0:15:24 to 0:16:28( Edit History Discussion )

Jake Brewer: C-SPAN is great because it allows the public to participate or to see what is going on in the halls of Congress as they debate.  An interesting thing that happened though, when C-SPAN launched, is that you started seeing things like giant rubber stamps.  You didn't actually see those in Congress before C-SPAN.  Because you put them on video, now people know they will be on video and they make these huge graphs and they make these huge stamps and they stomp and they do a lot more and they're much more animated.  On the house floor, they used to have much more open conversation and say "hey, by the way, this is what I need." "Hey! This is what I need, and why don't we just work this out.  We don't have to necessary grandstand."  So now it happens in club rooms, it happens in parties, it happens in other places.  [Abram Stern: I never see that stuff.]  You never see actual getting along and dialogue when you're flipping through C-SPAN.  The way we see that is that there's a whole ecosystem of influence as having an impact on people's lives all over the country from their congressional representatives, from their state representatives, from their local representatives on all these different levels.  It's our responsibility to figure out ways to make sure that that ecosystem of influence is brought to bear.

0:17:32 to 0:18:12( Edit History Discussion )

Jake Brewer: Now wouldn't it be awesome if you could also say, "now, here they are on video."  Here they are on even photographic stuff.  But getting that kind of thing involves a lot more people than we have.  It involves a lot more people than this room, obviously.  It involves platforms in order to get there, it involves actually looking at what the formats are and all the kind of data and real technical stuff is, which people in this room are really good at.  That's kind of the framework for the conversation and we've taken a lot of time setting the stage I suppose, but really from this point on, we want to listen more than speak as we chat about it.

0:18:48 to 0:20:06( Edit History Discussion )

Then of course we've got MetaVid, which is now indexing stuff in really powerful ways, and creating this stuff.  It's also—correct me if I'm wrong—it's restricted to C-SPAN footage, so far.  You also have things like Google Audio Indexing, has everyone seen that?  This is one of those sites that not too many people know about, so you can search a word like 'economy' and it tells you—just scroll over the yellow here—it actually tells you the sentence in which it appears and then you can play the video.  He says it four, five times throughout that, so if you want to figure out who's taking about 'economy,' who's talking about 'energy,' who's taking about these different things, you can actually search for it.  You have some of these platforms starting to come out and they're necessarily not just C-SPAN, it's some of these other things in other places, but that's also highly restrictive.  If you talk to the guys that run the political division at YouTube they'll basically say "we can't get much more of this stuff."  "We can't index stuff that's happening on the street."

0:20:31 to 0:21:04( Edit History Discussion )

Audience member: Oakland police [fatally] shot a person (Oscar Grant) in the back on a platform, and twenty people got it on cell phone cameras. Yup, so other political action. Obviously we have Iran going.  What others, as far as elected officials, specifically? Audience member: Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond. Yup.  Did anyone see Joe Biden talking about clean coal last year?  That was one of our organize rs, which we love that he said it then it totally screwed him.  What else, any others?

0:21:56 to 0:24:09( Edit History Discussion )

Jake Brewer: Good question.  Real quickly I'll add the other example is the John McCain one.  <Audience member: Mayhill Fowler>.  Mayhill Fowler.  But really, I like this point too.  If those are all negative things, there's something also interesting that happens when you have video there and people know about it, which is that—anybody see what happened with the British government two weeks ago, parliament up in arms because basically the stuff they spent their money on was revealed by a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request, or that it was leaked early, and so you got two examples of what they basically wanted to have—I promise this is to your point, sometimes I go way over here, but I promise I'll come back—is that that they're spending money on moats on their château.  This is your tax dollars on my moat.   [U.K. audience member: My tax dollars.]  Yeah, your tax dollars, exactly, we're international today.

You kind of gotta believe—and as a result of that, by the way, Nancy Pelosi is now dictating that expenditure data is going to be online—we believe that data doesn't exist unless it's online—but we kinda gotta believe that if members of parliament had known that all of their stuff was going to be available and public and online, they probably wouldn't have spent money on a moat in the first place.  Right?  There's kind of two-fold things, there's both holding accountable ("by the way, Joe Biden, you said something wrong" or "by the way, George Allan..."), you probably would not have said "you said these things and we're going to hold you accountable for being really stupid," or for saying something bad, but also by doing this, we're creating an infrastructure where people are then kinda just better people.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But by making it known that this is where it's going to be, or maybe we should just push them into the trench.  So these are the issues.