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The revolution won't be televised, but it might show up on a wiki and a mashup.
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig has made it clear for some time that he intends to step away for most of his work on copyright and with the Creative Comments to focus on a more fundamental issue: congressional corruption and reform. At a speech in Washington, DC yesterday, Lessig rolled out his "Change Congress" web site and provided more details of his reform program. Not surprisingly, mashups, open-source tools, and wikis are a big part of a plan in which everyone in the US can keep tabs on their elected officials' commitment to transparency.
So what exactly is Lessig advocating? His reform program has four points: he wants politicians to give up money from lobbyists and political action committees, put a permanent end to "earmarks," commit to public financing of elections, and commit to transparency in the way that Congress works.
Candidate agreement with these four principles will be tracked on a map at the Change Congress web site, with each Congressional district colored to indicate its representative's level of support for the principles. Representatives who support all four principles will be marked in bright red or blue (depending on their party affiliation), while a sludgy brown will mark the districts of those who haven't agreed to any of the proposals. The more PAC money they take, the browner their district gets.
An exceptionally sludgy brown
Coming soon to the site is a wiki that will allow users around the country to keep tabs on elected officials and provide updates on their compliance with the commitments. Eventually, assuming that the campaign becomes a bona fide movement, Lessig hopes to provide financial support for candidates from both parties who "make reform a central platform of their campaign," as he wrote yesterday.
Lessig argues that reform of the regulatory and legislative process is a necessary precondition for the achievement of his previous goals: better copyright laws and robust fair use acces
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