Robert S Tanner

With broadband and a decent computer and the plethora of clips on the intertubes these days you can attend all kinds of conferences from the comfort of your desk. You don't get the random, interactive meeting and greeting of physically being there but virtual attendance is a a heck of a lot cheaper (free). I watched a ton of Walter Mossberg's All Things D conference via video clips. I'm catching up a bit on Kevin Werbach's recent Supernova conference the same way. (I just listened to Clay Shirky's "love" speech which was a nice metaphor for how open source projects work and succeed although ultimately not a very informative metaphor as love is an incredibly broad term that encompasses many types of relationships. I'm reading - finally - The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins right now and there's a bit on the Prisoner's Dilemma and Evolutionary Stable Strategies that is probably more apt to shed light on why the cooperative aspects of open source projects do work and succeed so well.) It occurs to me that it is entirely feasible and may actually be effective in many cases for people to interact with government through such video clips. A typical written filing from a member of the public to a government agency like the FCC is often supplemented with meetings with agency staff (including in the case of the FCC, the Commissioners who make the decisions) where proceedings are discussed (written ex parte summaries on such meetings need to be added to the record). Such meetings seem still to be overwhelming done in person although folks are definitely using audio and video conferences tools as well. But these meetings need to be scheduled and are conducted at the discretion of the agency staff working on the proceeding. What would be an interesting tool somewhere between the written filing and the meeting would be a video presentation submitted to a proceeding. I honestly don't know if the FCC's current procedural rules would allow for this or not but it seems like something that should be explored. (So long as I'm pointing out technology stuff the FCC should be adopting, it also would be nice if the FCC would add RSS feeds to its website...)