Ovc Opengov on Jun 19th, 2009 :: 0:21:04 to 0:21:56
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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?

George Chriss

0:21:04 to 0:21:56( Edit History Discussion )

George Chriss: Well, I had a question, then also a partial answer to your question.  So going back to essentially the "cartoonification" of a politician when they see a video camera, and they're like "oh!  let me go grab my giant stamp and then let me really simplify the message beyond what it needs to be discussed at."  Something in my experience, I film as many meetings related to shared governance at The Pennsylvania State University that I can, so student governance, the university Board of Trustees, the student newspaper, the whole gamut, and actually what I've seen, gavel to gavel, is that people start becoming more professional, and they start choosing their words more carefully and [they] articulate their positions in really thoughtful ways and it's really been the opposite effect.  I'm wondering if there's any sort of way to knock off [over-]simplification.

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.

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Discourse related to the promotion of free expression and innovation in online video.

Crowdsourcing an Open Government: Using Distributed Video to Hold the Elected Accountable

Jake Brewer — Engagement Director, Sunlight Foundation
Robert Millis — Capitol Hub
Abram Stern — Univ. of California, Santa Cruz & Metavid

2009 Open Video Conference

Session held at at 11:08 am on 20-June-2009
NYU Vanderbilt Hall, New York, NY


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