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Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddyWiki, a reusable non-linear personal noteboook, will be our guest speaker at Wiki Wednesday Palo Alto. I'll also be on hand with other Socialtexters for a conversation about Socialtext Open.
Heading to the mountains for a couple of disconnected (hopefully) days. Next weekend I'll be at Wikimania in Boston.
Scott Gatz picks up on the conversation he started on Intrapreneurship with a thoughtful summarizing post. I had noted that Intrapreneurs take less personal risk than Entrepreneurs. While I thought my point was largely true -- following strong opinions, weakly held as blogging practice -- I've second guessed myself firt, and with a mind open for others.
What also bothered me is that what I do for a living at Socialtext is help those in large organizations who take risk get promoted. Some are Intrapreneurs who instigate a purchase and champion a tool, but many more simply stick their neck out by being transparent and on the side of a truth.
There is no question that Intrapreneurs take risk. As Andrew Fife pointed out, your salary can fall to zero. I disagree with him that being part of a large company opens more doors for you than a startup, just being there only counts for television, which further supports my original point that all companies should enable Intrapreneurial activity. Intrapreneurship is a big hairy audacious mechanism to foster innovation.
Today I gave a talk before the executives of a prestigous R&D unit. I was followed by none other than William Miller who has modelled The Valley better than anyone, gave me some key informal advice when starting Socialtext and helped me frame what we live and work in as a irreplacable marketing function. But more than anything, to me, he was the one who realized that the Culture of Failure.
Based on the points in Bill's Habitat for Entrepreneurship, we were discussing what a large organization could do to model the engine of innovation we call The Valley. Quoting one point in full:
4. A business climate that rewards risk-taking and does not punish failure is a prerequisite for an entrepreneurial high tech community. Most high tech ventures fail, so a climate in which the stigma of failure hangs over the unsuccessful entrepreneur serves as a powerful deterrent. This is especially true if the rewards for risk-taking are not sufficiently high. In Silicon Valley, there are many examples of entrepreneurs who have failed and successfully started over. These entrepreneurs view failure as a learning experience.
On the failure side, bankruptcy laws that provide limited liability—that is, laws that limit liability to the invested capital and do not permit creditors to “reach beyond” the company—permit entrepreneurs to be more venturesome. Similarly, the availability of limited partnerships for venture capital firms encourages their formation, and in turn, their capacity to engage in the high-risk business of high tech ventures. Japan, Korea, and India are moving in this direction, or have already done so.
On the success side, security laws that bestow equity credit for ideas, organization, and hard work give larger rewards to the entrepreneur. By contrast, a security law environment that requires company founders to pay the same amount as investors for each share of stock does not result in a large enough payoff for the former. This situation often results in large initial dilution of the founders’ stock, making them reluctant to take further investment — and dilution —to grow the company quickly. In fast-growing markets and markets characterized by increasing returns to scale, rapid growth is essential to survival. Changes in these kind of securities laws are currently under consideration in Japan and India.
A culture of failure is a prerequisite for success, and is based upon both legal structure and business norms. Liability must be limited and risk respectively distributed. Corporate venturing and M&A are a proven models for a large company to couple itself with the risk taken and the innovations of entrepreneurs.
Intrapreneurship, in my opinion, is less developed. Primarily because organizational cultures do not reward failure. I am interested to hear of a large companies that have structures and norms for personal risk taking by employees. By personal risk, I mean organizational, social and financial capital where the more you risk, the greater the reward. Liability is inherently limited within an organization, which is the conservative strong suit. But the undiscovered incentive, which goes against the grain of most corporate culture, is the ability for an individual, or team, to play an internal market with their own risk and reward. And when they fail, be rewarded as well, with the chance to succeed.
While my compatriots are up at OSCON, I'm at Always On this week on a blogger pass. Quite a busy week with the launch of Socialtext Open. The response has been great. 500 downloads in the first 24 hours, giving me new metrics and stakeholders to pay attention to. Quite frankly, I'm still trying to figure out how much my job is going to change as a result. Thanks to those who helped spread the word, and welcome to our new members of the community at large.
There hasn't been that much new in the content at AO. But then again, Tony knows how to throw a party, the usual suspects are in town and the hallway conversations are what it is all about. The best panel was on creating contagious behavior with Bob Sutton, Diego Rodriguez, Mitchell Baker, Gil Penchina and Perry Klebahn. I'll point to the video archive when they put it up, but the over-arching pattern was my favorite -- share control to foster value. UPDATE: Bob Sutton recaps.
One funny thing is the projected backchannel has gotten out of hand with inappropriate comments, Jesus and porn promotion. The problem is both tool and practice. Anyone can pick and change their identity without registration, and there is no moderation. It would be a shame if this recurring channel faded into the background.
The other funny thing, to be a critic, was the fusion of a Mai Tai party at Trader Vic's with free Audi test drives. Generally these two things don't go well together, but I think all the cars were accounted for.
Congrats to Mary and the whole team for launching Dabble. The smarts of this video remix community are just coming out now (at the time when YouTube is rumoredly valued at $1B, but that's another thing).
More than worth a dabble, and full disclosure I am an advisor.
This morning I gave a talk at New Paradigms for Using Computers on social computing. Most of my talk emphasized the virtues of wiki, freeform and focusing on social incentives for participation. In the Q&A, Ron Goldman of Sun pointed out that a focus on decreasing costs for publishing and group forming, and incentives to participate -- is scarcity thinking.
This was my first strong opinions, weakly held moment, and not just because of my respect for Ron. Sure, the costs are falling on the supply side. But that is nothing compared to the abundance of what people are ready to share.
What wikis and blogs really are is tools that don't get in people's way. Especially inside an enterprise, with all the organizational sediment. Yes, tool design and adoption practices can advance participation, but it is based on the most renewable resources.
Unfortunately, I couldn't stick around to see Stewart Butterfield, Sam Ruby and Tom Gruber because I had the Socialtext Open launch and other fun things to attend to. Sam's slides are a click-through joy.
If you want my powerpoint thinking, it is attached, in pdf, to guarantee the knowledge dies quickly. Big file: Socialtext NPUC 2006.pdf
UPDATE: DocBug's conference blogging
I'm pleased to announce Socialtext Open, an Open Source distribution of our flagship wiki product. Available for immediate download on SourceForge, this is the first Commercial Open Source wiki and weblog offering on the market. It's been a long time coming, this change in our business model, a way to strike a balance between freedom and profit motive.
Socialtext Open changes everything. Including the way we are going to communicate, with nothing to hide and sharing our Public Roadmap. While Open is still in Beta and we don't know the full impact this release will have, my hope is it fulfills our goal of wikis everwhere and cultivates a broader developer community.
So, go get the code, and tell us what you think.
Scott Gatz is pretty stoked at the ability to be an Intrapreneur at Yahoo. He gets to make a case for a project, acquire resources and above all, innovate. Possibly building a profitable business within a business. Great stuff.
But shouldn't any knowledge worker be able to do this at a BigCo? I have problems with using the word Intrapreneur, except for describing an innovative spirit.
The difference between an Intrapreneur and an Entrepreneur is the latter takes personal risk.
While a wiki emphasizes content over form, many Socialtext customers need to customize look and feel. In fact, for Intranet use case, having branding consistent with other applications and the corporate style guide can be a usability enhancement.
With Socialtext, you can Skin your wiki. For example, take a look at this Skin on the Socialtext Customer Exchange:
Now, there is more than one way to Skin a Socialtext. Whip out your mad CSS skills and Web 2.0 gradients. Got a Socialtext skin you want to show off? Let me know.
Many have written about how going Open Source changes your business model or sales process. Dana Blankenhorn notes that the open sourcing of Hyperic's product changed how they work. It required them to write code for stability and continuity, as well as adopt more Open Source tools.
This is not a big story, but it's the kind of thing that is happening constantly in the open source world. Once companies commit to open source, they often move to open source tools and open source business processes.
This is something companies considering the open source way need to understand before they get started. Open source does not just change license terms. It can change everything.
Nat Torkington highlights this by saying:
...There needs to be a phrase that's the exact opposite of "throwing code over the fence" to describe this change from closed source company to open source. I saw this when Sun opened Solaris. They looked at every facet of their software, from repository to decision-making to the libraries it used, and changed everything so it would work as an open source project. A huge task, but Sun knew it was essential if the open sourcing was to work. If Sun ever transitions from a hardware company to a consulting company, these best practices for open sourcing are something it could sell. Think Producing Open Source for the whole company...
As Socialtext gets ready for it's Open Source release next week, we know it will change everything. We don't have the luxury of undertaking an exhaustive process prior to opening, but we do have the benefit of being an adaptive startup that has iterated towards this milestone for years.
While most people know that Open Source results in quality code as a by product of having more eyes on it, simply knowing that it will be public has provided great incentives to developers enhance the quality of the code. That said, we know when we go Open that sunshine will be a great disinfectant for the bugs in the shadows.
But beyond the license and the code, we know there are many changes in store that we can't anticipate. Changes embraced.
Bob Sutton, who was an inspiration around the time we started Socialtext, is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. I've been sharing his posts like The Snowstorm Study in my internal blog and talking too much about the No Asshole Rule. But Strong Opinions, Weakly Held is an absolute gem:
...Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes from the amazing folks at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future. A couple years ago, I was talking the Institute’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of “confirmation bias.”
Not only is this great advice for interpersonal communications in an organization, it might be a guiding principle for blogging.
I wonder if the title is a hat tip to Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, where the pieces are people and the conversations ebb and flow their ties.
ShopWiki, a wiki search engine for shopping, raised $6.2 Million from Generation Partners. If they can cultivate a community, I think they have promise.
Recently, you had the acquisition of WikiTravel and World66. Expect more activity in consumer vertical wikis through the end of the year.
The Palo Alto Art Center's exhibition, IDEO Prototypes the Future, should be of interest to readers of this blog. Perhaps less than for the writer, as my mom is the curator, IDEO is a neighbor and I suggested the title. Bias aside, this is a great opportunity to learn about the innovative practices of the world's leading industrial design firm.
Podtech has a great series of podcasts to complement the show.
The exhibition runs through September 10th at the Art Center. Today at 2-4pm is design family day, where you can rapidly prototype with the kids.
Also related:
In parallel is an exhibition of interest for you Guttenberg nuts: Creative Commerce: German Lithographic Labels, 1920-1938
Prepare to be spammed globally. Twttr just launched, a mobile social software app for SMSing your social network developed by Odeo. It's slightly simpler than Dodgeball, not location centric and a bit more viral. Biz Stone calls it present-tense blogging. Ev notes you might want to upgrade your SMS plan and they are working on compatibility outside the US. To me its reply-to-all baked in your phone.
If they support MMS and let me send a photo to twttr and CC flickr, it will be a killer app. But for now, put my SMS' in a sidebar widget or give me feeds I can splice.
Yes, I am a twtt.
I'm advising a new startup called Dandelife, which is a Social Biography Network. TechCrunch has the scoop, but let me tell you why I think they will be successful.
Ever get that feeling why you are blogging and flickring your life away that you have lost something? That you are telling your life's story, but it is lost in the archives and in the minds of people who are really paying attention?
There is a gap in social software for binding stories in a chronology. For building biographies of people, places and things. I think Dandelife serves as different object to tell stories around. Time.
The horizontal and vertical visualizations are what makes this work:
Dandelife is definately beta and Edward and Kelly are working hard on it. But when you can upload your blog and photos to start your story, its pretty powerful. Go play. And let them know how it can get better.
Conde Nast, owner of Wired Magazine, has bought Wired News. If that seems confusing, it doesn't matter if you have been paying attention. Lycos bought the online brand, Conde the off, and they were a family by name. My sister was a reporter for Wired News and I watched from a distance as Lycos drove it into the ground. It's more than common sense they come together again. And I hope Chris Anderson gets to hire back all that great talent (no, my sis isn't available).
Let's admit that we are pathetically apathetic when it comes to politics. Most of us don't vote, very few of us are civic participants, even some of us don't pay taxes. Let's embrace the fact that we don't have time for politics, even when its electing representatives. And by embracing our less than ideal civic state, we may change it.
But time with the right tools is on our side. I just skimmed (because I've been participating in the blog conversations) a fresh copy of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. By now you may know this new economic for how the network changes business models for discovery and fulfillment. Chris has also written about social production, distributed across The Long Tail.
Building upon the Power Law of Participation, I'd like to suggest a model for civic engagement that embraces apathy.
The horizontal axis is time committed, the vertical axis ranges from apathy to civic engagement. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics surveyed 9 categories of civic participation: voting, campaign work, campaign contributions, contacting an official, protests, informal community work, membership on a local board, affiliation with a political organization, and contribution to a political cause. This lead Thomas Ehrlich to opine: But unless voting is accompanied by the other political activities, it reduces citizenship to a superficial and relatively passive activity.
Not that Ehrlich is wrong, but my point is this -- few of us have time or interest in politics, but there is a way for us all to have civic engagement within our means. That way is though social software. As seen in the Power Law of Participation, effective communities can engage participants at their own level while functioning as an organization.
This of course, is a theory based upon what we see in open source and Wikipedia as an organization, or the Wealth of Networks. I was tempted to add in Asylum or Resignation as a high engagement activity, as it is the closest to the right to fork you find in these emergent models where checks and balances are more liquid.
If I have one request from readers, it is to suggest what order the categories should be, or to suggest new ones, as my views of time as money may be biased. I added Taxes, Civil Service and Elected Office, another approach would be to leverage Robert Putnam's 12 categories. For your remix (and while you are at it, help me draw a proper power law):
• Elected office -- representing the time and interest of a constituency.
• Civil service -- while a form of giving at the office, it's not an excuse, but a calling
• Campaign work -- this actually has multiple levels of engagement, but while paid staffers
• Membership on a local board -- the greatest opportunity for civic engagement most citizens don't realize
• Voting -- not enough, in my humble opinion, but our basic obligation for civic participation
• Contacting an official -- either directly or through petition
• Informal community work -- high social capital activities most significantly augmented by social software
• Protests -- political activism
• Affiliation with a political organization -- mass-membership organizations
• Contribution to a political cause -- issue or group specific spending as speech
• Campaign contributions -- directed towards vote, low engagement rank because of the campaign donation made accessible through the tax form
• Taxes -- you pay them, right?
• Death -- inevitable, yes, but also a proxy for doing nothing. Didn't put it in the image.
When I napkined this model for Kevin Fong of the Mayfield Fund (no relation except trademark dispute ;-) over lunch at Brainstorm, he suggested that without apathy you have revolution. I suggested that the 95% turnout for the first Ukrainian election, which was rather revolutionary, might support his theory. I would like to think that political participation overlaid upon Maslow's hierarchy of needs may be a well-curve with one end sparking rebellion, and the other being, well, an ideal.
Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone surveyed the decline of social capital in twelve categories One counter argument he acknowledges is the rise of mass-membership organizations like the Sierra Club or AARP. It should be noted that Affiliation with a Political Organization does not necessarily mean fostering social capital, as members can be only connected through proxy. However, you could view a successful political organization as mass, with it's own Long Tail of Apathy.
Time columnist Joe Klein, author of Politics Lost, suggested at Brainstorm that his vote for the next President would be decided by how much she asked of the citizenry. That's right -- don't ask for my vote, tell me how I should contribute. The WW II generation shared a common sacrifice and understanding for what it meant to be American -- which made them good citizens and leaders. Doing what you can for your country used to be a shared value.
But as the political season approaches, let's consider what has changed (as little in the political landscape has). The cost for personal publishing has fallen to zero. Its common for citizens to express a facet of their identity online. The cost for group forming has fallen to zero. Networked appeal has proven itself as a fundraising mechanism. A broad conversational network and common sense repository supports collective sense making. Today social software has gained use broad enough to support civic engagement.
During the last Presidential campaign we held hope that politics was changing. First we thought we could get someone elected from the grassroots, but restoring topsoil takes greater effort. Then we even hoped that political institutions could change how they engaged the public, but the elected culture isolated itself without precedent. Quite frankly, this barely happened. But this time around, groups are forming to take action.
One fascinating statistic thrown around at Brainstorm 2006 was that 10% of college students volunteered to join Americorps. Unfortunately I can't find a source, although Americorps has 75,000 members, with a significant track record:
It is encouraging to think that NetGens have a latent demand for civic engagement, The children of the baby boom may not buy off on political messages, but they want to play a role, to give forth. Let's admit there is hope together, each in our own way.
Yellowikis is a yellow pages wiki community, started by a dad and a daughter, with 500 editors collaborating on open business listings. Now Yell, the world's largest yellow pages publisher, based in the UK, is threatening them to shut down.
Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.
Now last I checked, yellow was a color, and yellow pages was a generic term. Maybe that's why the Yell Group plc picked a more unique name themselves, but its hard to see the trademark infringement. But as a small wiki community, its even harder to see them standing against the cease and desist letter.
UPDATE: Chuqui: "Yellow Pages is not a trademark in the U.S. It *is* a trademark in the U.K. That's why Sun's Yellow Pages became NIS. so they have a trademark issue in the U.K. here." Contrary opinions in comments below.
Jimmy Wales with a new mission statement:
I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.
This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.
Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.
Sounds like the makings of a new center. I'm in.
If you have any doubt that markets are conversations, literally, there is a new paper by Peter Kollock of UCLA and E. Russell Braziel of Bentek Energy on How Not to Build an Online Market: The Sociology of Market Microstructure (pdf). Using the boom (and bust) of B2B Exchanges as a period to study the greatest creation of new markets in history, they explain how transaction efficiency doesn't foster liquidity in and of itself. Through an analysis of the propane markets in Texas and California, they show the role of social capital in markets and technology implications. Whereas in a liquid market, problems can largely be solved through price -- new, small and fragmented markets rely on conversations to gain "market color" and favors to do deals.
Quoting liberally:
The interconnected networks of relationships were important because of the structural roles of intermediaries, but these networks were also key because of the informal economy of favors that flowed through these social relationships. Solving problems is a central function of many market participants, and the key risk the individual is concerned with is career risk -- the extent to which their job or their bonus is on the line. Having friends in the network to turn to for favors in order to solve problems is critical. Economies of goods rest on economies of favors.
The informal insurance that comes from the flow of favors is a particularly important example of relational contracting "informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships" (Baker, Gibbons, and Murphy 2002; cf. Macaulay 1963). Contracts can be a formal means of dealing with some of the risks of transactions, but informal means of managing risks are fundamentally important for at least two reasons. First, contracts simply cannot cover all the possible things that can go wrong. Second, formal approaches to dealing with the risks of transactions can be exceedingly, even prohibitively, expensive. A transaction that does not rest
at least in part on trust and the flow of favors is an expense that can rarely be afforded
This social capital approach to risk management is an important feature even in the centralized Texas market, and dominates the dynamics of sub-markets such as California propane. To date, the study of the informal economy and informal risk management has focused more on such setting as traders in the slums of Ghana (Hart 1988) or agricultural traders in Madagascar (Fafchamps and Minten 2001), but first-world energy markets may have more in common with third-world agricultural traders than might first be thought. This is not to say that markets in the US are more "backwards" than is commonly thought, but to make the point that an informal layer in markets is both inevitable and often provides key functions for the successful operation of the market. As the former CEO [actually, President & Co-founder] of a B2B bandwidth exchange commented:
Somewhere around the peak of the boom we forgot something. That lowly phone broker who knew how to make money in the market. ... They didn't talk about efficient systems. They talked about talk, [the] guy they knew they could extend credit or cut a deal [with] because they knew they would get it back when they needed it. Just like the phone brokers from a couple of years before, they knew markets were relationships. Markets are social. (Mayfield 2005)
Yep, that's me. And it is no coincidence that the experience I had with commodity markets led me towards building social software for a living. In some cases, for people who get both worlds, like JP Rangaswami (ping), who recently made similar points on the use of social software in risk management:
JP excerpts from The Risk Management of Everything and Harnessing Hindsight to suggest the role of social software in risk management is collective enquiry and sensemaking around risk events. Unfortunately, when risk management is simply defensive, cultures punish failure which prevents learning about latent (and fat tail) risks. Managing the unknown requires making the known transparent, but to do so, requires trust.
I left Brainstorm 2006 with my interest in politics reinvigorated. The personal highlight was spending time with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, just after the Dutch government fell in her wake. The rest you could have seen on CNN, as the media presence left comments controlled. See the Brainstorm blog for notes on John McCain's session. Here are my notes from a panel, contributed to the private Socialtext wiki, on the hijacking of the American political process.
Participants:
Joe Klein
3 most frequenly asked questions about Politics Lost
1. Isn't it the politicians fault? yes. Many don't listen to advisors, or listen to the wrong thing (Gore not talking environment, Kerry not on torture)
2. What's been lost? Kennedy would now know too much. Inputs of polls and focus groups.
1. politician's faith in the public because of the information they have about us
2. the politician's faith in themselves. it takes a strong politician can look at a set of numbers and go a different way
3. Isn't it the media's fault. No. We have lost the habits of citizenship.
We know that politicians don't mean anything when they say, like Kerry, "we don't need a policy of family values, but valuing families," it means nothing. Judge a candidate's credibility by what you can measure, but in 2008 my standard is if you don't ask anything of me, if you don't challenge me, I'm not giving you anything, especially my vote. (emphasis mine)
Mark McKinnon
Consultants are a lot like journalists, we got into this because we loved it. You can lose and fail upwards in this business. Cartoon where a consultant is sitting in front of a candidate who asks, "remind me of my core convictions." We are trying to do things of some level of authenticity, but sometimes, with Perot and Dean, it's not the best thing. In 2000 Bush came to him with issues like Social Security they were going to campaign despite the numbers. Lists a few cases during the campaign where there were moments of unpolled authenticity.
Mark Penn
Used to do foreign presidential elections, like Colombia, where they won with margin. The first poll was 2-1 a tougher stance against the drug lords in order to make it a more modern country. Tried to inform the campaign leadership, but they said, you are right, but we would all be killed. The power of polls, and their limits. The power was that we could inform, the limit was saying it wasn't a good idea right now (they did it a year later). Polls give a clearer window of what leaders want to know. But leaders need to learn how to use polls to assist their thinking and go beyond a small group of advisors and system of political censorship.
David Gergen
I believe the leadership class of the country is failing us in politics. Not addressing the significant issues or leaving a heritage. Talked about Global Warming today, the first generation to leave others with problems they can't solve. Lot of reasons for this. We essentially face a generational problem. They country was governed by the WWI and II generations well for 60 years, people with common values, a sense of the role in the world we play, and a sense of common sacrifice. JFK to Bush wore a military uniform when they were young, a formative experience. Thought of themselves of Americans first, not partisans. "Tip, if I had a ticket to heaven, and you didn't have one too, then I would give my ticket back and go to hell with you." A new generation has come to town over the last 13 years, and if you look at them as a collective, born between 1940-1950s, and formative years in the 60s and 70s, and their best politics was when they were young. Either clung to old values or new ones, vietnam as a scar for who went and who didn't. Being American is secondary to their psyche.
Joe Klein
Combat veterans who were in the US senate would say that politics are the opposite of war. Polls are the crack of politics and media. Having to govern as a permanent campaign. Message of the day instead of looking over the next hill and telling people what they need. From a focus group, what would you tell the president on his first day, someone said, my opinion doesn't matter, which he explained was a request for leadership.
Arriana Huffington
Hillary picked flag burning, a red-state issue last week despite it not being a core conviction.
Mark Penn
Hillary has never been for flag burning. Journalists decide who is authentic or not, regardless of if it is.
Member of the Japanese Congress
Politicians level is equal to the people of a country. Not many exceptions to this rule.
Joe
What you are saying is that people get the governance they deserve. My book has made authenticity an epithet. Character is the intersection of beliefs and humanity. Rather than authenticity, I am interested in courage.
David Gergen
Leadership appeals to the better angels of our nature.
Gary Flake
We've mortgaged the future, and now sacrifice is required, but politics is how you keep the job instead of do the job -- what do we do to change the dynamic?
Mark McKinnon
The flip side of your point is that every time you raise the issue of social security, people go nuts.
Joe
Voters are not just a marketplace, we are a polity.
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