Here are a few specific starting points, then I’ll get to my main point, which is that we (a technologically-oriented US, at least) are not well set up for the future in terms of how we evolve tech policy. Not a new thought, but I think the SOPA situation may be putting us in a worse spot.

But first 3 starting points and a personal observation:

1. SOPA+PIPA are awful bills. No way around it. They over-reach, they circumscribe civil liberties, and they mostly will not work. They shouldn’t pass, and we should do whatever we can to keep that from happening. They’re the latest in a long line of legislation that looks like this: reducing freedoms in a misguided attempt to protect us from a different big bad. They’re so numerous in US history they hardly need listing here.

2. Existing industries are always oriented towards self-preservation. No exception here. But there’s a funny thing that happens: the most progressive companies of today who become successful and dominant will become reactionary in the future, oriented themselves towards self-preservation. Same as it ever was. And you can see it even in the current situation — the companies who are most outspoken are the modern Internet companies: LinkedIn, Mozilla, Zynga, Google, etc etc. Mostly on the sidelines are the most progressive technology companies of the past decades, even including Apple. So this is not, fundamentally, a techie v content type of issue at all, but more of a progressive v conservative technology issue.

3. We do have existing laws and norms. A number of folks argued that content owners just need to accept that pirated goods are a viable alternative and need to learn how to compete with them. I’m wholly unpersuaded by that point of view. Or, rather, I believe we do have existing laws that govern how we behave. It’s pretty clear (to me at least) that content businesses will need to evolve, and many interesting ones already have. But that’s something for a lawful market to decide, not for anyone to thrust onto content owners & creators.

And then a personal observation: I was actually a little nervous writing about SOPA last week because of the tone of the conversation to date. I felt like it might actually provoke harsh negative reaction and somehow brand me as “SOPA-friendly” or against the web. That’s a weird thing for me to feel, as I think my web & open culture bona fides are pretty well established at this point between my work with Mozilla, PCF, Code for America, and now Tumblr, etc etc. That by itself tells me that there’s something wrong about how things are going.

Okay, so given all that as a context, here’s my main point: no matter what outcome we get to with respect to SOPA+PIPA, we’re in a bad spot going forward. 

I think much of the legitimate frustration on the Silicon Valley side of the fence is that there seems to be no way to have a meaningful conversation about this stuff in ways that we know to be productive. It’s happening at this point with some guy who doesn’t seem to understand technology having his staff & a bunch of lobbyists prepare a non-sensical bill and then try to jam it through Congress, without any real effort to understand what might actually work. (And, worse, it’s being done in a way that seems deliberately designed to misinform.) So it’s a bunch of backroom, captured discussion that has massive impact on how we live our lives — and it’s all completely opaque (at best).

The real thing that I’m worrying more and more about is not SOPA per se, although that’s a very large problem itself. The real problem that I see is that our government just isn’t set up to make meaningful technology policy decisions going forward. I think Larry Lessig would argue that that’s now true about all facets of modern life, but I think that with technology it’s significantly worse. We have massive interconnectedness of systems built on an extremely rapidly changing foundation of technology. But more than that, technology is now transforming our private and public lives so quickly that we can hardly make sense of any of it at a personal level, let alone a public policy level. And there seems to be no way for legislation to keep pace unless we change the discussion there from specific technologies instead to principles of how we want to build and evolve our society.

And I just don’t see how that kind of conversation can happen right now.

I see how to defeat SOPA, more or less. But it’s more lobbying, more rhetoric, more Capitol Hill influence. And I think that all of that stuff ultimately corrupts industries that use it. I know this is not a new objection, and I’m sure that there have been people in every industry forever who have made this point.

So I think most of what I wanted to write on Friday is this: I desperately hope we can (1) defeat SOPA and more importantly (2) figure out a way to have useful technology policy discussions that can inform both our legistatures and law enforcement agencies. This isn’t the last law that will be technically poor and will impinge on civil liberties. There will be more, and they’ll come up more and more frequently as increasing portions of our society get disoriented by and disrupted by new technology.

We shouldn’t rely on symmetric (and corrupting) lobbying efforts to make things better; we’ll just get more of the same crummy situation we’ve got.

What I think we really need to figure out is how to help our leadership in government act and think in a more agile way, informed by more of our citizenry. More like the web, in a lot of ways. (Ed Lee’s announcement of an SF partnership with Code for America is a start.)

Maybe impossible, a pipe dream. But that’s the target I think we should be setting for ourselves, not just defeating a crappy, misinformed bill.

1. it’s not a discussion at all — it’s people calling each other names.
2. it’s highly likely to have a result that is unhelpful at best, and insanely destructive at worst
3. we’re building a completely worthless/bad roadmap for how to deal with technology policy going forward, and it’s going to get worse

Let me be very clear: SOPA is a terrible law that should not be enacted under any circumstances. It’s broken technically and misguided from a policy point of view. It not only won’t accomplish what advocates want it to accomplish, but it also will create backbreaking burdens and barriers to entry for some of our most promising technology companies and cultural movements of the coming decade.

But also: content creators & owners have a legitimate beef with how their content can be appropriated and distributed so easily by rogue actors.

Here’s the conversation we should be having: content & technology should be very aligned. Hollywood and Silicon Valley (broadly speaking — I’m talking metaphorically here) both want the same things ultimately: easier and bigger ways to share and enjoy awesome content from all sources, in a way that’s economic for everyone involved.

What we should be talking about is how to get better alignment, how to build systems and content that is better for, you know, actual human beings to use and enjoy.

But that isn’t the conversation that’s happening (and I use the term “conversation” here very loosely, since it has characteristics more like a bunch of schoolyard name calling). The conversation that’s happening is going more like this:

- content: “you people are stealing our stuff. you’re thieves”

- techies: “we’re not stealing it. we’re just building great apps for users.”

- content: “you’re ignoring the problem and helping the thieves. you’re effectively pirates, so we’re going to shut everyone down.”

- techies: “you’re acting like jackbooted fascists, embracing censorship and your’e going to end everything that’s good about culture today.”

- content: “we’re trying to protect our content — you guys are pretending like there’s no problem, then getting rich off platforms that pillage our content.”

- techies: “you don’t understand how the Internet works — how do you even live life in the 21st century? dinosaurs.”

So that’s awesome. Then you throw Congress into the mix and hilarity ensues. Because if you’re looking for folks who really do not act like they want to understand the Internet, Capitol Hill is a pretty good place to start. And then this is all devolving into a fight of pirates versus creators. Of protectors-of-democracy versus fascists. Or whatever.

What we need to be talking about is where the actual infringement problem is happening (I’ve heard from folks that the vast majority of the problem is on the order of a few dozen syndicates overseas). And how we need to be thinking about copyright law — in an age where copies are the natural order of things, as opposed to previously, when it was harder to make copies. And what sorts of law enforcement resources we need to bring to bear to shut down the activity of these real malicious actors overseas. (At root, I’m persuaded that the current issues are really law enforcement issues – we need to figure out how to enforce the laws that are already on the books to protect IP, not create new ones.)

Acting like there’s no problem isn’t the answer — there is a legitimate IP issue here. But pressuring a behind-the-times and contributions-captive legislative body to enact overly intrusive and abusable laws is even worse, both economically and civically.

What’s extremely discouraging to me right now is that I don’t really see how we can have a nuanced, technically-informed, respectful discussion/debate/conversation/working relationship. I’m not convinced that Congress is at all the right body to be taking up these issues, and am 100% convinced that they don’t currently have the technical wherewithal to make informed decisions, in any event.

So what we’re left with is one group pushing their captive legislators for new, over-reaching laws and calling technologists names. And a group reacting to that by calling names back.

I think the best that we can hope for in this scenario is that the current bill will grind to a halt and nothing will change. But I think that can’t be where we aim for the future.

Because technology policy issues are going to come up again and again and again as time goes on. (Next up, undoubtedly, is another round of privacy legislation, and I would predict the name calling will be even more intense and even less productive.)

We’re mediating more of our lives than ever through new technologies that we barely understand as technologists, let alone consumers or civic leaders. We need to figure out ways to have meaningful discussions, to try out policies that may or may not work at first and iterate quickly on them, like we do with products themselves.

I don’t have any answers here, but wanted to write down what’s been bugging me, as I think we all need to think more about what we want our lives to look like in the future.

It’s a humbling organization to join, because they’ve already made such amazing progress. They’ve got an amazing group of CfA Fellows working with city governments this year — projects in Boston and Philadelphia and Seattle; and one with the federal government as well. They’ve picked even more cities to work with next year in an expansion of the program. They’ve started the Civic Commons as a way to help governments share and take advantage of code that already exists.

More importantly, they’re showing how to build an organization that’s both civically-oriented and sustainable over the long term. In my view, CfA is helping a new generation of entrepreneurs and builders to figure out how to create products and organizations that can change our relationship with our cities and towns — not every startup has to be about maximizing financial returns.

So I’m really excited to join the organization — because of what it’s done in such a short time, because of what it represents today, and because of the promise it holds in unlocking so, so much positive and needed change in how we relate to our governments and our selves in the future.

I’m late in posting this, but wanted to write something about a tour I was involved in a couple of weeks ago: Silicon Valley comes to the UK (SVc2UK), and SIlicon Valley Comes to Cambridge (SVC2C), along with an additional trip to Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, although I didn’t go on the Oxford portion.

It was a really fantastic trip, organized by Sherry Coutu and Reid Hoffman, and it was absolutely packed with interesting events and people.

The crew from Silicon Valley (which generously roped in folks from Vancouver, Washington & NYC as well) was a great group — interesting and diverse — and interested and curious about each other and the technology landscape globally, and specifically in the UK. It included senior people/founders/chairs from Kiva, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, oPower, Mozilla, Creative Commons, DoSomething.org, as well as investors from August, Index, and Greylock and more — very broad.

But the stars of the tour were the people we got to meet. During the 4 days, we had 23 events scheduled that reached 2,700 people. The first day we started in London talking with people who run the UK government at the House of Commons — we had several MPs in attendance, and were hosted by the Speaker of the House of Commons in the fantastic Speaker’s Chambers. A few of us got to give short prepared remarks at the beginning of the session; mine are here.

After that, we were hosted by Google to talk with entrepreneurs from around London, also a great session, and had an interesting dinner with more folks from the London startup scene in the BT Tower.

The second day, hosted by NESTA, we got to meet many first time London entrepreneurs and it was a great, great time. There’s clearly a ton of interesting and fast startup activity happening in the UK currently, and it was neat to have a firsthand look into it. Was also fun to share some of our own experiences from Silicon Valley.

After that we hopped on a bus to go to Cambridge, which was an altogether different experience — also fantastic.

First a bit of history: Cambridge University was first established in 1284, and counts a number of incredible thinkers amongst its alumni: Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, James Clerk Maxwell, Crick and Watson and many, many more. And it’s been the home of seminal computer breakthroughs — it’s where Charles Babbage and Alan Turing did their work.

Over the past few decades, it’s also had an incredible run in terms of tech industry output, including being the birthplace of ARM Holdings as well as Autonomy.

We spent Friday at the Judge Business School at Cambridge, in a variety of panels, talks, and “surgeries” helping new startups think through their strategies and priorities. The high point for me, I think, was being able to talk with the 3 recent winners of a national entpreneurship contest — 3 teenage girls who’ve started their own venture. Great to be able to meet them and talk for a bit.

Saturday we spent time at the Hauser Center talking with a ton of interesting startups, and helping where we could.

Then we caught our breath for a bit.

On each of the three nights in Cambridge, we were very fortunate to be able to have dinner in one of the colleges: Queens (shown in my picture above), Peterhouse (the oldest), and St. John’s. One of the unexpected delights for me was that we were able to attend Choral Evensong in The Chapel of St John’s College on Saturday night — it’s a liturgy that’s been sung in that particular chapel since the 1670s. It was amazing for me to be able to attend that — as an adult, I haven’t been to church with any regularity, but I attended Methodist and Presbyterian churches growing up, and Dad has sung in choirs everywhere we’ve gone (and still does). It reminded me of listening to some of that music growing up, but the other reason that I liked it (other than that the music was exceedingly beautiful) is that it’s in such contrast to the hyper-paced, global, 24/7, always connected, media slammed life that we all live today. It allowed me to pause a bit, to reflect on what it means to be devoted to a cause, to spend your life trying to express ideas (in music or otherwise), and to think about things larger than just what products are released today that we can buy each other for Christmas. I doubt that I’ll ever be a particularly religious person again in my life, but I felt very lucky to be able to attend Evensong and think some about perspective and pacing and commitment.

Anyway, it was an incredible trip — Sherry and Reid did a masterful job in putting it all together — it was a little overwhelming, to be honest. There are some great things happening in London and Cambridge, and I can’t wait to see where they go.

It would not be an overstatement to say that this book, along with Postman’s other book, Technopoly, completely changed many things about how I saw the world when I first read them at Stanford. This book was an incredible insight then, in 1994, ten years after it was written, and I have to say that in 2010, it reads like a completely current account of what’s happening in our public lives today. (Owing to the time, it focuses on how television changes our culture; obviously you have to replace that with the Web, but it is amazingly modern in its insight.)

It’s got to be one of the 5 most influential books that I’ve ever read, and it’s getting better and better with age. As such, I’m going to quote here at some length, but if you haven’t read it, you should go get it, and read at least the beginning and end, as soon as you can.

Here’s the basic premise of the book:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

And this:

It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against “junk” on television, I must first explain that my focus is on epistemology, not on aesthetics or literary criticism. Indeed, I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched printing’s output of junk.

And this, the most important point: “My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.”

And this:

The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each “headline” stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. “Knowing” the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

And the last thing I’ll leave you with is this short idea: “…what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”

This is a beautiful, beautiful book. I really hope more people will read it and internalize what’s happening to our culture and discourse.

Of course, it’ll make a crappy movie, so maybe I’m hoping for too much.

I read this book on my way to the UK last week, and it really helped inform my remarks at the House of Commons. With an introduction by Tim O’Reilly, it’s a look at how open source ideas and architectures are influencing our democracy:

Thankfully, the lessons of the Internet—open standards, open-source software, and data-driven applications—are all being followed, albeit with greater or lesser focus in one project or another. (That’s true in the private sector as well.) Open APIs are being developed that will allow applications to work across the country (and eventually, internationally), rather than being bound to the systems of any one city. Projects like Code for America are working to build mechanisms for sharing code, expertise, and best practices between cities. We’re seeing new alliances between governments at the federal, state, and local levels to increase citizen services, eliminate redundancy, and reduce costs.

But it’s not all happy — he also talks about how the main focus has been on transparency and sunlight, but that that’s not nearly enough — we need to build better architectures of participation.

Yet rather than learning from its early mistakes and trying to provide for more meaningful and structured forms of public participation, the White House has since neglected the “participation” plank of the Open Government Initiative, shifting almost all of its focus to the safer realm of open data and government transparency. As the New Democrat Network has noted, the Open Government Directive “does a lot for the ‘Transparency’ part … but not much for the ‘Participation’ or ‘Collaboration’ portions … To really get the full benefit of the wisdom of the crowd, the government’s next step will have to ensure the dialogue is truly two-way.”14 Indeed, the danger that comes with focusing almost exclusively on transparency—a vital yet insufficient goal—is that we may end up seeing the failures of our government but being left with little recourse for doing anything about them. Transparency without avenues for real participation seems a bit like watching a police interrogation from behind a two-way mirror. While you can see what is going on, you have little ability to do anything if something goes wrong. And in any case, transparency has run aground as well. Abandoning his pledge to do health care around a table on C-SPAN, the president consented to a process of congressional wheeling, dealing, and capitulation to special interests, personified most by senators like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. Once the House and the Senate finally passed their divergent bills, the White House—in a rush to sign a bill—gave its blessing to skipping the conference-committee process and conducting negotiations to reconcile the two bills in private, among Democrats alone.

Obviously, I think this book is required reading for those who hope to change our government.

Yesterday we were invited to the House of Commons here in London, and after a short speech by the Speaker of the House of Commons, 5 of us participated in a panel on the impact of digital technology on the future of democracies. About 100 people attended, including several MPs and members of the House of Lords, plus people involved in running the government and figuring out what to do with technology.

It was moderated by Jon Drori (fantastic job, and fantastic guy), and the Silicon Valley folks who participated were: Reid Hoffman, Megan Smith, Joi Ito, Nancy Lublin and myself. Each of the 5 of us started by giving a 5 minute ‘provocation’ to consider, then we ran it as a more traditional panel.

I’ll write more soon; for now, my provocation follows. Would love to hear what you think.

—

As I started preparing my remarks, I knew that I wanted to talk, in the main, about how technology can make our democracies better. But here, in the heart of British government, it’s impossible for me not to think about a couple of British authors and imaginers of future dystopias: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

With these 2 especially, it seems a particular talent of the British to imagine horrible dysfunctional futures. Orwell in his 1984, of course, with nightmares of totalitarian control and surveillance, and oppressive government imposed on unwilling citizens. Huxley, by contrast, in Brave New World, painted a completely different picture: a citizenry of sheep happily gorging themselves on the trivial, on entertainment — with no Orwellian Ministry of Information needed at all.

In a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, an American named Neil Postman figured out nearly 30 years ago that what we were going to get wasn’t Orwell’s world at all, but rather a version of Huxley’s. And while the British seem to be adept at imagining dystopias, I have to say that we Americans seem to be pretty handy at creating them. In the US now, we clearly live in Huxley’s world: news has become entertainment; political discourse, when not an oxymoron, tends to be shallow. So many of the institutions and processes that have served us well for hundreds of years are breaking down.

Much of this is due to the nature of digital technology and the Internet, allowing massive amounts of new conversation, of news without context. The thing that digital technology is best at is closing gaps: in time, in space, in relevance — and that has put real stress on our institutions. Technology is not neutral — it makes many things easier, but also many things more difficult. There are winners and losers.

Clay Shirky, writing on the massive dislocations occurring today in the newspaper industry wrote: “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in place.”

And things do feel broken today, in many ways — the forces of dystopia seem to be on the rise.
But even so, there is a lot — A LOT — to be optimistic about. The hints of a positive future show all around us. The seeds of utopia are in the ground, so to speak.

• Take FixMyStreet, here in the UK — collective intelligence to help find and fix problems.
• And Ushahidi, which started in Kenya but has become global.
• And CrisisCommons.org to coordinate responses to crises around the globe.
• And the Sunlight Foundation, which resulted in support for OpenCongress.org among many others.
• And even the directive to all US agencies to break down barriers to transparency, participation and collaboration, which President Obama signed on his very first day in office.

So clearly there are real opportunities here, shaped by the natural affordances of Internet and digital technology.

What we know from the work we’ve done at Mozilla on Firefox and other open source projects, is that the way we organize, the technology we use, and the customs we support — what Tim O’Reilly has called “architectures of participation” — matter greatly. Architectures of participation, like technologies themselves, aren’t neutral. Projects like Wikipedia and Mozilla Firefox have architectures that are designed to bring in collaborators from everywhere, at every level. We have very serious contributors who spend most of their time working on the core. We have nearly 100 teams working on localizing Firefox into their own language. We have entrepreneurs building companies based on extensions to the browser. We have tens of thousands of people who test our browser each night and report issues. And we have hundreds of millions of users. We’ve built architectures of participation to get people engaged in as many ways as we can.

So what’s the future utopia that’s possible with digital technology? Ideally what we get — what we create — is a system where citizens are engaged, where they feel valued and connected with their governments and each other. Where our leaders are accountable — and desire to be accountable. It’s a future where it’s just as easy to help your neighborhood as it is to help your country or your planet.
To get there, we’ll need to architect with a few key principles in mind:

1. Transparency – where most of today’s efforts are, and critical to how we start
2. Clarity – flip side of scale – not the same as transparency — often, transparency of information can overwhelm — without a narrative, without intent, it’s very difficult to understand the implications of the transparency itself
3. Engagement – get everyone more educated and informed and contributing – get subject experts involved
4. Scale – must consider neighborhood government to municipal to national to transnational
5. Heterogeneity – life is increasingly cross-border, in all senses – trans-national – trans-company – mixture of public and private life

So my provocation turns out to be more of an exhortation, a call to action. As technologists and entrepreneurs and leaders of government, it’s our opportunity — and our responsibility — to imagine and articulate good, positive architectures of government, to engage with our colleagues and neighbors and coworkers and constituents to envision robust models for the future, in the context of ubiquitous, cheap, immediate information technology — and then to get on with making the world the way we want it.

Anyway, I come to the end of my involvement as convinced as ever that public libraries are critically important to our lives as citizens, but also just as convinced that we’ll see a massive reinvention in many of the functions that libraries perform.

But that isn’t really what I want to write about today — what I want to talk about instead is the budget work that’s going on for the City of Sunnyvale in 2010 — the topic of our Library Board meeting tonight.

At the end of last year, Sunnyvale hired a new city manager, Gary Luebbers, who inherited, like so many other city managers around the country, a government facing massive shortfalls in revenue among other problems. The preamble to his budgetary response for the coming year is fantastic work, and let’s start with some of the context:

• Sunnyvale’s overall budget for 09/10 is something like $150M (plus the costs for the water treatment facility and the golf course)
• We’re expecting a decline in revenue of $13M, primarily due to a shortfall in sales tax — people & companies aren’t buying things like routers and cars as much as they used to — so we’re seeing dramatic drops
• Beyond that, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has seen equity declines of around 25% this year, which is leading to increased employer contributions — about $8.5M more in Sunnyvale personnel costs starting in 2011/12

So we’re seeing a 10% revenue shortfall and another 7-8% increase in costs — not to mention that after the ballot initiatives failed earlier this week, there’s an expectation that the State of California will borrow up to 8% of local property taxes (that they’ll repay eventually, but has an impact of nearly $4M in near term cash flow).

Any way you cut it, that’s a brutal context for any city to deal with — even a larger city of 100K+ residents like Sunnyvale — between revenue shortfall & increased expenditure, you’re looking at $15-20M a year.

But here’ the thing: Sunnyvale, while we’ll see cuts, is basically okay because of the extremely conservative and long-range planning that it’s done since reinvention in the 70s. We’ve got a $36M budget stabilization fund, for example — and we can draw down on that for a few years — and because of that, the cash flow interruption from the State doesn’t matter overmuch.

I have some concerns about the conservative nature of Sunnyvale city planning — I think in any normal times it’s over-constraining — but in this particular situation, facing such a brutal and cascading financial meltdown, it’s incredibly, incredibly helpful to have this strength, and is a reassuring bulwark against the effects of the broader economy.

Not sure why I picked this up — have been thinking a bunch about what it means to lead, how to do it, what responsibilities are. This is an interesting & useful book — I got a lot out of reading it.

[As a first disclaimer: obviously, a lot is happening now with both the stimulus package and Obama's proposed budget. I don't pretend to understand most of it. The stimulus seems, to me, to be the right thing to do given the current recession. The budget is more complicated and has farther reaching implications. I'm generally in favor of universal health care, don't mind paying higher taxes, and think the overall focus on energy, education & health is right on. But the size of the deficits and the accumulated debt do worry me a lot.]

Anyway, what I liked about this book, written before Obama was actually elected, is that Kuttner goes through some presidents that didn’t just triangulate public opinion, but changed the nature of the US, the way we talked and thought about our obligations. Here are a few good quotes:

“As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes, all of the great presidents used their leadership first to transform the public understanding of national challenges and then to break through impasses made up of congressional blockage, interest-group power, voter cynicism or passivity, and conventional wisdom. In different ways, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson found allies, respectively, in the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement, as well as the press and the general public. Each president grew immensely in office. Each changed the national mood, then the direction of national policy.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the challenge for Obama. Said another way:

“Obama will need to be a more radical president than he was a presidential candidate. Radical does not mean outside the mainstream. It means perceiving, as a leader, that radical change is necessary, discerning tacit aspirations and unmet needs in the people, and then making that radical change the mainstream view for which people clamor.”

There will be lots of debate, questioning, and argument about where the US should go — that’s good & right, and should happen. That it happen in a transparent & open way is crucial, and I think that that’s happening, irrespective of any particular policies in the first 60 days.

But a long way to go, so we’ll see what happens — in any event, this book helped me think through the challenge of leading from the Oval Office, and the opportunity as well.

The fact that they’re available (and easy to find) along with a lot of other information on whitehouse.gov is fantastic and incredibly meaningful. But the content is also incredible so far, and in particular one specific memo titled “Freedom of Information Act“.

It is a beautiful and clear piece of writing, and states some incredibly important principles of operation and standards of behavior that I hope our agencies can live up to. The memo speaks for itself, so I’ll quote several passages at some length.

“A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.”

And the absolute most important line: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

This could not be clearer, and is a monumental step. And then he pushes everyone to go further than they’re required by law:

“All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government.  The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.”

There’s a lot of road left to travel yet — they’ve barely started — but already it’s clear that people everywhere are watching & thinking, and are ready to give Obama — and by extension Americans — some benefit of the doubt again.

So I’m hopeful that like so many other positive signals from the transition government so far, that we’ll use this economic stimulus as a way not just to fix today’s (undoubtedly painful) problems, but to invest in structural changes that will make life better a generation from now.

Still, I can’t help but feel like we’re all developing ways to talk about challenges like a community of adults, whether they be in commercial terms like we have at Mozilla, in the academy like this note, or in our government with the new administration. That’s something we can build on.

—
Dear Alumni, Parents and Friends:

Many of you have contacted me over the past few months with questions about the recent shifts in the economy and how the University is affected. I would like to update you on our response to these challenges.

Financial Aid Commitments Still Secure
The questions came to me even before the academic year was under way, from parents moving their sons and daughters into their residences this past fall: Given the state of the economy, would the University be able to meet its commitments to financial aid? Would we be able to help in situations where decreased home equity might preclude a loan they were counting on to help pay tuition? How would we deal with job losses by a family member? Our response: We will stand by our commitments and, yes, we will reconsider the financial aid needs of any family negatively impacted by the economic downturn.

The questions continued through Reunion Homecoming Weekend as the Dow Jones average dropped approximately 25 percent further. How was the University’s endowment affected? What would this mean for financial aid, for operations and for the capital facilities projects already under way?

The Tightest Financial Outlook in Decades
Let’s start with the endowment. We weathered the period through early summer comparatively well, achieving an overall return of 6.2 percent for the year ending June 30, 2008. Since then, the endowment has declined steeply, although somewhat less precipitously than the market indices. In addition, sponsored research, our second largest revenue source, has been declining in real terms over the past several years, and given the challenges in the federal budget is unlikely to improve quickly. Tuition, our third major source of revenue, cannot be raised significantly out of fairness to our students and their families. All of these factors contribute to the tightest financial outlook we have seen in decades.

Fortunately, Stanford entered this period in a relatively healthy financial position, bolstered by several years of revenue increases, generous gifts from alumni, parents and friends, and remarkable growth in the endowment, which for the first time ever became the University’s largest source of revenue.

To manage our finances going forward, we anticipate reducing the $800 million general funds budget – which pays for most of our faculty and staff salaries, central administrative operations and non-research expenses – by 10 to 12 percent over the next few years. Declining federal research dollars could double the total revenue loss across the University. We cannot achieve these reductions without some significant and permanent cutbacks.

Cutting Costs Wisely
As we implement these budget cuts, we will do so with several principles in mind. First, we will focus on preserving the investments we have made in our faculty over the past decade. Likewise, we will maintain our commitment to both undergraduate and graduate students. The excellence of the University depends on its people, and we will do our best to maintain the quality of our faculty, staff and students as we make adjustments.

Second, we will review our capital projects. We are in the midst of a major capital program that includes some vital construction projects. Halting projects in mid-construction, even temporarily, would cost us more money in the long run. But not all our projects will be built according to the original schedule. We will reexamine projects that incur significant amounts of debt.

Third, through support from The Stanford Challenge we have launched a variety of efforts to address the most challenging problems facing humankind: sustaining our planet for future generations, enhancing peace and stability around the world, exploring the potential of stem cells for autoimmune diseases, improving K-12 education in the United States, and finding new ways to generate energy that will not increase greenhouse gases. These are critical initiatives, and while we must adapt our efforts to present circumstances, we will not shy away from our long-term responsibility to lead in finding solutions for these problems.

Trust in Our Stanford Community
We know we are not alone in dealing with this financial shockwave; some of you will experience situations far more difficult than we see on our campus. My sincere wish is that those whose lives have been disrupted will find firmer footing in coming months. In any crisis, we look to the people and places whose connections sustain and strengthen us. I hope that your place in the Stanford community provides such nourishment for you.

As always, I am happy to hear from you. Send your comment, suggestion or question to me at president@stanford.edu or to Howard E. Wolf, ’80, vice president for alumni affairs and president of Stanford Alumni Association, at alumnipresident@stanford.edu.

Sincerely,

John L. Hennessy
President

Anyway, things are looking good lately (in this respect, if not in many others, nationally), and I’d highly recommend everyone take a look at their site.

A terrific book, and everyone should read it. A great analysis of what’s happening in the world, not from the point of view of decline of the US, but of a rising of new participants. Can’t recommend it highly enough. A couple of fantastic bits:

This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else. It is about the great transformation taking place around the world, a transformation that, though often being discussed, remains poorly understood. This is natural. Changes, even sea changes, take place gradually. Though we talk about a new era, the world seems to be one with which we are familiar. But in fact, it is very different.

And then later:

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America’s leading scholar-senator, once said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” That gets it just about right. Culture is important, terribly important. But it can change. Cultures are complex. At any given moment, certain attributes are prominent and seem immutable. And then politics and economics shift, and those attributes wane in importance, making space for others. The Arab world was once the center of science and trade. In recent decades, its chief exports have been oil and Islamic fundamentalism. Any cultural argument must be able to explain both periods of success and periods of failure.

Smart, thought-provoking book that everyone should read.

In life, pick where you want to go as much as you can, work like hell to get there, and be persistent. Learn all the time. Do good. Engage everyone around you by pursuing your passions. Help others. Do good work. Bring cool stuff to life. Above all, start.

metacool: From Obama to Pink to Oprah

amen to that. read metacool — diego is great.

The last couple of years I’ve been lucky to do some traveling for Mozilla — in particular to China, Japan, and Europe — and have found my perspective on what the world looks like (and can/should look like) changing greatly. (And I’m currently in the middle of Fareed Zakaria’s excellent new book The Post-American World on this subject.)

I’m just repeatedly blown away (and sometimes overwhelmed) by what Global Voices is doing — it seems to me a necessary point of view in a world where national boundaries seem more & more artificial and sometimes obstructive to the way people are having conversations and getting things done.