Sharon Pratt Kelly, former Washington, DC, mayor and proud proprietor of a brand-new politics Web site, talks an ideology that sounds like pure netizen.
"Our political apparatus worked when we were an agrarian society and moving with a horse and buggy," says Kelly. "People don't have outlets ... to be civically engaged, and the Net can provide that."
Kelly's personal contribution to the cause, a political-discussion site called Spirit for a New America, goes public on Friday.
Kelly says she hopes the site will act as a "conceptual catalyst" for a "new notion of self." Developed by small Brooklyn BBS and Web site developer NYOnline, Spirit for America eschews bells and whistles for straightforward weekly essays by Kelly and extensive bulletin boards.
Kelly, who served as DC mayor from 1991 to 1995, said the idea for the site began to "percolate" when she was teaching at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She had started writing a book, but decided that the Web was a better venue because it offered a way around the restraints of the publishing world.
"[The site] allows me the freedom to present my ideas without prejudgment," Kelly says. She adds that she has no plans to run for office.
Hers is more than a hazy feel-good agenda, though. Central to the causes she says she'll campaign for on the site is a Constitutional Convention in 1999 to abolish the presidential electoral college and break down the barriers to a more direct and inclusive form of democracy than the United States now enjoys.
"The flow of information is too fast and voluminous for there to be legitimate representational democracy," Kelly says. "We need a direct connection."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
