Glowrich on New Media

Friend-politics (Cronyism)

In a time where bloggers check the facts, who visualizes the power-structures that produces the facts? Sorry, I had to open like this two days after Don LaFontaine passed away (via Frank-Ly en GeenCommentaar).

I’d like to talk a bit about what intrigues me lately, namely how people with high positions take their decisions. We all like to think that our politicians listen to their constituency when they vote on a certain topic. We also like to think that board members and CEO’s put the company (and shareholders) first when they decide on something. Sadly, we know that this sometimes just isn’t true, but hey, what can you do?

When we agree that their official job is not their only motivation , we agree that in order to understand their choices we need a way to know what else influences them. In Dutch a literal translation of cronyism is ‘friend-politics’ which nicely stresses the way (business)friends have an impact on decision making. It is this part of the motivation that is hard for the public to know. But it using modern technologies, this is not necessarily true anymore.
A really simple tool for this could be LinkedIn. Most of the LinkedIn users publicly state their past jobs, committees, contacts, organizations, universities, etc. etc. Using this data via an API enables us to draw a map of (or list the) connections between the one making a certain decision and the one that profits from this. Adding more info based on articles by respected news sources could further complete these profiles.

Of course, it is easy to get cynical seeing all the connections but  it shouldn’t be used to proof our politicians are corrupt. A connection doesn’t proof a hidden agenda, it is only more likely and it should be investigated further. Doing that, decisions are really getting more transparent and hopefully makes it eventually harder to be corrupt or wrongly informed. This way it is actually an opportunity to be less cynical because when decisions are transparent there is no need to be as suspicious as most of us are now. Just like how newspapers can be more transparent, and more trust-worthy in a link-economy, when they show what information and from who they’ve used for every article.

One condition for all this to work properly is that every vote on every bill should be made public. A list of connections between the 30+ party members and the ones benefitting from the bill is nearly endless.

The point I’m trying to make is that nobody is original and in order to be trusted decisions should be transparent. Especially for the ones that decide on our account. Now we have an opportunity to make these decisions transparant and publicly available we should think about how we’re going to do that.