The Change Congress Project
Friday, March 21, 2008 at 02:04PM A prominent Stanford law professor on Thursday launched an ambitious project (change-congress.org) that aims to use collaborative software to harness the extraordinary levels of pent-up political energy and dissatisfaction that voters have shown over the past two years with their members of congress.
The Change Congress project's first mission is to diminish the influence of money in the legislative body by influencing the outcome of the 2008 election campaigns of 67 members of congress which are up for grabs. As the Change Congress project founder Larry Lessig noted in the project's launch Thursday afternoon, there haven't been so many seats open up for challenge in more than a decade.
Lessig, known for his decade-long role in trying to loosen the entertainment industry's vice-like grip on popular culture by shaping copyright law, is betting that the energy and dissatisfaction exhibited by voters against the status-quo in Washington DC, and the emergence of collaborative software that enables vast numbers of geographically-dispersed citizens to become politically active on their own schedule, will enable a new kind of transparency and accountability in political campaigns.
"The problem we face is ... the problem of crony capitalism using money to capture government," he said on Monday during the launch of his project in Washington, DC. "The challenge is whether in fact we can change this. The political experts tell you that it can't be done, that process always win over substance."
Reader Comments (1)
we need to keep pushing energy independence. Every other political concern is secondary. If we want peace and a greener world we need to stop paying for oil wars and stop paying dictators for oil. If we want to revive the economy we need to stop giving our money away to oil tycoons in foreign lands. We need to spend that cash on domestic sources.