New Party Overview

8/7/2019 New Party Overview

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The New Party

The New Party is an effort to construct a new approach to the political process that isfully appropriate to the information age. Rather than attempt to pose another party

over and against the existing established parties, our intent is to create a platform that sits

above the existing political process (overcodes it) and is able to take full advantage ofthe capabilities that are afforded by Web 3.0. We consider this approach to be

strategically similar to the transformation of politics that was brought about by the last

major shift in media television. In a very fundamental sense, the medium is thepolitics.

One of the principal advantages of new media technologies is their ability to scale. They

are able to deliver an enormous amount of continuing value with a relatively small earlyinvestment. Accordingly, we believe that it is possible using the right combination of

new media technologies and approaches to get money out of politics. This is not an

optimistic aspiration, but a pragmatic objective based on the real performance of new

media over the past decade.

Concretely, we will endeavour to run a viable and competitive candidate in every majorUS election in 2012 on a total budget that is comparable to a single senatoral election in

2010. In addition, we believe that our approach can increase transparency,

accountability, and engagement as well as much more effectively tap into the latent

problem solving skills of our complete polity compared to the current system. But theseare the icing on the cake if we can remove the power of money in politics, we will have

achieved our goal.

The Architecture

The principal components of our architecture are game mechanics, reputationalcurrencies, and ubiquitous computing. It is worth spending a bit of time defining

each.

Game Mechanics are the suite of techniques that have been developed by the

enterainment gaming industry to engage and motivate gamers. These are the

techniques that keep players glued to their Nintendo DS or Farmville in spite of the

relative meaninglessness of the games themselves. In recent years, the techniques ofgaming have been abstracted from the entertainment world and are beginning to be

applied more broadly. One can easily think of the political process (the election

process in particular) as a form of game. It has relatively simple objectives (get onthe ballot, source a candidate, win the election) and victory conditions (get the most

votes on election day). Moreover the tasks involved in achieving these objectives

are themselves relatively measurable (How many people did you get to support yourcandidate? How many signatures did you get today?). Game Mechanics can be

combined with crowd sourcing to generate high levels of effective and structured

activity without requiring substantial top-down coordination.


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Reputational Currencies are simply the digital version of real world-reputation.

Points, levels, statuses and badges that your digital identity earns as a result of

your activities. Reputational currencies can provide motivation (if I convince threepeople to join the New Party, I can earn Evangelist points); they can be used to

measure performance (who are the top Evangelists in your county?); they can be

used to allocate resources and authority (when you earn your next Evangelist level,you get to activate three new viral alerts and can add five more people to your

messaging team); and they provide hooks for end participant innovation (I have an

idea, can we use high level Evangelists to promote ballot measures as well ascandidates?).

Ubiquitous Computing is the recognition that the power of networked computer

processing can now be present essentially everywhere. Smart phones, WiFihotspots, tablet PCs, 4G networks, etc. can enable relatively intensive applications to

run anywhere. Street teams can be in continuous instant message communication

with each-other, checking in from their cell phones when they have talked with

someone at a household, all monitored on a google map mashup overlayed with adata-driven heat-map of where they are likely to find success on their next call. All

of these results, of course, are flowing up to a processor in the sky providing real-time data and feedback to the total community.

Combined, these tools enable the political process to be pushed to the edge. That is, a

system where the architecture provides guidance on strategic objectives (get on the ballot,get votes), but individual participants are free to innovate tactics and strategies as seems

appropriate to their particular circumstances. This concept of a fully distributed

approach is fundamental to the essence of the New Party and is a core value. Wheneverpossible, authority and responsibility will be pushed out into the community and the

core team will be small, fluid and relatively powerless.

The Platform

The New Party will have essentially no ideological content. The Party has no platform orplanks in the traditional sense. It has no opinion on any issue or even any preferred way

of thinking about issues. The only requirements to be a candidate for the New Party is

that you are Honest, Competent, Reasonable and have enough support to win an election.

It is both possible and desirable for two New Party candidates to differ enormously onparticular issues. All that is necessary is that they be quality representatives of their

constituents and that they be able to engage with each-other in respectful and constructive

conversation. In this sense, the New Party is not a 3rd party as much as an Nth Party. Ifwe do our job right, all future political activity will take place within the New Party

and the actual general election will be a legacy formality.

The Party has no platform because it is a platform: an open set of technologies that

should enable the relatively spontaneous formation of a new way of doing politics.

Specifically, it is a combination of a social network, a mesaging system and a jobs

board. At bottom, every member of the network has an identity (at a minimum their


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name and ZIP Code) and can link to other members of the network --- traditional social

networking functions. In addition, they can engage in two basic kinds of kinds of

behaviour: conversation and activity.

Our conversation engine will be substantially similar to existing scale conversation

communities like Reddit with a handful of key exceptions. First, participants will not beanonymous. They will have a real (and unique) identity. Second, rather than have a

simple architecture of just up or down voting on given comments, we will have a

three dimensional model where a given comment can be evaluated as to its good faith, itsthoughtfulness, and, finally, whether it is supported or not. So for example, you might

find a given comment that you are sure was issued in good faith and is truly thoughtful,

but that you dont support. Or you might find a comment that you happen to agree with,

but that you think was made in bad faith by the original poster (i.e., they are just sayingwhat you want to hear). These two differences bring a number of values. Bad behaviour

and thoughtlessness can quickly be identified and downregulated while conversation can

be promoted by allowing for respectful disagreement. Finally, of course, the actual

topics of our conversation will intially be focused strictly on issues of direct importanceto the network itself although as the community grows, the platform can (and likely

will) grow to cover a larger selection of topics.

Our job board consists of a list of different tasks that an individual can select.

Formally, the high level objectives of the New Party are simple:

Get people to join the party.

Get on the ballot in every election.

Source qualified candidates.

Get enough votes to win a given election.

The magic happens in how we go about hitting these targets. The high level objectivesare tied into the architecture itself. The details are left to the network itself to generate.

This is done through a combination of game mechanics and reputation.

We want to make it very easy for people to find ways to participate. Our core objective is

to get money out of the political process. We do this by replacing the concept of

donations of money with the concept of donations of direct activity. When someonejoins the network, they are presented with the opportunity to do something. At a

minimum, everyone can do three things: they can vouch for another member of the

Party, they can support another member of the Party, and they can recruit new people

into the Party. The former is simply an expression that you stake your personalreputation on the fact that the other person is honorable, competent and reasonable. By

doing this, you become accountable to the rest of the network and can expect people to

question you as to why you vouchsafe your connection as the election progresses.Notably, if that individual then goes on to generate for themselves a bad reputation, you

will likely have to explain your judgement. In principle, you could vouch for every

member of the New Party. By contrast, you can support only one candidate for anygiven office. This is particularly meaningful: in hotly contested races, those members of


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the party who vouch for both candidates but support only one become important in

helping the larger community make the best decisions. Finally, and crucially, every

member can become an evangelist of the New Party by recruiting new people into thenetwork. In a highly connected world, this can be a trivial effort: simply posting a link to

your Facebook account can be sufficient. Or you can hit the streets and go door-to-door

drumming up support for this bold new idea.

As you recruit, vouch for and support people, you begin to earn reputation. At a

minimum, reputation is status a nice reward for adding value to the New Party. But,more fundamentally, reputation is the metric by which you are afforded the ability to do

more within the Party. In addition to the basic activities of vouch, support and recruit,

every member of the Party can go to the tasking engine and really get engaged. The

tasking system is the beating heart of the New Party. A task is an activity that is linkedup to a high level objective. For example, if the high level objective is get on the ballot

in Florida the task might be collect ten signatures. In keeping with the distributed

nature of the New Party, tasks are not from top-down by a party hierarchy. Rather, they

are generated entirely by the network itself: they are posted by individuals with adequatereputation. For example, a new Party member has established a strong reputation as an

evangelist by recruiting many new people into the Party. Her reputation qualifies her tostart generating new tasks to get out the vote in her local region. As she continues to

succeed, she gets more reputation qualifing her for more authority and responsibility.

A positive feedback loop that scales. With only a minimal architecture and some basic

game mechanics, we are able to unleash the creativity and passion of the entirecommunity to achieve our core objectives.

Running for Office

One of the great weaknesses of the current political process is that it is so grueling, so

demeaning and so superficial that it filters out all but a very narrow demographic. Weintend our approach to operate quite differently and allow a more robust selection of

people to feel comfortable running for office. We do this first and foremost by turning

back the clock and recognizing that the medium is the politics. Television changedpolitics. Modern political campaigns are simply the logical expression of the qualities of

modern mass media (particularly TV). Our thesis is that the future of politics is on the

Internet and we intend to simply jump into that future with both feet --- now. In

principle, no New Party candidate need ever participate in any conventional politicalactivities. No campaigning, no TV commercials, no televised debates, etc.

Instead, running for office is intended to take place almost entirely online. Candidateswill particpate in messageboard conversations (earning or losing reputation). They will

engage in Q&A sessions where they can present thoughtful answers to crowd-sourced

questions. We will leverage social networks to drive the campaign if you want to learnabout candidate Xs character, why not ask someone who vouches for candidate X andwho you know and respect personally? Isnt this obviously much better than watching

them babble in front of a camera reading text someone else wrote from a teleprompter?

Tools for meet-ups and flash-mobs will of course also be part of the mix the New


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Media are fully capable of recapitulating all of the modes of campaigning of the Old

Media. They simply can do it for no money and embedded in a data-aware social

network.

If asked who they trust and consider a real leader, most people can identify a handful

from their social network. These are the people we want and the process of selectionshould simply be one of collaboratively deliberating on who is a quality representative,

convincing them to accept the challenge and then working together to gain enough

support to win. Where real divides exist between two potential New Party nominees in agiven election, we can make resource to the social network: find individuals who vouch

for both of them but (by definition) support only one or the other, and turn them into the

mediators who (hopefully) can help the larger community (and both candidates) come to

a conclusion on what is the best approach to take. Of course, if we come to a situationwhere we simply cant get one candidate to get enough support to become a nominee,

then there will be no nominee for the general election. This is not about ego or power

and if our prospective nominees cant come to a reasonable alliance, then we need to

work harder before we put them in office.

As a consequence our process is enormously less violent on the candidates than theexisting process. In a strong sense, a candidate of the New Party is not an individual

they are a representative of a community of supporters and it is the community that is the

campaign. In a very important sense, our candidates arent competing with legacy party

candidates at all.

Wasting your Vote

An issue that has long plagued new parties is the problem of wasting your vote: if your

vote for a candidate doesnt have a reasonable chance of concretely influencing the

election in a desired direction, then you have wasted your vote. Worse, if your voteinfluences the election in a negative direction by hamstringing the lesser of two evils and

handing the election to the greater of two evils, you have a worst case scenario.

We intend to take this common and reasonable concern as a strength. In any given

election we will broadcast how wasted your vote would be by voting for the New Party

candidate. If you are the first person to support someone in a given region, then the score

will be 100%. Your vote is spitting in the ocean. But, as more and more people jointhe network and set their support for candidates, their wasted vote score begins to drop

towards zero. We will base the score on a simple formula: once a New Party nominee

has enough support to have won the general election in the average of the past threeyears, the waste-o-meter will drop to zero. For example, if in your congressional district,

the winner of the past three years had 150,000 votes, then the New Party nominee waste-

o-meter will drop to 0 when he or she has at least 150,000 supporters.

Indeed, we will go farther we wont even allow a prospective nominee to run in the

general election unless their waste-o-meter gets below 25%. No chance of wasting your

vote if your preferred New Party candidate cant possibly win the election, then we


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wont even have a New Party candidate in that particular election. This creates a key

objective for the political game: get your preferred candidate to enough supporters to

qualify for the nomination.

Messaging and Media

One critical area of innovation is in the area of media. The lions share of spending in

modern political campaigns is in media. Obviously, for the New Party campaigns, TV,

radio and even Newspaper are essentially off limits. Instead, we make extensive use ofsocial media: YouTube, podcasting, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Skype and good old

fashioned email. We expect to be particularly effective using new media both because

we expect many of the most accomplished new media practitioners to be early adopters

of the New Party and (more importantly) because of the fundamentally social nature ofthe Party itself.

A typical political party is organized in the manner of most legacy institutions: top down.

There are insiders and there is everyone else. Messaging is broadcast (from the senderto the audience) and is essentially a variant on advertising. Our approach turns this

relationship completely around. The New Party starts from social relationships peopleyou know and trust. First and foremost, it is a community conversation. We dont

message, we engage and, wherever possible at a personal level. Simply put, it is one

thing to watch a political add on TV during the football game. It is something else

entirely to be engaged directly by your uncle or cousin or daughter.

Our lack of a particular ideology is crucial here because it breaks the adoption hurdle

down into two smaller challenges. First and foremost, an individual must be recruitedinto the idea of the New Party. At the center, we represent an alternative approach to an

entire way of doing politics something that we believe is already intuitively desired by

the vast majority of the voting public. We do this without any particular ideologicalencumbrances. As a consequence a voter can express his or her rejection of the existing

process without having to deal with the complications of the specific issues or individuals

that tend to mire traditional third parties (e.g., the Green Party, the Libertarian Party,Ross Perot in 1992).

After that, they begin to engage in the creative task of working with people they know to

try to identify a good person from their social network to represent them (and quite oftento convince them to run). At this point, of course, ideology and issue positions certainly

come into the equation. But here the effort is entirely at the edge and from the bottom-

up. As long as a given candidate is honorable, competent and reasonable and can garnerthe support of an adequate number of his or her constituents, the New Party is happy. In

fact, we embrace ideological diversity. If we are successful, we simultaneously expect a

much broader and more challenging set of voices to be heard from our representatives

and much more reasonable and effective actual deliberation than is currently the case.

We do, however, see two places where the New Party can and will participate in more

traditional media. The first is in messaging the New Party itself. As our movement


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grows, we expect substantial social interest in the movement and we will take advantage

of the opportunity to gain free PR: in newspapers, on television, etc. The story here,

however, will be about the New Party itself and its clean break with legacy politics. Notabout issues, ideology or specific candidates. This enables us to be fully empowered on

Fox and Friends as well as on Jon Stewart. Our message should be attractive all over the

current ideological spectrum and we want to keep the message clean and clear: politics isfatally broken and we must make a clean break with the entire legacy if we want to have

a chance.

The second way we will interact with traditional media is during the general election.

We do not dobut that even though we will have adequate support to win the general

election, the legacy parties will come to the point where they will pull out all the stops to

defeat us. The dirty tricks will be out in force. Consequently we will need to be able torapidly, effectively and overwhelmingly respond to them. Our primary approach will, of

course, be on-line. Leveraging the actual social relationships we can respond to negative

messages rapidly and directly with the authenticity of real people. If a political hack

crafts a TV ad that isinuates that one of our nominees has some sort of fatal characterflaw, we can (and will) rapidly (i.e., within 24 hours) mass many direct rebuts from real

people who really know that candidate and know the people they are messaging. Whoare you going to believe? A political attack ad or someone you know and trust?

At the same time, we will have a swarm of white hat meme hackers (the Internet

equivalent of mass media spin doctors) who will be at the ready to crowdsource effectivecounter-strategies for presention to, through, and around the mass media to ensure that

the truth is not lost in the noise.

Corrosive to Co-Optation

A realistic concern is that that the New Party can be co-opted, either by some newideological political parties forming within the network or by legacy parties (ie., the

Democrats and Republicans) using the platform to further their own campaigns. We

believe that this is a feature, not a bug. By design, the New Party architecture iscorrosive to co-optation and, therefore, adoption by legacy parties in particular will be a

double win. No only will their adoption increase our scale (adding members to the New

Party platform) but we believe that any participation by a legacy politician in the New

Party is always beneficial. This is because there are three fundamental forces at the rootof most of the problems with politics today:

Assymetry of Information no-one knows exactly what is going on and somepeople have enormously more access than others. Peddling influence and access

undermines the democractic process.

The Power of Money winning and holding office is very expensive. Candidatesare dependent on their party apparatus and on donors and lobbyists for the flows

of money that they need to succeed.

Bureaucracy the process of getting on the ballot and then of being arepresentative requires dealing with and using an increasingly massive


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bureaucracy. This creates power-groups, vested interests and inefficencies.

Our platform is designe do address all three problems at a fundamental level:

To Assymetry of Information we pose Transparency. We believe that everything

should be in the open and both searchable and analyzable. Importantly, thisshould be true after election as much as before and during: every New Party

representative should seek maximum transparency. Every meeting should be

logged and ideally webcast for the community to participate-in. If Lobbyist Xwants to meet with Representative Y, why shouldnt Ys constituents be allowed

to sit-in (and even engage in the dialog if they want to?)

To the Power of Money we pose the Power of Activity. By freeing candidatesfrom the yoke of fundraising we allow them to be more independent of both party

and lobbyist. If a legacy Politician is able to use the New Party to run their

campaign at lower and lower expense, this reduces their dependency on party and

on donors/lobbyists. A great result.

To Bureaucracy we pose Engaged Community. Our activity system allows acandidate to push the heavy lifting of politics out to the community; freeing them

to focus on doing their job: understanding, communicating, thinking, and

executing on policy. Equally importantly, our network is continuous.Traditionally, as a politican moves from campaigning to legislating, they lose

connection with the grassroots that put them in office and have to turn to a

dedicated staff bureaucracy to digest and propose policy. Our system is seamlessand connected. The network never goes away. Rather than turning to dedicated

(career) staffers to navigate the halls of power, we imagine New Party candidates

leveraging their network to digest, and discuss policy in our message-boards. Amore public and structured conversation that is outside the smoky back-rooms.Hundreds and potentially thousands of minds can be put to work on particular

problems (including the problem of forging consensus and drumming up votes)

where the representatives are merely one set of (respected) voices among many.

Rollout

The rollout of the New Party takes place in roughly five discrete phases.

1. Architecture and Development. This is a principally technical phase. We

estimate that with the right team of ~10 skilled developers this is a 9-12 monthproject to get a working platform out and running.

2. Recruiting early adopters. We see the demographics of our early adopters coming

from three different backgrounds:a. Gen Y. Already fully engage in social networking activities, ready to

engage in changing the political landscape and frustrated with the status

quo Gen Y is the workhorse of the New Party. Our reputation system willallow the most crucial elements of any emergent network (the


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tastemakers/superhubs) to be rewarded for their effectiveness helping us

recruit the thousands of these early adopters that are the key to massive

scaling.b. The Internet Illuminati. We will target to recruit several hundred of the

folks on the Internet who are known thought-leaders in our area. Whether

these are academics, silicon valley types or bloggers on the street, theybring their reputation, legitimacy, networks and (most importantly) minds

to our emerging movement.

c. The Voice of Experience. These are dozens of folks who carry a lot ofsocial reputation and gravitas but are not Internet buzzheads. This might

be someone like a Bill Gates (who is not really an Internet Illuminati) or

Warren Buffet, perhaps an Oprah or a more politically oriented validator

like a Madeline Albright or a Ron Paul. Like Colin Powell endorsingObama in 2008, they bring the sense of breadth and seriousness that is

necessary for our model to extend into the mass.

3. Ballot access. A major hurdle for any new party is wrenching control of access to

the ballot away from the entrenched legacy parties. Traditionally this is anexpensive and legally challenging problem costing millions of dollars just to get

a candidate on the ballot for a single office (President). Our principal intent is toleverage game mechanics and crowd sourcing to navigate ballot access at the edge

and at low cost. If, however, it turns out that we will have to push through using

brute strength (and money) we will have to turn a pragmatic eye towards this

particular hurdle.4. Growing the network, knocking down objectives and recruiting candidates. We

activate the network to grow as rapidly as possible. Pushing our Gen Y early

adopters to evangelize not only to their peers but their families and co-workers,bringing in the old fogies who are finally ready to break with a broken system.

Expanding into the disenfranchised demographics that rallied to support Obama

in 2008 and the core of the Tea Party in 2010 (yes, we believe that both of theseare natural members of the New Party). Knocking down more and more Voices

of Experience who understand the urgency of something like the New Party in our

times. At the same time, we are getting onto ballots and sourcing candidates forelections all over the country. At first it is a patchwork quilt of (gerrymandered)

jurisdictions, but over time the map begins to light up as our increasingly massive

network makes quick work of their challenges.

5. The big push. Hopefully at this point we will be taking on the super-exponentialgrowth curves of successful social networks and will be doubling month-to-

month. This kind of growth is self-fulfilling: it creates buzz that makes the

broader mass aware of the opportuninty to be part of something new; it startsdropping the waste-o-meters into 0%, it recruits great potential candidates; it

emboldens our existing members. Our Man on The Moon goal would be to win at

least one national election in 2012 and be positioned to be a dominant force in2014.

Why this Just Might Work


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Obviously, the dream of the New Party is more dream than reality. Even in the best of

circumstances, our chances of even cracking the ballot access code are slim. But they are

not zero and the opportunity is worth the risk. In-fact, there are a few reasons to berationally optimistic.

The conversation is ripe. Everyone is fed-up with the status-quo. From agingBoomers to new college grads, there is thin confidence that the current way of

doing things can achieve any positive results. And at the same time, the scope of

our collective challenges is increasingly large and impossible to ignore. One wayor another, the next ten years are going to be a wake-up call. Huge populations

are going to be shaken from their dogmatic slumber as the realities of multi-

trillion dollar deficits, a crumbling economy, an aging population, a decliningempire and an increasing comeuppance of our decades of carelesness hit with

intense remoreslessnes. A new story that presents a real and potentially effecive

break with the past will be able to reach ears that want to hear.

The demographics are ready. GenerationY is coming of age. The eldest of that

Generation will be in their 30s by 2012. A generation of digital natives who areintuitively networked, highly skilled, disproportionately unemployed (almost

double the national rate) and who have not yet been rendered fully cynical formsthe principal hope of the New Party. Importantly, while the younger generation

will be the early adopters and the hands and feet of the new party, we also expect

them to be enormously effective evangelists to the older generations. Unlike theBoomers who had an intractable conflict with their elders, Generation Y generally

has a great relationship with their parents and grandparents. The New Party does

not present a fire-breathing break with the values of the past but an earnest and

practical effort to rebirth some possible chance for the coming generation. This isa message that Gen Y will be able to deliver and one that the older generations

are increasingly in a position to hear. The medium is the politics. It is understood by all technology entrepreneurs that

the introduction of a new technology into the market tends to go through three

phases. In the first phase, the new technology helps legacy institutions execute on

their old business models more effectively (the word processor is just a bettertypewriter). In the second phase, as the new potentials of the technology begin to

reshape the landscape, technology entrepreneurs find themselves providing

solutions that allow legacy institutions experiment with new business models ornew distribution channels. Finally, when the market is ready, some sort of

pure play hits that dispenses with the legacy altogether. These wins tend to be

big and irrevocable (eBay, Google, Skype, YouTube, FaceBook, etc., etc.)

changing the shape of the market in ways that would have appeared implausibleeven months before their introduction. From this point of view, politics is just

another market and the reality of the landscape has been radically reshaped over

the past 20 years. While certainly we have seen digital technologies usedextensively in campaigning increasingly so with each election they have thus

far been limited to the second phase. Our intent is to take a swing at a pure play

with the New Party. We might be early. If we are then the next generation willhave a better chance of breaking through over our dead bodies. But if the timing


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is right miracles can happen.

New Party Overview

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