Site cedes power to people

As the 2008 U.S. presidential contenders struggle to mesh old-style politics with the fast-evolving Internet culture, the future of online politics may have already arrived in this green swale of a town two hours northeast of Las Vegas.

Steve Urquhart, a local lawyer and state legislator, launched wiki-based Politicopia.com in January hoping to create a virtual town square where Utahans could debate issues coming before the Legislature.

Debate they did, creating an online forum between elected officials and their constituents that ultimately changed state policy.

“The language can be incendiary, but [the details] are in black and white for policymakers like me,” said Republican state Rep. Keith Grover, who credits debate on the site for persuading him to vote for a controversial school voucher program -- which passed by one vote. “People have salient points, points that are founded in facts, not emotions.”

Although the experiment was limited -- the issues were local in a lightly populated state -- experts say Politicopia is among the first websites to deliver on the Internet’s potential to amplify individual voices and counter the political power of special-interest groups.

The potential effect for broader political discourse has stirred excitement among advocates who believe the Internet can be used to increase citizen participation in politics.

“Steve is at the vanguard of the future of American politics in the 21st century, where town halls, policy debates and civic involvement will happen on wikis, blogs, video-sharing and social networking sites,” said Andrew Rasiej, a founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and an advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, both of which advocate more openness in political campaigns and government.

Politicopia is based on a user-controlled wiki system that allows anyone to join the discussion. Unlike activist groups such as MoveOn.org, it does not push an agenda other than open discussion. Removing politicians from control of the debate gives it room to roam.

“I don’t want it to be about me,” Urquhart said. “I want it to be about politics.”

At its heart, Politicopia has done what Web-savvy political watchers maintain the presidential candidates have yet to understand -- or have rejected. Political campaigns are determined to control the message from the top down, and strategists are leery of ceding even a little control to supporters.

The Barack Obama campaign, for example, had a public breakup last month with Joe Anthony, who created an Obama MySpace page in 2004. The parting occurred after the campaign sought control of the page and Anthony sought to get paid to maintain the page and its network of 160,000 “friends” (site parlance for network members).

In the end, Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) got the site -- and control of the message -- and Anthony kept the friends.

Most candidates use the Internet to simply broadcast their messages in another medium -- an electronic form of direct mail, with video. The message flows one way. Even social networking programs, in which campaigns help supporters form local grass-roots committees and raise funds, are horizontal. The information flows among supporters, not up to the policymakers.

Obama’s campaign -- which many Web-watchers think is using the Internet most effectively among presidential candidates -- announced it was soliciting YouTube videos about people’s efforts to “make this country better” and promised “to use the input from the submissions to help shape the agenda for the campaign over the course of the next several months.”

At Politicopia, interested voters have already been engaged, with measurable results. They conduct their own legislative debates and leave both a record and an aggregation of voices to define an issue.

The technology advances the chat rooms that spiked in popularity a decade ago.

“Chat rooms are real-time technology in that you are engaged with people over the Internet in the here and now,” Rasiej said. “Politicopia is more of a repository of ideas and discussions where issues can be debated and information can be added over time.”

During the 45-day legislative session, which ended in mid-February, the online discussion swayed the votes of at least two state legislators on the school voucher measure. Urquhart thinks it also helped persuade legislators to shelve a proposal to have Utah issue a direct legal challenge to Roe vs. Wade.

Whereas Politicopia debate pushed the voucher decision to the right, he said, it pushed the abortion decision to the left.

“It moved the needle,” said Urquhart, a conservative Republican who just began his fourth two-year term. “It helped improve the dialogue. I think that’s what a lot of us are yearning for in politics today.”

Politicopia’s influence on Grover, who is also a middle-school vice principal in Orem, Utah, was significant. Most of his professional peers were dead-set against a school voucher plan, which had failed to gain legislative approval for several years, Grover said. But as a conservative Republican, he was drawn to some elements of the proposal.

He began reading Politicopia, and slowly the arguments coalesced in his mind. Bucking his peers and, he said, reflecting the opinions of constituents, Grover voted for the bill.

Orem architect and first-term Rep. Steve E. Sandstrom similarly found clarity in the Politicopia discussion and voted for the measure, which he initially had viewed with skepticism.

“I think we’re on the verge of something new,” said Sandstrom, a former Orem city councilman. “It was intelligent, thoughtful and produced a consensus. It was pretty neat.”

Urquhart is an unlikely hero of the Internet. He began blogging in 2004 about his stances on state issues, but he is hardly a tech wizard. He relies on others for the software to run the site.

The initial site, which Urquhart calls the beta version, was hosted for free by Palo Alto-based Socialtext. Urquhart is awaiting new software by Open Resource Group to try to expand the site’s capabilities -- such as social networking tools for users to create their own groups around issues -- but says he does not know where the wiki will grow, or how it will be financed.

“We’ll have to figure that out,” Urquhart said. “On all of this I’m flying by the seat of my pants.”

Urquhart began Politicopia out of frustration over low turnout at public forums. Conversations with a Web-savvy brother-in-law led him to launch the site in January. The website was quickly embraced by the growing online community that advocates open government. Urquhart wound up speaking on a panel called “Embracing Voter-Generated Content” at last month’s Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York.

“I’m baffled” by the amount of attention, Urquhart said, sitting in his small home office in a new development at the edge of fast-growing St. George. “I just want to find solutions and involve more people in the dialogue. Democracy requires it.”

Politicopia’s strength, he said, comes from breaking down the barriers of time and self-consciousness. Debaters can jump in at any time, adding as many or as few thoughts as they like.

“They control the environment,” Urquhart said. “They look at it when they feel like, ignore it when they feel like.... And it only works if it’s a broad pool of people, not just techies or one party or another.”

Urquhart still writes his blog, a conversation with constituents about his stance on issues, but sees that format as too limiting to encourage open discussion.

“It’s too professorial. There I am at the head of the class: ‘Today we’re going to talk about such and such,’ ” Urquhart said.

The future, he believes, lies in the wiki.

“It has to be bottom up,” he said. “The people have to have the tools and the ability to set the agenda.”

scott.martelle@latimes.com