Mark Myers has been highlighted by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently The Nation for his work on The Superdelegate Transparency Project. The open source project, which he started because he was furious with the “elitist” elements of the superdelegate process, tracks political, professional and personal information relating to the superdelegates. The project is now housed at Congresspedia.

Myers’ background is in technology and he works in Florida as a consultant. Our conversation eventually made its way into the realm of Internet and music distribution, which will later make for another wonderful conversation and a hundred great posts. Here he discusses his rejection of a decade of political apathy, the usefulness of a background in tech, and the future of political activism in the Internet age.

How did you initially get involved with this project?

Moving it forward was almost accidental. I reconnected with [Jennifer Nix], an old friend from San Francisco. She had previously written for The Nation, AlterNet and she worked as a published [of Glenn Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act?]. She told me that she was starting a blog. She was pretty involved in politics. She wanted me to write about music. We exchanged all of these emails and talked about the possibility of writing about politics.

I had thought that I would be the perfect case-study of someone blogging about politics because I used to be politically active but I have since started to feel more disenfranchised and powerless over the years. I am pretty liberal, but I have never been a registered Democrat. I actually used to be a registered Republican.

I always had issues with the Democratic Party’s top down mentality in terms of how they do business. They spend all of this time getting people ready for their GOTV efforts and organize with a top-down goal in mind. I thought that the run-up to the war was a perfect example of this. They just weren’t listening to their people.

I had first heard of superdelegates in 1992 and the concept stuck in my craw since then. You think about the fact that all of this power is isolated into the hands of the few and it makes you furious. One morning I sent Jennifer an email about how I wanted to get involved and I described what I saw happening with all of this. I wanted to keep an eye on superdelegates and who they were endorsing against how their constituencies had voted. I wasn’t expecting that within a week and a half we would have had coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I was rather shocked. But she had reached out to Chris Bowers from Open Left and he got into it. Then Congresspedia got on board, and there we were.

It is really interesting that you expressed this discomfort with the top-down leadership of the Democratic Party and your solution was essentially to shake that up by decentralizing efforts using wikis and other Internet technologies. Had you long been looking at wikis as a solution to these sorts of problems?

I use Wikipedia as a reader. I’ve only changed an article about three times and it was here and there to fix factual errors. I have had a few other ideas for wikis but they never really had anything to do with politics. I was just ticked about the superdelegate issue–that there were 800 elite people whose opinions were all that really mattered. If someone else had organized this, I would have been happy. I wasn’t really looking to do a lot of free work but somebody had to do it. The idea was out there begging for someone to do it. This project just applied everything–the need, the tools, and the desire–that were already out there. I just applied what was suited to the task.

I guess you reach a point where you see where you fit and you say, “I have to do this.” Without Jen’s participation, this wouldn’t have gone anywhere. I credit her more than me. She asked, “Who are my connections? Who can get it momentum?

How much work goes into maintaining a project like this?

There is a massive amount of work that goes into tracking, matching info, getting citations and working with sources, etc. It’s been a long time since I have had exposure to statistics like these.

There was an article in The Nation about the project that mentioned a pediatrician who works on the wiki and I don’t know him. There are all these people doing this work that I don’t know.

My work had been on an as-I-can-do-it basis. At the start I was working 10 hours a day and 7 days a week. In March and April, I backed off a little too because I was trying to launch another site. I built the original but then we moved it over to CP and they were doing a ton of work. Thankfully, my roll had quickly diminished.

Do you have a background in organizing?

Not in terms of community activism. In my 20s I used to volunteer at the YMCA in Pennsylvania. It was a youth program called Youth In Government that tried to make young people more involved in the political process. I was an advisor there for five or six years. So there was this theory that there is this big process that you, too, can be involved in and I believed that model for a while. Then in the late 90s I began feeling that it wasn’t true.

Geraldine Ferraro’s statements about the superdelegate process exposed a core philosophy of old school Democrats that is still prominent and makes me feel like I was right for feeling apathetic. I hadn’t voted for a while despite agreeing with the things the Democratic Party believes. I have done one-off projects but you could never have said that I was a community organizer. This all was a new venture for me. I was more of a technology person; that is my professional background. I guess the real reason for me getting into any of this was because in my professional career I have a knack for figuring out creative applications for technology.

How has that background helped you in this particular campaign?

In one case, at [a telecom] I was working for, we had a severe need for assistance with service activation unit teams. We had this severe need for help and there was no system offered. Our teams were using spreadsheets and it wasn’t very productive. I was championing for the department internally, but there was this feeling that nothing could be done in this situation. So I started dorking around with other systems and after being told that they wouldn’t be able to straighten out this backed up system for nearly a year and a half, I reconfigured another system so that it could be done there in a fraction of the time. Long story short, It took a developer three hours to put it into action.

When I look at other problems, I look at them coming from this background. I ask myself, “What else is possible?”

What do you see in the future of organization, politics, and the Internet?

I talked about this a bit in a Huffington Post piece a few days back. What we saw in 2004–the Meetup and the Dean and Trippi tactics–really set things into motion. Obama has taken that model and maxed it out in terms of where it is going. What I think is going to happen in the next four to six years is that you will see an emergence of those kinds of activities reaching beyond the electoral context. It will find its way into the legislative process.

Look at a lot of of the laws that get passed. Nobody reads them. Someone does read them for the lawmakers, but there is largely this escape of accountability. What is emerging in the next few years is that folks online will dissect the laws at the committee level. People will take through the laws section by section. They will be dissected and so-forth. Maybe I am over-shooting or over-optimistic, but I think that it is an opportunity to change our relationship with the government.

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