The Eventful Politics Project

On PDF 2007

Still decompressing from PDF 2007. Met a lot of great people working to use technology to encourage citizens to become agents of change.

A lot of people were interested in Demand, but “performers” are in short order in the activism world. It’s easy to understand the meaning of demanding an appearance by Barack Obama, but it’s not clear how to go about demanding awareness about the farm bill or a more open House of Representatives. What kind of event would a person attend in their town to make those things happen?

It’s a tough question, but it’s one worth answering. We’re working on it. There are plenty of people with brilliant ideas who remain sequestered in think tanks or universities, when they should be going from town to town engaging the rest of the country. We want to help them figure out where to go.

Watch this space for solutions…

Oh, and I was on TV.

Sunlight, clarity, the law, and you

We live in San Diego, so we get a bit more sun than most people in America get in late January. I don’t say this to gloat, but rather in an attempt to write a clever intro to a post about “Sunshine” laws.

We live in San Diego, so we get a bit more sun than most people in America get in late January. I don’t say this to gloat, but rather in an attempt to write a clever intro to a post about “Sunshine” laws.

Most states in our blessed union have Sunshine laws—sometimes called open meeting laws—that require most government meetings to be open to the public, and full disclosure of their records.

It begs the question: do you know where to go to find out about these meetings? It’s no secret that all of San Diego’s sunny days couldn’t keep our lawmakers from launching us into a pension crisis.

It turns out that information on these events isn’t easy to find anywhere. In fact, your local bureaucrats are probably spending precious tax dollars are likely being spent on running “meeting notices” in the back of obscure local newspapers.

Why? Because Sunlight laws are no longer perceived as a requirement to encourage democracy, but as simply another cumbersome step required to have a meeting.

We dream of creating a sunny solution to this kafkaesque nightmare. Why don’t bureaucrats publicize their event information on Eventful? It’d be easy to enter (relatively a cinch compared to sending announcements to newspapers), easy to find, easy to document, and it just might encourage greater civic participation.

We’re starting by cataloging all of the House and Senate’s public event information in our database, but that’s just the very beginning. There’s a lot of work ahead. Anyone know any bureaucrats looking for a break?

“The Greening of America” and Eventful

Like every Saturday, I get my cup of morning coffee and break out the lawn chair for a nice morning of reading the newest issue of “The Economist” down by the shore.

This week’s cover article “The Greening of America” looked especially promising, and provided a little hope for the future of our world. For those who have not read the article, it essentially discussed how America was “turning the corner” on environmentalism, thanks to a new Congress and unlikely actors, such as big business and the religious right. The article then serves to remind us of the way the rest of the globe views us (or perhaps used to), as a moral beacon, able to take on the bleakest of situations and lead the world past seemingly undefeatable challenges.

Inspired, I immediately broke out my laptop to see how Eventful.com was representing today’s environmental cause. The results seem to indicate that the Economist was perhaps right, that America has taken on the challenges of global warming and climate change. Represented on our site were over 750 environmental events, including conferences, meetings, beach cleanups, congressional hearings and other wide ranging topics. In the big cities, with tree-planting in L.A. and a discussion on “Building Green” in Chicago, to small towns, with “An Inconvenient Truth” screenings in Cary, N.C. and at the University of Vermont, the movement appears to be in full swing.

Hopefully all this indicates what those concerned with climate change believe needs to happen - that America will once again lead the world over seemingly insurmountable odds to a greener environment for future generations.

An Eventful Campaign

This is the story of how a few crazies at Eventful are trying to use technology to improve Democracy.

Here’s how we see it: we’ve got two parties in the US—each seeking to reflect the values and beliefs of their core base. Each November campaigners pull their base out to the ballot boxes, convincing their voters that the opposition seeks to destroy all that is right and good in the world. The distinction between loyal party member and sectarian has become blurred.

So, while conservative bloggers blog for conservative readers and liberal bloggers blog for liberal readers, we hope that technology can serve to remind us that, as Thomas Jefferson said in his inaugural speech, “We are all Democrats, we are all Republicans!” There are millions of passionate voters in this country, voters with myriad concerns and needs that don’t necessarily fit in with either of the major party platforms.

We’re building a database of all event information in the world (yes, all). This means we’re sucking up info on conventions, town hall meetings, rallies, protests, meetups, house parties, etc. We’re doing this because we think the internet can—and should—make smaller events more discoverable. It’s a pursuit that parallels transparency. That is, we believe that there are tens of thousands of wholly public events that are essentially hidden from the public simply because there’s no simple place to find them.

We want to provide tools that will allow bloggers to easily create and share events that are important to them. We want to create a service that lets people know exactly when and where they can go in their communities to make a difference. We want a place where people can find out where they can go to discuss the issues that are affecting them most.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Stay tuned, we’ll let you know how it goes…event by event.