Contents - Index

9.1.   Overview of the Public Interest Network Project                   (Top)

Dual Objectives
The objectives of this project are twofold.  The first objective is to test the depth and breadth and the future of the spontaneous, self-organizing, and bubbling-up political process unleashed by the Internet in the form of public advocacy networks and facilitative leadership.  Will this process be the means by which the American people achieve consensus on issues and have them heard in a representative democracy and will this process become an independent force in American politics powerful enough to check the power of governments and corporations and restore a balance that the Constitutional Balance-of-Powers and pluralistic countervailing powers are failing to do?  Is the Internet-based grass roots political phenomenon that we are observing today the precursor to a permanent new force in American democracy?  Is this the solution to the problem of creeping power concentrations and abuse in democratic systems that has alluded philosophers for centuries because they simply could not have foreseen today's army of educated, informed, and technically savvy citizens and the Internet?  

The second major objective of the public interest network project is to look inside the natural citizen participation process unleashed by the Internet to learn how it can be nurtured to become a full-fledged public interest institution and to develop a set of guidelines and lists of potential stumbling blocks for citizen leaders and citizen participants.  Besides the contribution to understanding and we hope bettering American democracy, it will recognize the leaders, volunteers, and members of A-Nets for their cooperation in this research and development project.  Hopefully, it will guide the creation and operation of new A-Nets in the ways of successful predecessors and to help restore health to the American political system.

This project has been unofficially underway for several months.  We have been compiling materials, carrying on an Internet dialog to explore ideas and approach, and we have been collecting  baseline data to inform our hypotheses and to use later for the analysis of changes over time.  The first official project is a case study of the advocacy network called Moveon.org, Berkeley, California, a highly successful and widely-recognized advocacy group and prototypical example of the fascinating new emergent democracy process.  Moveon was founded by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades.  Wes Boyd, cofounder and CEO of Berkeley System, Inc., has been keenly interested in the implications of nets like Moveon on American democracy and is one the three principle investigators of the research and development project dedicated to that timely question.  This case study will serve as a pilot study for learning what to ask and how to ask it to learn the secrets of  bottom-up advocacy networks.  

Following the case study of Moveon.org, we will officially begin data collection from the records of advocacy networks, personal interviews and on-line surveys with leaders, participants, policy makers, and media reports. William Boyd, Professor of Law at the University of Arizona and coinvestigator, will help to oversee the data collection and will conduct a class on the topic of the Internet and democracy in the Spring of 2004 in which students will participate in this project as part of their assignments.  He will also make available the research and computer facilities at the University of Arizona College of Law for certain parts of this research.  Dr. Lawrence Boyd, President of Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, Arizona, is the third investigator.  Lawrence is a former professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Arizona State University.  He has a Doctorate in political science and social work with special interests in political philosophy and quantitative methods and is the author of an innovative Internet-based toolkit for scientists that will be used in this project.  He will develop the on-line questionnaires and instrumentation, help conduct the research, oversee the data analysis, and dedicate the facilities of Pasadero, Inc., in Tempe to this project.  

Other participants in this research, including PR people, interviewers, data processors, and editors, wherever possible, will be members of our own family and friends political discussion network and we will use the technologies we are studying to tap into the huge pool of American and world citizens for an on-going online debate about the potentials of public interest networks for participatory democracy.

There are four major sets of research tasks in the body of this project.  The first focuses on the properties of A-Nets individually.  The second focuses on the properties of the network of A-Nets.  The third focuses on A-Net campaigns and the fourth focuses on the impact of A-Nets on the political system.  The first three sets of tasks involve the collection of data directly related to the subject.  The fourth area involves the collection of data on political events over time from which inferences about the impact of the A-Net phenomenon on the political system are made indirectly.  Individual political events of this kind are the most subject to interpretation.  No single event stands alone because in many circumstances the observed phenomenon could be accounted for by factors other than the public interest network.  It is the total picture of political events over time in combination with findings about the properties of A-Nets that will support the hypothesis that the public interest network operates to restore balance to the political system.

Sample Design
Our sample size is necessarily limited by the heavy requirements of the research within A-Nets.  Also, we expect substantial variation across A-Nets.  Our strategy is to make aggregate level inferences from unit level research.  Consequently, we will stratify a random sample of A-Nets by type and size.  This will ensure that our sample is representative of the universe of A-Nets.  With 4 major types of A-Nets and three size levels (small, medium, and large), we get 12 subgroups.  Randomly selecting two from each group makes a sample size of 24 A-Nets.  The case study of Moveon.org will be used to verify the validity of our sample frame and methods.

Research Periods
An important dimension of this research is time.  A democratic political system is in a constant state of change.  Healthy democracies change in cycles in response to the problem of balancing the creation of wealth with distributing it.  Healthy and ailing democracies occasionally experience dramatic shifts due to historical, structural, and technological changes in the system's environment.  Our premise is that American democracy is experiencing such a shift and that we need to observe the system over time periods that will effectively capture that change.  

Therefore, we will make observations in four time periods, starting retrospectively at the  first use of the Internet in public interest groups (1997?).  The second period runs from 1998, when Moveon launched the first large-scale campaign using the Internet, through the political campaigns preceding the Democratic Party primary.  The third period runs from the day after the Democratic primary through campaigns and Party Conventions for the November, 2004 elections.  The fourth period runs from the day after the election through the first week after the 2006 November Congressional elections.  Therefore, research covers a period of about 9 years, of which 3 years is prospective.  However, there will be important information to report by the end of November this year (2003) and periodically until the end of 2006.

Because of changing circumstances, hypotheses will change to fit the situation.  For example, if President Bush wins another term in the 2004 elections, then we might expect an increase and  intensification in public interest network activity.  On the other hand, if he is defeated, we might predict a decline in progressive A-Net activity with a change in quality toward hot issues and perhaps some proactive campaigns.  At that point, we might even predict the emergence of conservative A-Net activity.    

Project Funding
Our plan is to seek funding through the Small Business Innovation Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation.  We are also considering private sources of funding, including our own pockets.  If funding is delayed or we find it too constraining, we will pursue this project on our own

Project Publications
The results of this project will be published online on our Emergent Democracy: American Democracy in Transition Website. We expect to publish a series of discussions and articles online and in professional and popular journals and we expect to publish at least one book on public interest democracy.

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