Porter Bayne is the creator of a new online community called Ameritocracy.com, a site that allows users to read what politicians actually say, comment on their speeches, and rate the comments of other people. Think of it as a type of fact-checking site for people who don’t have lots of free time to read candidate speeches for themselves.

The site is in testing right now, but you can try it out by using beta invitation code ipdi.

Bayne and I spoke last week about his site, good governance, and bringing people together to talk about politics:

Who are you?

My friend Iris and I have been collaborating since January 2007 to design this thing.  She’s a brilliant creative from upstate New York and has a pretty leftist worldview.  I’m from Texas originally and have always been fairly conservative, including a die-hard stint in the College Republicans for awhile.  I razz her for being a liberal socialist hippie and I get accused of being evil on occasion.  It’s pretty fun.

James, our CTO, was a medic in the army in the late 80s, stationed in Latin America.  As he says, “I’d wake up and read in American papers that I supposedly wasn’t there doing what I was doing.”  Bobby and I met pretty randomly - online! - back in 2000 when I wrote for a small computer gaming site, and Brian - who’s had a huge impact on how we think about our system technically, brings the pragmatism of Indiana to the team.  So, we very much bring an end-user perspective on politics and media to the table.

What inspired you to create Ameritocracy?

I think each of us involved in the project had our own light bulb experience.  For me, I originally came up with a similar concept in 2004 when I was frustrated with how so many of my friends/colleagues were repeating misinformation straight from campaigns’ mouths or their favorite radio show, and they didn’t trust information from the “other side.”  Then one day my sister, who reads voraciously and has as many degrees as my right hand has digits, said “I just don’t know how you stay up on political information”.  That made it real to me: people just don’t have time to keep up.

How will Ameritocracy help solve the information overload problem that so many American citizens have?

Isn’t it something that civic literacy has declined since the web and the 24 hour cable news station became the norm?  It boils down to time and trust.  What we do is allow users to report brief quotes from politicians, pundits, and organizations, with sources cited.  Users can then write short responses that support, challenge, or simply add context to the quote.  Sources must be cited.  Based on the quote and user-written responses, community members rate the quote itself for how credible the speaker is being, and how much the quote’s content matters to them.  So the content is quick to read and engage.  And the ratings allow the community to generate reputation for users as well as the politicians, pundits, and organizations they are discussing.

Your site seems to rely on the ideas of collaboration within an online community. Can collaboration/the wisdom of crowds/crowd sourcing actually create change on a policy level? How do you think Ameritocracy and other sites may impact the political environment?

I think we’re already seeing it.  YouTube|CNN debates are a step in the right direction.  The Obama campaign clearly benefitted from multiple aspects of collaboration and crowd sourcing.  The World Economic Forum just opened up with a YouTuber addressing the crowd.
So yes… if Ameritocracy can help educate and engage more people with better information, then we can impact policy.  According to a report from the Pew Center for People and the Press, the higher someone’s civic literacy is, the more they want to learn and the more valuable they think it is to be involved in their community.  That means change in whether people vote, how they vote, and then what other steps they might take to be involved in their community.

What goal would you like Ameritocracy to accomplish in the next two years? What about long term?

Our blue-sky goal is to get regular people much more engaged and influential in important sociopolitical dialog at local, state, and national levels.  By “regular,” I simply mean those of us lacking the time or inclination to read news and editorial pieces a few hours a day.

We want to be the place people turn to check something out quickly, either by coming to the site or seeing it in a widget out in the wild.  Moreover, we want people interacting, knowing they have a place where their participation does make an impact, even if it’s just casting a quick vote.  And we hope to be a favorite, efficient resource for journalists and researchers.
We’ll be the place people come to report, rate, and respond to politicians, the media, and other organizations.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under 2008 Election, Citizen Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.