Q&A: Rob Kramer, Founder and CEO of PopRule

By thinksocial on May 12, 2009 | 1511 Commenthttp://think-social.org/qa-rob-kramer-founder-and-ceo-of-poprule.htmQ%26amp%3BA%3A+Rob+Kramer%2C+Founder+and+CEO+of+PopRule2009-05-12+15%3A50%3A26thinksocial

ROB KRAMER
Founder, CEO of PopRule

Rob has spent the past 20 years as an entrepreneur and executive in the media, technology, environmental, and non-profit sectors. Rob is the co-founder of PopRule, a distributed democracy platform and application for taking and distributing rapid political action.

TS: Tell me about PopRule why did you start it?

Rob Kramer: I started it to get the tools back into people’s hands so they could take political action and actually effect change in their own lives. We live in a country of so-called representative government, but in a sense we’ve been duped. We create this incredible relationship with our elected officials during their campaigns – we all get very excited about certain candidates, whether they’re local school board officials or the president. But the moment they take office the relationship basically ends. Or it only continues to the extent that the politician needs to reach out to his or her constituents.

TS: So do you think that social media is the tool we need to make politicians more accountable?

RK: I really believe it can change the world on so many levels, whether it’s politics and government, or humanitarian issues, or green issues.

TS: Is there anything you’re seeing apart from, obviously, PopRule, that you’re really excited about? Any ways people are using the technology or any new technology that’s coming about that you think might have some impact?

RK: Technology doesn’t solve problems, people do. Is crowdsourcing a technology? Not really. Does the underlying technology enable the crowdsourcing – the social networks that crowdsorucing can happen around? Yes. Social media is a reflection, an exteriorization of basic human behavior from the beginning of time. We’ve been in this very one-way world recently, and that’s changing through social media. There was a point at which it was all about corporations running the government and the economy – which they still do, in many respects and the traffic was all one way.

TS: And what do you think the threats are to people using social media in the public interest?

RK: I think one of the threats is this issue of net neutrality and whether or not these tools are going to be in the hands of a select few or have the ability to benefit everyone. There is the threat of further segmenting certain parts of society and leaving them behind. I do believe though that social media is truly democratizing.

Television is a one-way medium. It’s a passive medium. Whereas if I participate in social media or social networks or distributed democracy, I am participating in the process, I have the ability to create, I have the ability to activate, and I have the ability to distribute that action. It requires me to participate. That’s a good thing, and it is the way human beings have always lived. We entered a period for maybe a couple hundred years where it everything was very top-down. And some people were marginalized. Social media is a much more inclusive, participatory model in which people can self-organize.

TS: Where do you see the public interest of social media in a couple of years?

RK: In politics, from a PopRule perspective, we really believe that by the presidential election 2012 every candidate will have an open channel of communication with various issue-based sectors of society through these tools. People will actually contribute to policy, contribute to the shaping of a particular platform that the candidate of that party stands on. They will actually be participating in government like we did when we had tribal councils By 2012 social media will have changed and transformed the entire political process all the way through legislation it’ll be crowdsourced. There will always be representative, I imagine but the people will start to inform the representative on how they want to be represented, as opposed to the other way around.

TS: So essentially we will have come full circle from tribal villages through technology to a position where every elected official is as accountable as a shaman in a tribe.

RK: Yes, I think so. We’re not re-inventing behavior here, we’re re-discovering behavior. In the green sector, for example, there’s a great desire to find solutions – whether it’s climate change, or transportation, or alternatives to fossil fuels, the collective society has the opportunity with social media and its infrastructure to crowdsource solutions and ideas that collectively benefit us. Social media is going to enable us to do it more rapidly than we could possibly do it for some top-down corporate, entrepreneurial or governmental approach.

We need all of the spare brain cycles that everyone has, the wisdom of crowds, collectively, as the human race work through this challenge. There’s no way a corporation or government is going to be able to do this alone. Social media is going to be the tool, the environment, and the guide through which we can achieve things that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. I ve actually been involved with the international water sector for about five, six years and done clean, safe water projects in three developing world countries. Every time I go to those countries it’s a big challenge; it takes 6 weeks and it’s a lot of planning, and you’re going into a place that you don’t know about. Well, because of social media we’re able to find problems and solutions much quicker, we’re able to plan ahead in terms of what’s required, at what point and where around the world, and we can collectively deal with those issues. So when we do show up on the ground we’re actually much more effective. The perfect example of this is that you could go online right now and donate 25 dollars to a social entrepreneur in Bangladesh who needs to buy a couple of sewing machines to start his textile business.