• myssieb: I snored right through it #dcquake
• mobilizer: 3 all-time records set this year: 55″ of snow, 105 degree heat, and 3.6 mag quake. What’s God trying to tell us? #DCQuake
• PrinceChowder: Ima use da #DCQuake as a reason for me being late but #TruthIs I’m always late o_0 lol
• RachelLBurnett: Bush will be blamed for #dcquake & #Obama will take credit for no damage. #tcot #p2
• nhagerwtop: I’m with all the other CA transplants. I used to sleep through 5.0s when I was a kid. #dcquake
• germonique: That’s the word I was looking for! I made panquakes! #dcquake
• joerominiecki: Didn’t feel the earthquake. I’m a heavy sleeper though. Doubt I’d wake for anything less than 6. #dcquake
• bethanyhardy: Must … stop … Tweeting about the #dcquake. Especially since I didn’t feel it. #movealongnothingtoseehere
• jeaparris: False Alarm guys. I simply had too much dairy last night. #dcquake
• DanPCurran: I slept through an earthquake?? Better question: WHO IS PERFORMING IN OUR OBLIGATORY CHARITY CONCERT? #dcquake
• sosarahsays: I’d bet money that the earthquake will somehow mess up the Metro this morning. @unsuckdcmetro #dcquake #wmata\
• districtjoe: Getting dressed to “I Feel the Earth Move” #dcquake
• carewo: Damage inflicted by #dcquake… it knocked the toilet bowl brush out of its holder. Don’t worry everyone we’re ok!
• WashingTina: Ok…I’m going back to bed. Enough excitement for one day… #dcquake #doover
• zHeather: Alrighty, #dcquake or not, I’ve gotta get ready for work. Hopefully the planet will stay still while I shower.
• SophieBegonia: Earthquake was a 3.7. My dog’s response was a 8.9 in puppy-panic. #dcquake
• khoney: Small 3.6 earthquake this morning near DC: maybe Earth demanding action on climate bill? #DCquake
• ahepker: How does the Secret Service protect the president from an earthquake? Not really something you can jump in front of… #dcquake
• geomantic: Well, I’m awake now dammit. #dcquake
• dcurbandad: I thought it was my wife wanting to get with me. But it was just the #dcquake.

Social Entrepreneurship: Leading Social Change from Nick Troiano on Vimeo.

The concept is not foreign to government. Last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsored a contest in which ten giant balloons were placed around the country, and a prize was offered to a team of people who could locate them all the fastest. The goal was designed “to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.” In addition, as a story in today’s Washington Post points out, NASA has used contests to develop “flexible astronaut gloves, a lunar rover and wireless power transmission.” The winners came from the least likely of places. The story included a great anecdote that showed this is not new:

“One of the most famous contests was sponsored in the 18th century by the British Parliament in a desperate bid to determine longitude at sea as ocean-going commerce was exploding. A clockmaker, John Harrison, won the bulk of the prize, worth 20,000 British pounds, with a marine chronometer capable of keeping precise time in rough and changing sea conditions.

“No one expected a craftsman to win it. They expected one of the great astronomers to win it using some kind of astronomical approach,” said Andy Petro, manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.”

Think about what that means for innovation – that the best ideas are in areas just now being tapped into on a large scale. Atlas Corps founder Scott Beale tells a good story of how the Gates Foundation was wracking their brains about how to distribute malaria nets to families without encountering the problem of the men selling them to others in order to get money for food. The game-changing idea didn’t come from a room of the most educated and best paid staff person – it came from a native who suggested making the nets pink instead of blue, and thus drastically devaluing it (no man wants to sell a pink net, duh).

So the starting point in this conversation, and why this model is so important, is a humbling recognition that – we don’t know it all. A good incentive, a simple process and a means to reaching the crowd has the power to transform innovation and problem-solving. [Sometimes the first ingredient isn't even necessary.]

Coincidentally, at a ServiceNation coalition meeting last week, member organizations were given the opportunity to suggest ideas about where the movement should go or things it should do. I stood up and stated simply, “Use new technology to leverage the wisdom and power of the crowd.” Indeed, instead of a group of “experts” sitting in the W Hotel deciding where the movement should go, why not use Google Moderator and open it up everyone? As I heard complaints in the room about organizations adapting their programs to foundation priorities just so they can get funding, why not foster a system of funding like the Pepsi Refresh Contest (where all you have to do is convince other people, again not a panel of “experts,” that your idea is worthy of funding)? Everyone was also talking about outcome based measurements and how to measure effectiveness, why not crowdsource and then standardize metrics to use in such evalutation?

I’m not sure the room got the point. It’s a new idea. And my guess is that the more examples and successes that can be pointed to and modeled after, the more people and organizations will begin to adopt it. I’m enthused by the Case Foundation’s collaboration with the White House to speed this process up.

It was a pleasure to plan this event, and thanks to Ustream, many more people can benefit from this discussion and take part in the conversation on-demand. On a Tax Day marked with angry protests, events like these show how people from different generations and different political views can get together and have a rational and civil discussion.

“Being an environmentalist means different things in different places. By choosing five or more of these actions and sharing your stories, you CAN make a positive difference for the environment. Join with others around the world today to take the small actions that will add up to make the biggest difference. Are you ready?”

The new campaign is a vast improvement over where it was a year ago – offering more actions, greater immersion with the social web, and a more compelling user experience. I had the opportunity to study Pick 5 as part of an assignment for my E-Government 2.0 course this semester, in which we had to examine a “failed e-government project.” You can download my report “Pick 5 Analysis” and view some PowerPoint slides highlighting my research below. The report explores how Pick 5 fell short of its public engagement goals but utilized a method of “failing fast” to identify areas of improvement and build off of them (as this relaunch demonstrates).

Many thanks to EPA’s Web manager Jeffrey Levy and the State Department’s Lovisa Williams for the time in this project.

Well, the hangover is upon us.  An Associated Press analysis recently found that young people’s health premiums could rise at much as 17 percent under the new law. Although the analysis did not factor in potential benefits to young people such as being allowed to stay on parents’ insurance to age 26 and tax credits that vary for those making under $42,320 a year, it’s safe to say that a 27-35 year-old making more than $42K a year will see a pretty steep increase in the cost of health insurance.

The increase is a result of the law’s limiting of the price discrepancy between policies offered to young and old people. What was a 1-6 or 1-7 ratio is now capped at 1-3. Despite having lower income and higher unemployment, the Millennial Generation is being forced to subsidize the new health care entitlement, which by its very nature benefits older Americans as they are more likely to use health care services.

Bet you didn’t hear that in all of the debate. But that’s not all.

When President Obama signed the health care legislation, the federal government also transitioned all student loans into the Direct Loan program, removing third-party federally-subsidized lenders. This saved $61 billion, which was mostly reinvested into higher education. Sounds like a good deal for young people, right? Indeed, many cheer about the direct and immediate benefit of increased Pell Grants. Yet these grants will only increase by $350 over the next ten years, which the New York Time calls “minuscule.”

It seems if Congress was really looking to do something to benefit all young people, rather than spending savings that could otherwise reduce the budget deficit (which young people will ironically eventually have to repay) on narrow constituencies, it would have simply reduced student loan interest rates. Instead, students will be overcharged by the government, which borrows money at 2.8% and then lends it at 6.8%, to subsidize other federal programs (i.e. the new health care entitlement). Lowering interest rates would have been a much greater financial benefit. In fact, one piece of legislation, introduced by Senator Lamar Alexander, reduces rates by 1.5% and saves the average student $1,800 over ten years (on an average $25,000 loan). Don’t expect that piece of legislation to go anywhere.

It seems in both scenarios, the Millennial Generation was told it would benefit, while in reality, the wool was being pulled over our eyes. This all shouldn’t come as a surprise, partially because there is no AARP equivalent for Millennials. We simply don’t have the political power to advocate for ourselves. (Do you think seniors would ever see a 17 percent increase in their premiums?) To me, the surprise is that so many young people are (still) willing to support these policies. In both cases, we could have achieved health insurance reform and the Direct Loan program transition without digging our generation deeper into debt and facilitating an inter-generational transfer of wealth. I presume the best explanation, besides Gerson’s suggestion of ignorance or idealism, is that there is just plain loyalty to the President and the Democratic Party among some young people, although according to a recent Pew report, it is fading.

Michael Frank noted that once Millennials connect higher prices, constrained wages, and fewer job opportunities to the policies that cause them, he predicts “then those healthy, and generally conservative, policy instincts can kick in.” We can only hope. Millennials are not doing themselves any favors by ignoring these realities.

It wasn’t always like that. Justices Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia and Kennedy did not have a single vote against their confirmations. That the opposite is happening is not just a reflection of growing partisanship in Washington, nor the attributes of the nominees themselves – but of the very real and growing problem of the idea of a “living Constitution.” If we were to treat the Constitution as it should be treated – a legal text whose meaning must be discerned within the context of what its words meant when they were adopted by the people, in order to apply it to various cases – then we would be looking for legal scholars who can do this job well and reasonably.

“If on the other hand,” Justice Scalia once said, “we’re picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a new constitution with all sorts of new values to govern our society, then we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look principally for people who agree with us, the majority, as to whether there ought to be this right, that right and the other right.”

And that is what we will see in the coming weeks: a search for someone who, primarily, believes in what we want him or her to believe in. It seems we don’t much care about the rest, which begs the question why we are looking for just lawyers and not politicians (oh, wait). Gallup reports that 49% of Republicans think the court is too liberal and 30% of Democrats believe the court is too conservative. However, overall, 50% of Americans people think the court is “about right.” Thus, the President – who by most accounts is not looking to expend much political capital in a confirmation fight – will likely be looking for a “moderate” nominee. At this point, we’ve reached the point of being incoherent. Again, Justice Scalia:

“What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean? There is no such thing as a moderate interpretation of the text. Would you ask a lawyer, ‘Draw me a moderate contract?’ The only way the word has any meaning is if you are looking for someone to write a law, to write a constitution, rather than to interpret one.”

Taa-daa. That’s precisely whom we seem to be looking for. And that’s precisely how we get outrageous decisions that create new rights but do not follow such rights to their logical ends by arbitrarily drawing legal lines in the sand so as to seem “moderate.” (See Lawrence v. Texas). This simply represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a justice, and the role of the court for that matter. And while it may seem, albeit in a rather perverse way, that it is democratic for a political majority to get its way by stacking the court with justices who will rule in its favor, it is not. The living constitution, based on the idea that we should read new meanings into the Constitution based on our evolving understanding of rights and so forth, is anti-democratic.

When Justices determine that there is or there is not a right to something – that decision is binding on us, save for a Constitutional amendment. No local, state or federal government can say otherwise. Further, such a determination is not necessarily based on what the people have said they want, but what nine particular justices think we ought to have. The living constitution breeds rigidity not flexibility. The other route is not to convince a handful of lawyers whether there should be a right to abortion or gay marriage or assisted suicide or anything of the sort that is clearly not governed by the Constitution, but to convince fellow citizens and, in turn, our representatives to make a law. That’s democracy, grounded in a separation of powers.

The modern era of judicial activism and conception of the living Constitution has undermined democracy, and has compelled us (both liberals and conservatives) to conform with its flawed ideas by seeking judges who will be on our side when issues come before the court – removing power from the people, concentrating power in the hands of a few elite, and devaluing the entire purpose of a written Constitution. The ongoing debate over who should replace Justice Stevens is case in point.

Congress in a Wordle: the most common adjectives used by respondants to describe Congress in a recent Pew survey.

As I wrote last week, the Coffee Party is a growing movement that might just answer that call. Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to attend my first Coffee Party as Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.  The event was televised on C-SPAN – you can watch the program online. Linda Killian from the Woodrow Wilson Center pointed out that 93% of Americans believe there is too much bickering in Washington and, according to a recent Pew survey, “dysfunction” was the number one term used to describe Congress. Though the crowd was overrepresented by the political left, it was clear the Coffee Party itself is not ideological. It is about finding solutions to make our government work better and reengaging citizens in the democratic process. So what kind of reforms are we talking about?

A necessary part of making government work better, Friedman writes, is breaking the oligopoly of the two-party system. At the Coffee Party event, in Freidman’s article, and at this weekend’s Transparency Camp hosted by the Sunlight Foundation, two specific ideas were in constant discussion: redistricting reform and alternate voting. These two relatively common sense reforms would be an effective means to reclaim government from the two political extremes and getting it working again.

Redistricting is a timely discussion. The process happens in most states every 10 years, following the decennial Census. As of today, only 5 states redistrict through bipartisan commissions and 2 states through independent bodies. The majority (36 states) redistrict directly through the state legislature, which is most commonly exploited for political purposes. This process leads to the famous gerrymander, as geographic areas are carved out to favor one party of another. This is why the incumbency rate in Congress is about 90%. We’re not choosing our representatives – they’re choosing us. [Check out a documentary on Gerrymandering to air soon.] Thanks to new technologies, with a touch of a button we can now create compact and contiguous districts that will be more competitive. No longer would elections be decided in the primaries, which produce political extreme candidates.

In fact, that’s why Phil Keisling recently proposed getting rid of primary elections altogether. FairVote’s Rob Richie points out, however, that without instituting alternate voting, such a proposal might led to unintended consequences. Alternate voting, also known as instant runoff voting, allows voters to rank their candidates according to preference. This system would be more welcome to third party candidates, as voters would no longer have to worry about “wasting their votes.” Again, this would create a system that would produce a more representative government, run by elected officials who no longer are beholden to the right or left wing fringes.

Electing a President who promises to change the tone of Washington and bring the parties together is not enough, as we have seen. We need fundamental, democratic reforms such as redistricting reform and alternate voting. This necessitates citizens raising their voices and organizing, not in protest to government, but in unity to demand a better one.