and moral support they’ll provide. You’ll only understand what I mean once you start getting responses, so get on it.

This step is easy, but it might take some guts at first. What if they respond negatively? Just remember that if someone does respond negatively to something so positive, you don’t want to consort with such people, and it’ll probably benefit your character to stay away from them.

Has it been worth it?

True, I’m much more independent than most of my friends. But this question is worth asking, because this life has its down sides:

1: I’m not exactly loaded. My friends at Yahoo are pummeling me in this category. They’re taking home six figures and they know they’re going to get a paycheck twice a month. I, on the other hand, haven’t a clue what I’ll make over the next year. Money doesn’t come regularly, either. I’ll get a few small checks one month, nothing else for a few months, and then *BOOM*, something big. Independence at this age means uncertainty. But I work for myself precisely because I value independence over money, so I’m not envious of my friends’ salaries. And I make enough to live in Manhattan and enjoy city life, and for now, that’s good enough for me. It beats Sunnyvale.

I’m a food fanatic, so one of the downsides of the small wallet is my inability to make the most of Manhattan’s restaurants. But I’ve discovered something else, a perk of self-employment that ends up saving me money: the working lunch. I have time and permission to go anywhere in the city for lunch, and unlike dinner, lunch can be had at nice places for reasonable prices. Also, it helps my work, as the conversation at lunch is much more work-oriented than at dinner. This helps me justify it as a part of the job, not a luxury.

Oh, yeah: I also have to pay double taxes, as I’m both an employer and employee. Aggravating? Yes. Worth it? No question.

2: Working for myself means I do my own marketing, recruiting, record keeping, couriering and receptionisting. It’s boring. It also means that sometimes, I feel like I’m not working enough, because the amount of creative work I do is dwarfed by errands. The issue here is not the amount of boring stuff I have to do. Rather, it’s that I’m unable to gauge whether I’m spending enough hours on the job.

For example, let’s say that in my first year, I want to end up making the equivalent of $40/hour for 40 hours per week. Should my trip to Kinko’s count as work time? The practical answer is yes, as my trip to Kinko’s is a business necessity. But the time at Kinko’s was spent ordering new stationery (or whatever one does at Kinko’s). I’m not doing work for a client, so I end up asking myself: was the time spent at Kinko’s really worth $40/hour? Should I spend extra time tonight doing real work to offset this errand?

I’m still not sure what the answer is. It’s something I have to live with for now. But it beats living with my old schizophrenic cube neighbor, who provided color commentary of his mouse clicks.

How to keep it up

All those things I said at the beginning about sick days and freedom and the absence of bureaucracy–it’s easy to forget about them once they’re no longer in your life, and thus forget why you’re working for yourself in the first place. With that gone, and no looming boss telling you to do work, it’s easy to start loafing.

I constantly have to remind myself just how lucky I am to be doing what I’m doing, lest I find myself among the gainfully employed. Here are a few things that help:

• The cube placard from my old job. I kept it. It’s on my wall. My cube number—C5-822F—smacks of an inmate number. From my desk, it is always within view. “Don’t go back to that life!” it screams. The cream-colored construction paper is wise: I don’t deserve to be called C5-822F.
• The occasional rush hour trip on the subway or train. It’s only 8 am, and those people already look defeated.
• Office Space and The Office. Their observations of cube life are so spot-on, if I weren’t already working for myself, I think they’d inspire me to quit my job.
• Thoreau’s Life Without Principle. This paper convinces me again and again that humans were not meant to spend eight hours a day in an office. “What is it to be born free and not to live free?”

These are my own unique sources of inspiration. Everyone has their own. I’m curious to know what yours are. Use the comments section.

On top of maintaining the drive to work, I need to figure out the mechanics of this lifestyle. The right to work whenever I want is a mixed blessing. I’m writing this at 2 am because I got a sudden burst of energy...Alternatively, I could do it tomorrow during sane work hours and thus reserve this hour for something healthier, like sleep. That would help me maintain a balance between my work and my life...Then again, I like to think that a job like this should be fun, that it isn’t work at all–that if I like what I do, I’ll never have to work a day in my life, so who cares about life/work balance?…Of course, if I only did work during bursts of creative energy, I would be pretty unproductive. So if I force myself to work by going to the library, I get a lot more done…But, since it isn’t as inspired as the middle-of-the-night diatribe, is the quality as good?

I have this conversation with myself over and over. I haven’t figured it out yet. But at this age, I have time.