Posts from hacking government

My partner Albert penned a post yesterday (on and because of labor day) talking about the changing nature of work (more freelancers working on marketplace platforms) and suggested some interesting ideas. You can read his post here.

The two really interesting and related ideas are:

– A legal right for workers on these platforms to have real time (API based) access to the information about their work, pricing, supply and demand in the marketplace, etc, etc

– The development of algorithms (and coops and communities using these algorithms) that will allow these freelance workers to extract the best rates for their work

I believe that in the long run these platforms may/will be replaced by blockchain based networks of labor where there is no platform middleman and there would be no need for a legal right to an API because all the data would be public by default.

But who knows how long it will take for that transformation to happen? In the meantime, Albert’s ideas are really good and I would encourage people who are thinking about old school based regulation of these platforms to think instead of a new school regulatory approach along the lines of what Albert has suggested.

Our portfolio company Etsy is helping Rockford Illinois build an entrepreneurial economy in their city. Here’s a short (3 min) video that talks a bit about what they are doing and how it got started.

In celebration of a huge July 4th in which over 10,000 people collectively donated almost $2mm to get MayDay PAC over its $5mm goal, here’s Larry Lessig talking about why all of this matters.

Today, July 4th, the anniversary of the day in which our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, is also the final day of a crowdfunding campaign to raise $12mm for a Super PAC to fund campaign finance reform.

This campaign is called MayDay and the person behind it is Larry Lessig.

The idea is to use the $12mm to make campaign finance reform the fundamental issue in five high profile congressional races and win them.

If that works, then May Day PAC will crowdfund a much larger amount in 2016 and do this again in a lot more races.

Larry’s assertion is that the vast majority of americans want big money out of government, but the small number of people with the big money don’t want that to happen and they are calling the shots now.

He believes that the best way to fix that is for everyone with small amounts of money to come together and put together some big money and go toe to toe with them.

I think it is an interesting idea and when Larry raised the first $1mm from the crowd, the Gotham Gal and I participated in the small group that matched the first $1mm. We can and do write big checks to politicians because that’s the way our corrupt system of government works right now. We are happy to write big checks to change that system and make it right.

The second part of the crowdfunding campaign is seeking to raise $5mm and then get that matched in the same way the first $1mm was matched.

With one day to go, the campaign is short by about $1.5mm. It would be amazing if the american public celebrated July 4th by coming up with the final $1.5mm.

If you are so inclined, you can help do that here.

My partner Brad and our colleague Nick have been advising some folks in Iceland on economic development and how the Internet and networks could be the key to giving their economy a big push. They have been doing that for several years now.

Last March Brad went to Iceland and gave a talk to a bunch of policy makers there. It was put up on YouTube recently and I am making it the video of the week this week. In this talk Brad lays out a vision of what the Icelandic economy look like in ten years with the right policy choices. He also explains why he and the rest of USV is interested in that (hint: jurisdictional competition).