Impulse

They called the inter­net the great democ­ra­tizer. Here’s a great example.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m an advo­cate of copy­right reform. House bill HR.5439, cur­rently in com­mit­tee, pro­vides some nec­es­sary reform with regards to orphaned works (copy­righted works for which the owner can no longer be found (e.g. think of some ran­dom WWII pho­to­graph found in a closet)). I’m inter­ested in how this bill is pro­ceed­ing in com­mit­tee.
Using Thomas, I was able to find the cur­rent sta­tus of the bill: referred to the Judiciary Committee’s sub­com­mit­tee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property for markup and com­ment. Going to the House web site, I was able to find that subcommittee’s web site. There, I was able to watch a feed of the last dis­cus­sion of this bill. They raised some of the issues I was con­cerned about it, and post­poned fur­ther dis­cus­sion. Interested in being noti­fied fur­ther events going on with this bill, I went to GovTrack and signed up for an RSS feed to track this bill’s progress. Then, using the list of mem­bers from the subcommittee’s home page, I was able to send emails to com­mit­tee mem­bers stat­ing that I am in favor of the bill, pro­vided they include a pro­vi­sion for cre­at­ing a search­able image data­base as described in the open­ing remarks.
Never before has it been pos­si­ble for cit­i­zens to so actively and closely par­tic­i­pate in democ­racy — I never left my office, yet I was able to be noti­fied of issues that con­cern me, watch the leg­is­la­tors dis­cuss the issues on cam­era, and con­tact rel­e­vant rep­re­sen­ta­tives. This sim­ply wasn’t pos­si­ble a few years ago. One of my favorite quotes from West Wing (and they prob­a­bly stole it from else­where): “Decisions are made by those who show up”. These tech­nolo­gies — and the avid use of them by the gov­ern­ment and peo­ple — allow more peo­ple to show up. Democracy always func­tions bet­ter with more par­tic­i­pa­tion.
What a cool demon­stra­tion for how tech­nolo­gies can be lever­aged to improve the world.

Related posts:

1. Installing Democracy v1.0
2. Thumbing the scales of democracy