Intwo

For many of us, in thoughts or dialogue about the state of the world and how it can be changed we reach a wall that is made up of a political system intertwined with corporate economics. You can try to climb the wall but it seems that the wall always manages to be bigger. You can try to break the wall, but people have spent their entire lives breaking the wall without making much change. Lawrence Lessig has been trying, again and again to fight with this massive obstacle but recently, he has decided to try a new technique. He is now attempting to change the wall. He will inject a virus of good into it with the goal of morphing it from a looming, impermeable form to a road with signs and maps.

Maybe a bit abstract. This might be better:

Change Congress is a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions. Using our tools, both candidates and citizens can pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington. Our community will link candidates committed to a reform with volunteers and contributors who support it.

The basic changes that can be pledged for are:

1. No money from lobbyists or PACs
2. Vote to end earmarks
3. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
4. Support publicly-financed campaigns

Lessig is creating a platform where congress people can pledge their intent, citizens can pledge their requests, and everyone can view the pledges as well as if they are living up to them. By making this information manageable, digestible, and segmentable, the congress peoples actions will be public knowledge, and thus the congress people will be accountable to them.

I cannot do this subject justice in a small post. This video is from his talk at Harvard Law School, I would highly recommend watching it. The outlining of the Change Congress movement happens more towards the end of the video, but if you are interested at all watch the whole thing.

The Change Congress Website

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under humanity, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.