A panel of Internet gurus gathered Friday at the fifth annual Votes, Bits & Bytes conference here, held by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School to discuss the impact of Internet business models on online politics.
The panelists said the most valuable lesson online campaigners may be able to garner from Web-based companies is that building a sense of trust remains at the centre of winning loyalty from customers or political followers.
Among the panelists were Web luminaries including Esther Dyson, the former head of Web governance body the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and Craig Newmark, the founder of classifieds and community site Craigslist. Dyson currently serves as editor at large for CNET Networks, parent company of ZDNet Australia. Newmark works in customer service at Craigslist.
"The golden rule is really how people want us to operate," Newmark said. "They want business sites and political sites to adhere to our shared values of being fair with one another and treating each other with respect."
Joining the two Web celebrities on stage were Tod Cohen, deputy general counsel for government relations at online auctioneer eBay; Jonathan Zuck, the president of the Association for Competitive Technology, an IT industry group; and Debora Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School.
To Cohen, the reason why eBay has been so successful is linked inextricably to the morals expressed on the company's business card-size ideology outline. The values card, the brainchild of company founder Pierre Omidyar, includes reminders that people are generally good, that they usually treat others the way they wish to be treated, and that the company strives to foster an open, honest environment among its customers.
The satisfaction of eBay users is almost solely dependent on the integrity of other members of the site; consumers buy and sell goods based on an honour system that demands accurate descriptions of items for sale and the promise to pay for goods purchased. If eBay members didn't trust in this system, the company never would have made it, Cohen said.
Newmark echoed the sentiment of creating mutual faith between sites and customers. He said the success of Craigslist, an advertising-free classifieds site in which eBay now holds a 25 percent stake, could be channelled into Internet politics.
"It's an issue of moral values," Newmark said. "People want to know the truth and be treated fairly -- that's the American dream."
Newmark acknowledged that people can still be misled by politicians' false promises, even after being fed a diet of legitimate ideals.
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