This year’s Netroots Nation Convention marks the launch of a bold experiment in participatory democracy.  The Netroots (i.e. the left half of the blogosphere) will use MixedInk’s collaborative writing tool to craft their very own political platform in advance of the Democratic Convention.  At two working sessions, participants will kick off the initiative by putting their best ideas and language together.

If you’re going to be there, come visit on Friday, July 18th and Saturday, July 19th, and stop by our exhibition booth!  These sessions are just the beginning of what will be an ongoing, public process that will continue in the weeks following the conference.  The final, collectively written platform will be presented to the DNC before the convention in Denver.

If you want to be involved from the beginning but won’t be at NN, sign up at MixedInk.com, and we’ll email you the URL as soon it’s launched.

We’d like to thank the folks at Netroots Nation and wmtriallawyer for helping to organize this!

This effort builds on a growing movement to use online tools to make our government more transparent, representative, and accountable.  Both Barack Obama’s campaign and the RNC have launched exciting initiatives allowing people to help shape their platforms.  Using the Barack Obama website, Democrats can organize “Platform Meetings” in their communities, during which they can discuss and then submit policy “planks,” or one- to two-sentence policy suggestions.  These planks will be reviewed by the team writing the Platform and some will likely be incorporated into the final document.

The Republican Party also has an exciting grassroots-driven platform development effort underway.  The site highlights a range of issues and enables people to submit policies and comments that will be considered by platform authors as they prepare for the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Also along these lines, 21st Century Democrats wrote their own Alternative Democratic Platform, which is currently being circulated as a petition.

We are thrilled to see the platform-making process opened up to the public - and proud that MixedInk will be the platform used by the Netroots.  MixedInk was built to enable exactly this kind of participation, and we look forward to seeing the results of these incredible people-powered efforts!

Don’t forget to sign up if you want to be notified when you can help create the Netroots platform.

Check out this video, singing praise for tools that tap people’s knowledge - whether using prediction markets to forecast everything from election results to American Idol winners to asking the audience tough questions answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  They point out that people - collectively - perform consistently better than the pundits and experts.  Our post on prediction markets makes many of the same arguments.

Based on our last test of MixedInk, we’re convinced that our 30-headed pundit did better than any individual one of us could have alone!

We just tested out the latest version of our tool, and I wanted to share the results.  The short version: the test was a success!

Last week, 30 beta testers (read: friends) used MixedInk to help write a letter to the editor explaining why Barack Obama shouldn’t choose Hillary Clinton as his VP.   (We did not select this subject on our own - we gave our participants a few topics to choose from, and this is the one where there seemed to be greatest consensus.)

Here’s what they created together:

For years, wide-eyed journalists, politicos and academics have captured people’s imagination with musings about the many ways the Internet would democratize our society.  A decade and a half after the Internet’s emergence, the anticipated transformation is certainly underway.  Media, political, and corporate institutions have begun to incorporate readers, constituents and consumers into their regular operational and decision-making processes.  However, relative to the initial projections, the pace of change isn’t fast enough – at least to the impatient ones, including us here at MixedInk!

There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, government, media, and corporations are hesitant to cede real power to their stakeholders.  News reporters and editors don’t want to be fact-checked by their readers because it threatens their perceived status as “experts.”  Politicians want complete control over their policies, platforms and messages.  Companies want to know what their consumers think, but they don’t want consumers to have a say in decision making.

This reluctance is increasingly beside the point, however.  New, more democratic norms are coming to govern the relationship between reporter and audience member, elected official and constituent, company and consumer.  This is because free markets and elections provide these institutions with an existential reason to engage citizens transparently and democratically that overrules their hesitance: doing so brings them more votes, more dollars, and more attention.

Another challenge is that the trial and error process of testing social technology takes time.  Social processes are often counter-intuitive and difficult to manipulate, so it’s hard to build web-based tools that are a natural social fit.  New online tools thrive not because they solve some previously impossible technological problem, but because they provide “elegant organization” that offers an outlet to harness people’s energy in a productive (or at least entertaining) way.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict how people will interact with each other using a new tool in advance.  Thus, finding ways to ‘organize elegantly’ requires a slow process of trial and error.

In practice, this has meant that innovative media and political organizations simply try out different tools to see what works, and then, over time, others imitate the tactics that turn out to be successful.  Being currently immersed in this trial and error process, the MixedInk team is very much aware of the time it takes; the way people use our private beta site sometimes surprises us.  As a startup, however, we don’t face the same risks as those at large, prominent institutions.  If things don’t go so well for us, few people will notice.  If they fail, everyone pays attention!

There’s plenty of cause for optimism, though.  The pace of change seems to have increased within the last several years between the growth of new media and the beginnings of a shift towards more democratic user engagement among corporate, political, and media organizations.  As Vanessa mentioned in a recent post, Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are significant innovations in the world of corporate America.  Others, like the YouTube/CNN primary debate here in the US and the UK Prime Minister’s “Ask the PM” represent the beginnings of a democratic transformation within the media and political sphere.

To continue our online democracy’s forward progress, it’s important to recognize and address the risks involved with each of these efforts, though.  Each one engaged a large, critical mass of stakeholders with an up-front promise to publich, incorporate, and respond to their input in a meaningful way.  This sudden, very public democratization of communications meant risking that users might overwhelmingly contradict each institution’s official message and branding.  Yet by capitalizing on citizens’ desire to communicate directly with decision-makers, these efforts have been quite successful.

For all of us who aim to contribute to the emerging wave of online democracy, understanding the risks that that innovators like Starbucks, Dell and CNN face can be the difference between success and failure.  Only by adequately balancing risk and reward will new social technologies and applications be able to bring our emerging online democracy to its inevitable tipping point.  In my next post, I’ll describe a few different models for engaging citizens that provide varying degrees of risk and reward, allowing institutions with a range of risk-aversion and participatory ideals to strike the balance that’s appropriate for them.

Sorry for the big pause in MixedInk’s musings. It was a busy Spring!

Over the past few weeks and months, there have been some notable developments in the crowd-powered arena, and I just want to take a moment to highlight a few interesting examples.

We’re always excited to see forward-looking companies embracing the collective wisdom, so cheers to Starbucks
and Dell, both of which opened the door to major customer feedback. Both companies have embraced a platform called Salesforce Ideas, which TechCrunch aptly described as “Digg-for-ideas.” It allows people to share their ideas, discuss them, and then vote on the ones they like. Participants also get updates from the company responding to the top-rated suggestions. Pretty cool! To many skeptics’ surprise, the Starbucks page has been very popular, with ideas coming in by
the thousands and garnering hundreds of thousands of votes. Starbucks has embraced this feedback as an opportunity to offer their customers the ultimate form of respect – asking their opinion – and to get some new and innovative ideas for free. Dell’s “IdeaStorm,” which was the first site to solicit consumer feedback in this way, rightly earned PR Week’s Innovation
of the Year Award in 2007.

Radiohead has also opened the door to crowd-sourcing. The band surprised fans earlier this year by letting them decide whether or how much to pay for their last CD. In April, they upped the ante by offering “stems” (or different tracks: bass, guitar, drums, vocals…) of their single “Nude,” and then letting fans remix the song. Fans could post the remixed versions to Nude Re/Mix, where the public then could vote their preferences. As SocialMediaInsider points out, “This practice views the original content creation as the mere starting point for what happens to it once it is embraced. Some artists dabble in this area, but most don’t.” This is exactly how MixedInk views the collaborative writing process. Each person’s written contributions are like stems – ready to be edited, remixed, and ranked – that together build the best possible response, reflective of the wisdom of the different people involved in the process.

Most recently, MoveOn challenged its members to make a 30-second TV ad that tells the nation why Barack Obama should be the next president. A whopping 5.5 million votes were cast on 1,100 entries. The top 15 videos were sent to a panel of filmmakers, artists, musicians, and progressives, including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Lawrence Lessig, Jesse Jackson, and Moby. The winner was recently announced, and will be aired on TV during the campaign.

We’d love to hear about other applications that show the power of the crowd. Please feel free to highlight any innovative examples in the comments!

In my last post, I described the vertical disaggregation process occurring within the news industry, wondering aloud (as is fashionable these days) what business model will support the news in the new media environment.

Actually, this question needs to be more precise. A better one is: Which business models will support which types of news generation processes – regardless of whether they happen in a newsroom or not? I believe that, in addition to vertical disaggregation, there will be a simultaneous process of horizontal disaggregation. That is, various types of news that have historically been created within a single company will end up within distinct entities, which are in turn supported by different revenue streams and cost structures.

The gurus of news 2.0 believe geographical scope will be a (if not the) major fault line along which content creation and aggregation are broken down, though hyperlocal journalism has had limited success so far. The national and regional news sites that already exist will be complemented by hyperlocal sites that tell you what’s going on in your neighborhood, on your block, or even in your apartment building. As it would be hard for a single neighborhood to generate enough advertising revenue to support paid reporters and editors, this type of hyperlocal site will only become possible through partial reliance on user-generated content, which the site obtains practically for free. A number of startups are already targeting this market.

But geographical breadth is just one of a number of social and technological fault lines along which horizontal disaggregation can occur. Any social or technological variation in the news content creation process could necessitate a different business model, and thus, be housed within a distinct entity.

Jeff Jarvis (CUNY professor of journalism and well known blogger) proposes separating the functions of newsgathering, editing, and analysis:

So maybe we need to disaggregate the newsroom yet further into its distinct and, we hope, marketable skills. Reporting and news-gathering (words, images, sound, video, data, investigation) may well be something that freelancers (professionals and amateurs) do. And editing — curating, vetting, enabling, educating, to cut up the task yet further — may find new value. Analysis may happen more and more in the commentsphere that the community has become.

This makes sense. But why stop there? Why not further divide the news generation process into its component steps? Conversely, will it make sense in some cases for news production processes remain unchanged? (Indeed, some magazines are thriving even as other print media declines.)

It will all depend on what type of news is being produced. Let’s consider five types of journalism. These are by no means exhaustive, or completely distinct from one another:

- Investigative journalism involving in–depth interviews, breaking news from private sources, or a high degree of technical expertise
- Crafting narratives from widely available, understood, and agreed-upon facts (e.g. sporting events, political events, market information, etc.)
- Opinion and analysis
- Hyperlocal news
- Collection and dissemination of raw data

These vary in the extent to which they can be crowdsourced, in citizens’ desire to participate in their production, in their need to be fact-checked, and in the degree of subjectivity involved in crafting narratives.

If we were to do an analysis of how much it costs to produce each category of journalistic text, either in per-article or per-word terms, I suspect we’d find huge variation, perhaps even an order of magnitude or more. We’d also find huge differences in revenue per unit, as some news is more viral, and some news inherently leads users to spend more money (which generates higher demand for advertising). In other words, it makes perfect sense that they would need separate business models!

These days, somewhat counterintuitively, news crowdsourcing experiments often create more work for the journalists who organize them – not less. Someone must generate internal support for the project, set up one or more technology platforms, encourage the community to participate, and/or monitor large numbers of contributions (the quality of which varies significantly). But eventually, as the technology improves, and as news sites institute permanent, flexible processes and deploy them with greater frequency and scale, these costs will shrink on a per-unit basis. Technology will selectively afford opportunities to crowdsource expensive components of the news creation process, thereby eliminating those costs from newsrooms. In this way, technology will magnify the differences in cost and revenue per unit between different types of news.

My prediction is that we’ll end up with multiple, distinct business models, each associated with different processes for gathering first- and second-hand information, crafting narratives, editing copy, fact-checking, etc. These processes may happen within a single company or within separate firms – I imagine there will be some examples of each. The point is that different types of news will become sustainable in different ways.

Intensive investigative journalism will probably always require a high level of professional journalism. The others, theoretically at least, could some day be largely crowdsourced, though the processes for crowdsourcing would likely vary significantly. A lot of data is already being collected by readers (polls, photos, comments, videos, etc.), though one might argue we have a long way to go in finding a structure that approaches traditional journalistic standards and fully exploits the value of this content.

Eventually, I think it will be possible to crowdsource a much larger share of journalism than we currently anticipate. MixedInk will be a socially and technologically different way to produce some types of news. It will enable motivated crowds of readers to assume responsibility for certain phases of the news generation process. Along with other technologies that facilitate crowdsourcing of content creation, it will help to cushion the fall of traditional media while producing a more democratic public sphere.

It’s important to acknowledge up front, though, that there won’t be a single solution to the news ‘crisis,’ but many distinct solutions. Journalism may be transformed almost beyond recognition, but I, for one, do not worry about its future. The demand for news is clearly not going anywhere. If anything, by providing pressure for change, the crisis is helping to avoid stagnation in our public discourse. It will result in a stronger news product that better engages and reflects the priorities of readers.

Breaking from its conventional emphasis on editorial oversight, CNN is launching a completely user-generated news site at iReport.com this week.

In August 2006, CNN made a big move to bring citizen journalism into the mainstream when it launched iReport on CNN.com. iReport submissions are chosen by editors and checked for accuracy before CNN shows them online or on television. As a result, CNN has showcased only 10% of the nearly 100,000 news-related photos and videos that it has received since 2006. User-generated videos and news have provided some of CNN’s most compelling footage, which were especially noteworthy during California’s wildfires and the shootings at Virginia Tech.

The new CNN site will be fully open, allowing users to post anything (though the site will be monitored for inappropriate content). “The community will decide what the news is,” says Susan Grant, Executive VP of CNN News Services. Modeled after YouTube, iReport.com will allow citizen journalists to upload videos, photos, and audio files, while visitors can search, rate, and share clips.

The trend toward mainstream user-generated news doesn’t end with CNN. ESPN recently launched “ESPNU Campus Connection,” which “combines student reporting with gripping college hoops action,” according to its website. ESPNU is putting students to work as sportscasters responsible for generating coverage, sideline reporting, commentary, and analysis. This gives students a chance for a unique professional experience and offers ESPN exposure and more extensive programming on college campuses.

This is a win-win for publishers and consumers. “For a publisher, you’re engaging consumers, and mixing up your offerings. For consumers, you’re getting a voice and having an impact,” points out Piper Jaffray Web analyst Aaron Kessler.

Here at MixedInk, we’re excited to see these big players recognizing the potential of citizen journalism and supporting it with creative – and sometimes risky – new initiatives!

Also see ReadWriteWeb’s report on CNN here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cnn_to_launch_completely_user.php

What are FAQs?
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, as you are likely already aware. What you probably also know is that the FAQ page pretty much always includes the answers to those questions, not just the questions themselves. So technically they should be called Frequently Asked Questions & Provided Answers. “FAQPA” doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, so we’ll be sticking with FAQ.

Who cares which questions are asked most frequently?
Well, you do, in theory, and we do too. The idea is that you think like other people do, more or less. So if MixedInk makes other people wonder about certain things, there’s a good chance that it makes you wonder about the same things. Instead of you and every other person with a question asking separately and us sending you each an individual response, why not save everyone the time and just gather all the questions and answers in one place?

Why spend an entire blog post on FAQs?
Good question. We just wrote the FAQs for our site, and we were so excited to share them with you! But we realized we probably ought to wait till the site launches (soon!) to do that. So this was sort of a consolation prize.

So can we at least see some of your FAQs? You promised a “sneak preview” in the title of this post.
Sure! Here’s a taste of what’s to come:

Why use MixedInk?
In order for your opinion to matter, you have to lump yourselves together with lots of other people by voting, signing a petition, going to a rally, etc. That means you have to give up control over the message you deliver. MixedInk helps you express yourselves together without losing your individual, nuanced voice. Since MixedInk is democratic, it ensures that you have more control over what you say together.

For companies, nonprofit organizations and campaigns, it can be difficult and expensive to wade through thousands of emails, blog posts, comments and phone calls to understand what stakeholders are thinking and saying. MixedInk provides a way to harness the energy, ideas, and opinions of their most passionate members, consumers, and employees.

How many people can participate in responding to a MixedInk topic at once?
In theory, there’s no limit to the number of people that can contribute at the same time.

How can the software automatically put so much text from so many people together?
It can’t - we don’t automatically assemble a collective piece of text. We just give users the tools for them to do it themselves, by working (playing, really) together.

Is it simple majority rule?
For now, yes. Later on, we’ll make it possible to see how contributors can be divided into different camps based on the opinions they express. In the meantime, any contributor who feels he or she is in the minority can set up a new topic and ask that only those with shared views participate.

Can I republish a final collective response written using MixedInk?
You certainly can - and we hope you do!

All text that is authored by a group using MixedInk is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. That means you can republish the content as long as you mention: “This text was created by [number] people using the democratic collaborative tool at MixedInk.com. It may be republished only if accompanied by this addendum.”

If you are republishing it online, you must also include a link to the page where you found the text.

That’s all?!? You teases!
If you’re so anxious to find out more, why haven’t you signed up to be a beta tester yet?

Right. So how did you write the FAQs for MixedInk, which hasn’t launched yet, given that you don’t know which questions are actually going to be “frequently asked”?
OK, smarty pants, you got us there. We don’t know which questions will be frequently asked. We had to guess. But we’ll update the FAQs later when we find out what questions people actually ask.

Do other sites abuse the FAQs like this?
We don’t know for sure, but it sure seems like it to us. We feel lucky if half of the FAQs are remotely relevant to our concerns, so we’d bet they were also written without actually being “frequently asked.”

That doesn’t justify the practice of determining FAQs without user input, however.

If your collaborative writing software is so darn great, why don’t you just let your users write your FAQs?
Hmmmm… we hadn’t thought of that. Seems like a good idea. Maybe we’ll try that when we are fortunate enough to have users.

Other sites’ users could write the FAQs for them, too.
Another good idea – you’re full of them. Maybe we should hire you.

Where can I find your FAQs after you launch?
We’ll put them up here: http://www.mixedink.com/faq. (Note that this link will not work until we launch.)

Where should I go if I’m tired of reading this senseless drivel and actually want to learn something about FAQs?
Here’s a few sites we consulted as we constructed our FAQs:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ
http://www.querycat.com/ (database of FAQs from the entire internet)

Is your blog always going to be this…playful…from now on?
Probably not. Must be the holidays

By 2012, one quarter of entertainment will have been created, edited, and shared within peer circles, rather than coming out of traditional media groups.  This is the conclusion of a global study on the future of entertainment, called “A Glimpse of the Next Episode,” conducted by Nokia and The Future Laboratory.

In carrying out the study, The Future Laboratory interviewed entertainment industry leaders as well as trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors.  This was combined with Nokia’s own research from its 900 million consumers around the world to construct a global picture of entertainment over the next five years. 

Nokia termed the phenomenon Circular Entertainment, noting that people are showing “a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media,” according to Nokia’s Multimedia Vice President Mark Selby.  Trends Director at The Future Laboratory Tom Savigar added, “Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative.” 

At MixedInk, we have been very busy developing a collaborative writing tool to satisfy this demand.  Where blogging has enabled anyone to share their thoughts online, MixedInk is excited about making it easy and fun to remix and mash up opinions within a group to generate newer, bigger, and more compelling ideas. “Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate,” notes Savigar.  We agree.  While wikis have allowed people to write together online, we are making it easy for people to compare and contrast what many different people think – and communicate easily about those opinions. 

“Whereas the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment,” says Savigar. 

MixedInk will help this expanding movement to grow.  We are motivated because we believe that an active and passionate group can create stronger, more powerful content than its individual members could produce alone.  And perhaps most importantly, we are inspired by the potential for such a platform to democratize the political arena, the media, and the workplace. 

“We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of,” says Savigar.  We already see the beginnings of this evolution, and we look forward to playing our part in making it a reality. 

Get ready. The Next Episode will be written by you. 

Thirty family members and friends of the MixedInk team recently came together to test our software. It was very exciting to finally see MixedInk in action at this scale after much hard work and internal testing. Watching an interesting discussion take shape and participating in the eventual synergy that emerged over the five-day period was an extremely rewarding experience.

Together the participants addressed the following question: Is the US government ever justified in using torture? Why or why not?

(We chose this topic because we know people feel strongly about it. Having a topic that encourages vigorous discussion makes testing our software and concept easier).

Participants wrote, edited, and recombined responses to the topic throughout the test. With a total of 44 responses and 296 ratings in the end, the group had a vibrant brainstorming session and a fascinating exchange. Through a process of mixing and rating each other’s responses using MixedInk technology, the test participants collaboratively sculpted a collective opinion on the selected topic.

For those who are curious, we’ve pasted the text of the collective response below.

This is a major moment for MixedInk – this test provided definitive proof of our concept. We learned a ton from the test and are now tweaking old features and adding new ones based on the test and on the feedback we received. At this point, we plan to continue testing it with different and bigger groups – let us know if you’d like to help shape MixedInk by getting involved in future tests at testing@mixedink.com. We’d love to get your input!

No to Torture

In the wake of 9/11, we have begun to speak a new language. “Patriotism” means blind devotion to any government policy; to “support the troops” means to never question an interminable war; and “torture” means making the world safe for democracy. (heh, heh, heh). We are living in a world of contradictions and are facilitating it with a language of opposites. It is easier to accept an unwarranted war, corruption, and torture when they are cloaked in words like democracy, strength, and safety. But eventually we will run out of platitudes and be left with nothing but the bare truth of our actions.

Torture has fallen prey to the cover of new speak. By saying we’re protecting our way of life from terrorism, we have become terrorists ourselves and what once was abhorrent to Americans has become acceptable. The question in real speak, though, is what security do we truly gain from the use of torture? Of the multitude of tools in our security arsenal, torture is one that has been shown to fail — people will say anything to get themselves out of the situation. This is particularly true in the case of terrorism, where people are often motivated by martyrdom, and just a bit more courage as a tortured prisoner can earn a handsome payoff in the afterlife. In embracing torture as a society, we therefore lose not only our honor, but also our precious resources as we waste time and money following false leads.

Even if torture were shown to be an effective information-gathering tool, however, it still would not be a sound security policy. When we commit torture against prisoners, we place our own soldiers at great risk as we forego our authority to demand protection for them. Today other countries can easily follow our lead in playing semantic tricks to determine where the Geneva Conventions apply. If that were the case, and our soldiers were being tortured at the hands of another countrys interrogators, be sure that this discussion would need not occur; our collective outrage would be unanimous.

More importantly, we cannot discuss torture without examining what it means to be part of a society that allows it. Many claim that we need to rethink our domestic policies, and even internationally-accepted norms, given the new threats we face. We disagree. In fact, it is only at times when we are scared for our safety that we must recall the importance of our civil liberties. It is during these times that it is easiest to forgo our most important ideals for the illusion of safety and expedient answers to complex challenges.

The American justice system relies upon the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And we have a very high bar for guilt; a jury must be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. The implicit understanding is that we, as a society, would prefer to let a guilty person go free than wrongly punish someone who is innocent. We depend upon our right to due process of law to ensure that our government does not overstep its bounds. When we allow torture of someone suspected of a crime (or suspected to be privy to critical information), we corrode this deep foundation of our country by exacting punishment based on mere suspicion. Not only does it undoubtedly lead to the torture of many people with no, or little, connection to terrorist networks, but it also leads to a dangerous temptation to blur the distinctions. And just like that, we begin down a slippery slope of disintegrating civil liberties.

Nearly everyone agrees torture is generally wrong, but there is still a great temptation to allow torture as a last resort in extreme cases. Torture, however, is not an acceptable government policy even in these scenarios. We have seen time and time again that seemingly normal people can do awful things. We saw it during Milgrim’s famous psychology experiments, we witnessed it during the Holocaust, and we stood speechless more recently when we learned of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. If we condone even a single case of torture, how will we then stop it from expanding? Who is to be the judge? Any policy that allowed torture would be subject to abuse. Enforcement is extremely difficult to imagine, given that these prisoners would be punished without the benefit of being tried in court, and an interrogator could always argue there was good reason to believe the prisoner had valuable information.

There is a short list of countries that permit torture, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Uzbekistan. It is not a club that the

United States should wish to join. As we seek to remain a world leader, we must remember what it means to be American and the moral authority it could command. We should not throw it all away in exchange for nothing more than a second-rate intelligence tool. It’s time to speak clearly and realize that torture debases not only the victim but also the core of all we, in real talk, hold precious in America.

As is clear from this example, the group of our friends and family that created this lean to the political left. Note that MixedInk is emphatically nonpartisan. Our tool will be available to any group wishing to express itself together regardless of its opinion.