Kevin Makice

MEDIA GIRAFFE PROJECT INTERVIEW: Kevin Makice, founder, 3rdParty.org

Interviewed by Ashley Coulombe

‘’Involvement with 3rdparty.org’’

MAKICE: We had been working at the Internet a little, probably about 10 years ago is when the idea started. And we had a break in our respective schedules and so I built a site that we could use as sort of a community.

The idea behind it was, we were both very, very frustrated with the party systems and the types of candidates that were coming out and the types of conversations that we were having. So we wanted to create something that would just sort of be from the ground up to create a new party or a new political discussion.

Both of us have other jobs and a couple years after that I started a family, Jeff’s now got a family, so our priorities have ebbed and flowed. I’m back in grad school and between that and my family it’s just been taking up lots and lots of time. So this has been more of a side project that we just come back to every once and a while.

But the mission is still the same: that we want to have a different way of talking about politics and we want to construct things from scratch rather then starting sort of with the rhetoric and the ideas that are sort of pushed from top down and being restrained by that.

Every election year, with Presidential elections in particular, we’ve had a surge interest and then just haven’t been able to sustain it. I did a project in 2005 that was related to 3rd party where we used a wiki to try to do this, to have these conversations and build a platform from scratch. That in itself was a difficult task to do but that didn’t end up going anywhere either. With 3rd party we still have the same interest in doing it; it’s just a matter of time and resources that have just sort of kept us from furthering it.

‘’Have you started to gain interest leading up to the election next year?’’

Yeah, even now. We had a real serious spamming problem and one of the things that’s been on the to-do list for probably about six months is to basically freeze all of the stuff that we’ve got right now so we have that content for reference but to restart it on a Wordpress blogging-style platform. One of the advantages there is that they have something called a Kizmet which will block pretty much all the spam. That over the summer was all the time that I had was spent deleting these spam posts and stuff. And some of that has been a legacy from a couple of systems ago that we got on some list and it’s been hard to fight that.

So there’s still interest, people come to the site and start conversations but I don’t think either Jeff or I have had time to really do much with it. Now with in-between semesters my hope is that I can finish doing that porting to that new platform and we can actually do something leading into the Presidential election.

‘’Where do you get funding from for 3rd party?’’

Basically Jeff paid for the hosting and still does and I volunteered the tech. There were a lot of hours involved with that and with posting and trying to run it. We don’t have any funding at this point. We’ve had a couple people that are sort of in similar situations in that they were very interested early on but then went back to school or had families started – it sort of just never amounted to. There was talk of starting sub-chapters in different states and really formalizing the whole process.

But really, my main interest isn’t so much in a formal organization as is a platform for conversation. Probably the way that I would it hope it leads down the road is that we do come up with a new paradigm for how people can discuss and that becomes the centerpiece of the party.

Jeff has a different design, I think. He really does want it to be a formal party and I think that’s there’s a number of people that have been involved with this project that also would support that too. So my personal interest is not quite in the same card. I’m more interested in getting people to talk about politics in a different way and base that on the things that they can do in conversations or issues that are happening in their various local areas.
‘’Why are you at Indiana University?’’
The School of Informatics. The reason I came to Bloomington in the first place was that I was working at the School of Business. I did that for two years and then I telecommunicated back to my hometown in Illinois with a company called Tickets Now and I basically did that until 2004 when I went back to school. Since that time my only jobs have been through internships or working in teaching at the school. But I’ve still got another couple of years before the Ph.D. is finished. I originally went in just for a Masters but it’s a very interesting time and it’s a very interesting program, so I stuck around.

‘’Blog with wife’’
Before I knew what blogging was, my son was born in January of 2000 and we changed our names to match each other at that time as well; we just scrambled our initials and came up with our last name. As part of the process of being a new dad and I’ve always liked writing and you had to do web pages so I created a site and it was all just static content. I was writing an essay a week and Amy was contributing as well.

Our blogging technically goes back to 2000. I really didn’t start blogging seriously until I got to Indiana and a couple of other students that were just casually blogging. In 2005 I picked that up and it’s sort of escalated ever since then. We’re now between Amy and myself it’s been Sept 26 since we last missed a day of putting something up there. And so mostly it’s a very eclectic blog. Mostly what I blog about are things that I’m researching or things that I run into on the web. So most of it for me is about Web 2.0 things or design-oriented content and most of what Amy has been doing the parenting kinds of things. It’s got all types of things.

I’m very interested in local politics and local community in particular so there’s a number of projects that I’ve got going on here that I’m trying to identify and solidify some of the local resources in Bloomington and that’s been reflected in the blog as well.

‘’What’s your opinion of a third-party in elections? Also, why do you think it’s important to have these conversations?’’

First of all the way that we’re indoctrinated into political discussion is really flawed. The party system is just an invention of efficiency, the two-party system anyway, that happened to be the two parties in charge at the time they set the rules. The way that they set their rules on how they go about selecting their own candidates and how the states respond has influenced and limited the ways that third parties can be involved.

So yes, there are third parties out there but the fact is that until third parties’ candidates can really start making in roads in local, state and federal levels where they can get meaningful visibility and influence elections just in the electoral process. It’s going to be very hard for any third-party candidate to be successful. There are a lot of things in the structure and the system that is very much against, and a hurdle for, any third-party candidate.

The discussion is so important and changing the way that we do that because if you go to pretty much any political forum online, and there’s lots and lots of places you can have political discussion, but the discussions tend to be about things at the international level, the federal level, about votes, about Supreme Court Justices, and these are all very important conversations to have. 

The reality is that people having those discussions aren’t having any influence and don’t really have any reach, any impact, on the decisions at that level. However if you switch that around and find local issues, it’s very easy for most people in most towns to get audience with the mayor or councilmen to set up an appointment and go have coffee and go have a really meaningful conversation. It’s not practical to do the same with U.S. Congress people or Supreme Court justices and yet that’s where all of our conversation is . . . .

Every [political] conversation you start by assessing is this person Republican, are they Democrat, are they liberal, are they conservative and once you apply that label coming with it is a whole bunch of assumptions about what they believe and how they stand on certain issues and it has nothing to do with the person that you’re actually supposed to be talking to -- it’s all about this topped out label. I want to create some conversation that really tries to humanize the way that we have these conversations so it’s not just about what your stance is on gun control, it’s knowing something about the makeup of the person that led to believe the things that they believe and vice versa and maybe that there’s some common ground or challenge our own beliefs just by being exposed to people at that level.