Gavin’s Digital Diner

Her name was Jane. We met, quite unexpectedly, at Zaventem Airport in Brussels. At the Avis counter. It was such a random thing, but when I saw her I knew — no hesitation — whatever the cost, I just knew. Some things are just meant to be. With Jane, it was meant to be. Jane. I can still hear her voice.

We travelled together, she and I, bisecting France; from Brussels to Aix-en-Provence and back again. In hindsight, I couldn’t of done it without her. How I ever planned to survive, travelling those weeks without her is beyond me. I’d have been lost without her, lost.

She was my constant companion, Jane. During the day, driving, she was there. In the evenings, she’d accompany me on walks — short or long. She was never at a loss for words; she always knew just what to say. I’d hang on every word. She was worldly in ways I can’t describe. We became close in those few days together; I could sometimes even anticipate what she’s going to say next. “Oh Jane,” I said. “Run away with me. Together we’ll see the ends of the earth.” Jane, always taciturn, would say: “Go to the end of the road and turn left.” Jane had a sultry way about her, teasing yet stern, with that lilting British accent. I’d smile, knowingly. “You have reached your destination,” she’d say firmly. Then, I’d reach up and - ever so gently - pluck her from her adhesive perch on the windscreen and tuck her into the glove box. Yet, in the end, I left her. I left her in Brussels, back at the Avis counter. I had to. It was either that or lose my deposit. Jane: the GPS lady.

GPS is a liberating technology. Jane — in the form of a TomTom GPS device — was amazing. To put it nicely: driving in a strange city can be, shall we say, flummoxing. To put it accurately, it can be frustrating, irritating, and downright dangerous — to you, the other traffic, innocent and not so innocent pedestrians, and/or your assorted travelling companions.

Driving in another country quadruples that frustration and danger. Not only are you perpetually lost, but the roads are wacky, some barely wide enough for a goat (and a skinny goat at that). The pace of traffic is fast and all the signs are in a different language. [To quote Steve Martin: Those French are amazing, they have a different word for everything!] Moreover, even if the road signs are roughly approximate to English, or you happen to speak the local lingo, everything is nevertheless somehow incomprehensible.

Now what were those “three laws of robotics” again?

I’ve wandered the world, driving here and there, always with some degree of angst, some lingering anxiety about the traffic, the other drivers, where I was going, or just where the hell I was. With Jane as my co-pilot that anxiety was gone. I could concentrate on driving, either at (very) high speeds on flawless French highways or feeling like James Bond as I curved around winding trails in search of coteaux and caveau, my (rented) Audi A4 Turbo Diesel purring, Amel Bent’s Nouveaux Français blasting on the Blaupunkt.

It’s odd. Technology was supposed to be enslaving, not liberating, the enemy of democracy, not its savior. We were headed for dystopia, an Orwellian future where technology was to be a black boot on the back of the neck. I watched the year 1984 creep closer and closer, big brother looming large. It came and went, with barely a whimper.

Now, don’t get me wrong: technology can (and has) been turned to evil ends. Much has already been said about the evil ends. The possibilities for more evil abound, even for a company who’s motto is “do no evil.” (It’s just a little to newspeak for my tastes.)

The Open Secrets Effect

But I want to talk about the other side. I want to talk about Jane, and things like Jane. I want to talk about something I call the “open secrets effect,” something that has the power to save one’s marriage from map-reading malevolence, and, perhaps, the power to save democracy from itself.

While it may seem a trivial one, GPS is a good example of the open secrets effect — that magical synergy you get when you mix disaggregate information with extraordinary computational power and deliver it in new ways. In the interest of honesty, I should say that I stole the name of the effect from Larry Makinson and OpenSecrets.org, a site published by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). That site is the brainchild of Larry and of Ellen Miller. Ellen is the former executive director of CRP. She’s now at the Sunlight Foundation. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also note that my wife was CRP’s long-time communications director, until the fates led her down a much more fun career path. She’s the reason I get to do these fun trips.

The site, OpenSecrets.org is about campaign finance. It’s also a prime example of the power of opening the kimono, of exposing information that has been shrouded in darkness and complexity.

The Open Secret Effect is what happens when you shine a bright light on data, making it not just available — there are lots of maps of France “available” after all — but accessible, understandable, and personal. When you do that, something magic happens.

For example, originally, Open Secrets was a book. It was published by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). It weighed in at probably 10 pounds and was a good four inches thick. But, when CRP took that information, mixed it with a dash of database and a smidgen of internet, suddenly they had an even more powerful agent of change.

That magic mix — data, database, and internet — made the information real and powerful. People could look up their “own” politician, and see just where the money came from. There’s a new twist today, by the way, an initiative called MapLight.org. It promises to take that information to the next level, marrying campaign contributions to voting records. So called “mashups” like MapLight — where two or more previously isolated sets of data are “mashed” together — potentiate the open secrets effect. “You have reached your destination,” says Jane.

That’s the power of the open secrets effect. The mere act of opening the kimono changes behavior and changes the balance of power. Now, more than ever, U.S. political campaigns (and politicians) are dominated by big-money interests. Those interests finance the campaigns and, through those dollars and donuts, pocket the politicians that shape the fabric of our lives. Hopefully, the jig is up. With the open secrets effect of MapLight and OpenSecrets, it should be much more difficult to be bought and sold, especially when everybody knows how cheap the price.

So too, the inherent “connectedness” of the Internet is also changing the relationship of money to power as well. Big money is still there (by the bucket-full in this particular election season) but it is being somewhat counterbalanced by so-called internet campaigns, campaigns that are using the ‘net’s ability to aggregate lots of small things, in this case small contributions.

For good or for bad, campaign contributions have been ruled as constituting “free speech.” As such, more people are speaking than ever before. [Sadly, over two-thirds of those dollars — regardless of source — just end up fueling the creation of traditional one-way TV spots, designed not to inform but to obscure, enrage, or distract. One-way media must perish from this earth.]

Nevertheless, today’s innovative (dare I say social) uses of technology have had a liberating effect. Instead of robbing us of rights, they have increased our participation, restoring power to the formerly powerless. It has strengthened our democracy, not undermined it. To paraphrase Al Gore in his (absolutely terrific) book, The Assault on Reason, “a connected citizenry” is our greatest hope. The new internet is all about connections and the open secret effect.

More and more secrets are being opened. It’s a revolution in knowledge, power, and influence. Suddenly the powerless are powerful, the disenfranchised are raised up. It is something that can change the course of history or something that can get you from village “A” to vineyard “B” (and back again). “Take the roundabout, second exit,” says Jane.

Opening this secret can of worms has the potential to turn power on its head — counterbalancing previously one-sided relationships or creating strength of numbers where there was none previously. It’s directly responsible for the new realization that “consumers” are not passive patsies but active participants. Nowhere is this truer than in the development of software, for example. Software publishing has become a dynamic, interactive process where the customers participate in the product’s development, even doing the product testing.

Previously top-down, one-sided relationships are being changed — for the better IMHO. For example, let’s look at some previously one-sided relationships: between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist, between the Fourth Estate and the public, and between grantee and grantor. These are being turned on their heads — they’re feeling the open secrets effect. They are being forced to operate in an environment where the formerly obscure is now in public view, i.e., the open secrets effect is at work.

In one of my favorite examples of truly living the Open Secrets life, Southwest Airlines actually made a television show of their inner operations called “Airline,” with a tag line of “We all have our baggage!”

Meanwhile, a site called TheFunded has turned the tables on the world of the holy venture capitalist, dishing up a place that allows entrepreneurs to rate their would-be suitors. TheFunded has changed the equation by opening up the secrets that everybody “knew” but nobody shared. TheFunded has aggregated the voice of the powerless, and in so doing, become powerful. Now the VC’s are beginning to understand the real business they’re in and the nature of their relationship with their customers, the entrepreneur.

A more Web 2.0 example is being done by Google. Google is turning the one-way-medium called “the news” into a two-way conversation by introducing a way to give the subjects of news reports a way to comment on articles written about them. What was a one-way pipe is now a two-way conversation. It chips away at the Fourth Estate’s overwhelming power to set and control the agenda.

Finally, there is a little open secrets project I’m involved with. It’s called GrantsFire. [I don't have much to show you yet about GrantsFire – but you can look at the hGrant microformat standard, if you want. Microformats are a way of marking up web pages to make them machine readable. Find information here.]

Clearly, grants are no secret, just as maps of France are easy to come by. However, GrantsFire is about seeing and presenting that information in new ways. GrantsFire is an initiative to both establish a standard for publishing machine-readable grants information on the web, and about encouraging foundations to publish such information. Once up and running, with a critical mass of participants, that information can be aggregated by one (or more) sites. People will be able to run the data through a data vegamatic, slicing and dicing by topic, type of support, geographic focus, foundation, dates, and dollars. Who knows what mashups might result. Perhaps the next time I’m careening around France, Jane at my side, she’ll pipe up and say: “You have reached your destination. There’s a vineyard on your left, a gas station on your right, and this area has received over $4 million in private grants to encourage organic farming, improve educational test scores among children, grades K-12, and to finance microenterprise.”

Secrets are now open secrets. Clive Thompson, writing for WIRED in an article entitled “The See-Through CEO,” writes:

“The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn’t steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you - and everyone trembles before search engine rankings.”

It’s a new world. Expose yourself. Come drive with Jane and see the power of the open secrets effect.

{Photograph copyright: Pam Green, 2003}

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