Rebuilding Democracy: Town Meeting Government for the Internet Age
Integrating a Civic Internet for the Civil Body Politic of The Internet Age.
Join us as we Deploy a New Generation of Neighborhood Networks, Convene Civic Forums, Organize Engineering Working Groups, and Integrate a Civic Internet for the Civil Body Politic of The Internet Age.
It's Time Again for We the People to in Town Meeting Assemble
American Democracy Was Born in Town Meeting. 250 Years ago, We the People gathered in Town Meetings, Assemblies, Congresses, and Constitutional Conventions. We Declared our Independence, Raised an Army, Fought a War, Ordained & Established a Constitution, and Issued a Great Seal Proclaiming E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One.
Since then, we've weathered Plague, Environmental Disaster, Economic Collapse, Civil War, World War, Cold War, and now we Fight a War on Terrorism at Home & Abroad. So far, our Democracy has Prevailed.
Today, as I write this, we find ourselves a quarter century into a new Millenium, on the eve of our 250th Birthday as a nation, choosing new leadership - one candidate promising to radically reshape our government along authoritarian lines, the other a new way forward.
Either way, it again falls to us, We the People to Assemble in Town Meeting to Renew our Democracy, share our Visions & Aspirations, Make New Plans, and Organize Ourselves to Shape the Future. To Make our Voices Heard & our Presence Felt as we Chart our Way Forward into a New Millenium of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. As We Form a More Perfect Union, Establish Justice, Insure Domestic Tranquility, Provide for the Common Defence, Promote the General Welfare, and Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity.
Town Meeting for the Internet Age
In 1963, JCR Licklider sent a memo to colleagues - kicking off a series of meetings & events leading to the Internet that now serves as the nervous system for our human enterprise here on planet earth. A process not unlike that which led from a Town Meeting on Boston Common to the United States Government as we know it today.
In 1969, Steve Crocker organized the Network Working Group (NWG) and wrote RFC (Request for Comment) #1, the basic model for Internet governance by collaborative standards writing. A model that harkens back to Sam Adams, the Boston Town Meeting, Town Meetings across Massachusetts, Committees of Correspondence, and the Boston Pamphlet that gave birth to the United States. The NWG evolved into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Society, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN which, to the extent that anything does, govern the Internet to this day.
In 1971, this writer arrived at MIT just as Ray Tomlinson sent the first email across the ARPANET, launching our modern era of virtual teams & communities. Alan Kay proclaimed the best way to predict the future is to invent it and a generation of engineers set out to build the Internet, the Web, the Social Network, and now... a Civic Internet.
In 1992, the Internet opened to the public, which immediately began calling for Electronic Democracy, Electronic Town Halls, and Electronic Town Meetings. Dave Clark described Internet Governance thusly: We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code. And this author, fresh from developing the Concept of Operations & Network Management Architecture for the Defense Data Network (the military segments of the Internet that grew out of the ARPANET), left BBN to form the Center for Civic Networking, with notions of bringing Internet-style Town Meeting Governance to local communities. We built Community Networks & organized Civic Forums - focusing particularly on municipal master planning. We helped expand Internet infrastructure: We brought high-speed Internet access to Public Libraries, supported early Open Data efforts, built the Public WebMarket to support rural microentrepreneurs reach world markets, and helped cities & towns plan infrastructure and launch Municipal Broadband Networks.[1]
Now, 30 years later, we've wired the world. Six of our 8 billions are linked into a network-of-minds - each of us, and all of us, with the potential to be anywhere & everywhere, all at once. We've built an electronic town hall for the world, and organizational models for thinking & working together in large number. We can now turn our collective attention to rebuilding larger swaths of our aging infrastructure. Humanity is milling in the lobby, exchanging cat pictures & shouting political slogans. It's time to call Town Meeting to Order.
Starting the Process
Here, in Acton, MA - coincidentally, birthplace of the first Minuteman Company to cross the Old North Bridge in Concord, and die turning back British Redcoats - I find myself living in Nagog Woods... the oldest condominium complex in Massachusetts. I serve on one of our four Condominium Boards, as its Treasurer, and on our complex-wide Long-Range Capital Planning Committee. At 50 years old, we face a challenge common to many neighborhoods: Charting our way through major renovations, while avoiding both catastrophic system failures, and staggering construction costs.
I started to apply my previous experience to the problem, blogging my progress at ThisOldNeighborhood.Net - and quickly discovered that we are not alone in facing this challenge, and that Condominium communities are being forced to proceed at a scale & scope well beyond our experience & capability.
Many suburban subdivisions, built in the post-WWII era, are starting to crumble - badly in need of major renovations. Our governing strictures, and perverse economic incentives, drive us to keep costs & fees down, by avoiding major repairs that might require us to update to current building codes; the result being decades of deferred maintenance, now catching up to us in the form of skyrocketing operating costs & condo fees, staggering special assessments for major repairs, catastrophic system failures, and the exit of insurance companies from 20 state markets and counting. Compounding matters are requirements to adapt to changing climate & weather patterns, and shift from fossil fuels to electric heating, cooling, and hot water systems. The losses from collapse of Miami's Champlain Towers alone included 98 lives, and $1.02 billion[2]. The Economist estimates that, climate change and the fight against it could wipe out 9% of the value of the world’s housing by 2050—which amounts to $25trn[3].
Opportunities are likewise staggering: By rough estimate, full renovation of one condominium unit costs $200k, an 8-unit building, $1.6m, a 277-unit complex, $55m - not counting grounds, utility infrastructure, or common facilities. In Massachusetts alone, there are roughly 157k condominium units, clustered in 10k buildings - a potential market of over $31billion[4] in one state alone. If we can figure out how to get our acts together!
Here in Acton, we recently passed a by-law Regulating Fossil Fuel Infrastructure in Buildings, as one of 9 communities participating in the Massachusetts Municipal Fossil Fuel Free Building Construction and Renovation Demonstration Project - preventing construction and installation of new fossil fuel infrastructure. The by-law presents both a challenge to large-scale renovation projects, and an opportunity to pay for such projects through energy savings & tax incentives.
On October 8, we organized a Zoom-based Town Meeting, asking: How Do We Redevelop Our Aging Neighborhoods & How Do We PAY For It?[5] We asked:
How We Reinvest in & Redevelop our aging neighborhoods, without breaking the bank?
How we do it in the context of changing weather patterns, and new building codes requiring fossil fuel free redevelopment?
How do we Buy Local, Build Local, and Invest Local to strengthen our local economies?
How do we access the Municipal Planning, Engineering, Financing, and Purchasing services that our taxes pay for, but that stop at the boundaries of neighborhoods managed by Condominium & Homeowners Associations?
How do we benefit from an emerging political focus on Housing & Small Business Development, and Developing Generational Wealth?
We exited the meeting with a mandate to identify models for comprehensive neighborhood redevelopment, develop tools & techniques for communities to apply, and promote policies & programs to support neighborhood reinvestment & redevelopment.
Three days later, I attended a 250th Anniversary Reenactment of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress that directly led to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The event concluded with a rousing talk, by Larry Lessig (best known for his proclamation that Code is Law), calling for Constituent Assemblies to Shape Policy & Restore Democracy. And that's what we are proceeding to do.
We're following the model pioneered by the early Internet community - organizing Working Groups, linking them together into a Civic Engineering Task Force, organizing Policy Forums, leading to Crowdsourcing programs fueled by Demand Pull from within our neighborhoods.
We invite you to join the Town Meeting already in Process, @ThisOldNeighborhood.Civic.Net.
The Road to CivicNet 2025
On a larger scale, we see this as a start toward Integrating a Civic Internet: Networking the Civil Body Politic of The Internet Age: Deploying a New Generation of Neighborhood Networks, Organizing Permanent Civic Forums, and Spawning Permanent Engineering Working Groups in Neighborhoods... Everywhere. Restoring Town Meeting Government Of the People, By the People, For the People.
The process mirrors the events leading up to the 1983 Internet Flag Day - where network sites everywhere where required to migrate to TCP/IP, from the older NCP protocols - a process that involved ad hoc working groups across the Internet vendor & user community - and might be viewed as the birth of the integrated network-of-networks that we now call the Internet. The level of coordination involved led to convergence of the IETF and its first formal meeting in 1986, followed the next year by the first TCP/IP Interoperability Conference (INTEROP) - where vendors demonstrated their wares in an exhibition-wide ShowNet. We envision a similar process for launching a Campaign to Redevelop Suburbia:
Publishing a series of white papers & op-ed pieces to recruit participants & working groups from neighborhoods across Massachusetts, and then other states.
Organizing a series of online policy forums with public officials & political representatives - town meetings operating as initially intended, with citizens providing direction to their government, leading up to a
Plenary Conference, in early 2025, following installation of a new Administration in Washington. We plan to hold this conference in Concord MA, in the tradition of the MA Provincial Congress - where representatives from MA towns gathered to voice the sentiments of their town meetings. (We see this as particularly appropriate in this period where Americans are gathering to celebrate our 250th Birthday, and where, if our Nation survives, a new Administration will be calling on We the People to Chart a New Way Forward - particularly around housing.)
Developing A Platform for Broad-Based Collaboration
We plan to build on the models & open-source tools perfected by the IETF over its years of guiding the Internet. In particular, we plan to adopt the Meetechoo conferencing platform, and DataTracker document database used to organize the thrice-yearly IETF plenary conferences & support ongoing working group activities. We plan to add a modeling & simulation environment, environment, to support scenario gaming support for community planning.
Currently, the Protocol Technologies Group LLC supports the effort - providing a combination of services akin to the BBN Internet NOC, SRI's RFC Editor and IANA Functions, and CNRI's Secretariat Functions. This writer is doing his best to play a combination of Dave Clark, John Postel, and Bob Kahn - while recruiting a larger cast of characters & sponsors. Over the long haul, we intend to migrate these functions into a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), organized as a self-sustaining member-owned cooperative corporation.
We invite your participation and support.
Join us @Civic.Net as we Develop the Platform, Form Working Groups, and Solicit Presentations Exhibitors & Sponsors for our first CivicNet conference.
Join the Town Meeting already in Process, @ThisOldNeighborhood.Civic.Net
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20031002113041/http://civic.net/ccn.html
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/judge-approves-billion-dollar-settlement-surfside-condo-collapse/
[3] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/04/11/global-warming-is-coming-for-your-home
[4] https://ma-eeac.org/wp-content/uploads/MA21R34-B-MFCEN_Full_Report.pdf
[5] https://thisoldneighborhood.substack.com/p/how-do-we-redevelop-our-aging-neighborhoods
