How iPad Technology and iPhone Apps Expand Liberty

How iPad Technology and iPhone Apps Expand Liberty Matt Harrison: We can introduce marker forces. It's the way that governments operate to bring them in a more competitive, more open fashion and hopefully in a creative libertarian revolution at the local level. Ted Balaker: Hi, I'm Ted Balaker with Reason TV. Today, I'll be sitting down with Matt Harrison and Justin Hartfield at the Prometheus Institute. Harrison and Hartfield created the do-it-yourself democracy iPhone app. Hartfield gave the world the weed maps app. The two are working on a new project that uses iPad technology to make classic libertarian books more interactive. Tell me a bit about the Prometheus Institute. Matt Harrison: Well, our mission is to pioneer innovative technology to advance liberty. We think there is a need in the marketplace for tools that help people take the great ideas, the great studies and the great policy proposals that our movement is putting out and now the technological ability to put them into action. Ted Balaker: And your big thing right now is the do-it-yourself democracy iPhone app. Can you talk about that a little bit? Matt Harrison: Do-it-yourself democracy automatically locates you in your city and gives you a customized menu of action items to do everything from protest your taxes to start a recall campaign, protest bureaucracy, basically anything you can do to reduce to the growth of government will allow you to do. Ted Balaker: How would someone in practice use your app to be beat that government just a little bit? Matt Harrison: So you're on your way to work and there is the construction that’s taking up that lane that’s blocking your traffic making it take an hour longer to get to work every single day. You know that the government is causing these kinds of projects that nothing is really getting done. It's kind of a shady bit process. You don’t know really who’s working on the project. You want transparency, so we give you action items not only to protest bureaucracy but to demand transparency with the bids that are available in your city so you can see what kind of budget your city is putting for, what kind of taxes they're charging you and really just giving you the information you need to be an advocate for liberty and to understand what it takes to reduce government in a practical sense. Ted Balaker: So it's like basically a hi-tech way to complain to government officials. Matt Harrison: Exactly. Right now, there are a few hi-tech ways that you can ask the government for things. What we like to do is give people the tools to actually reduce the growth of the government to take power back, to increase competition, to increase transparency and there is nothing really out there in a technological platform that does that right now. So, we’re trying to fill that niche. Ted Balaker: One of the things that I find interesting about the app is that it really does zero in on the person and whatever obscure layer of bureaucracy is responsible for that broken light or that pot hole, is that correct? I mean if you're driving through Chino and you see a pothole, your app knows exactly who’s responsibility that is? Matt Harrison: Exactly. We actually had interns research, the specific departments inside each of the small cities to find out which email address to send the emails to. So, it took hundreds of hours of research to actually compile the data for California because there are over 600 cities in California and there are municipalities that run the water. Some do the transportation. So, it took a lot of research to do but, it really works really well when you're in a small city because the person you're emailing, you probably know them by first name basis. So, it's kind of like an intimate connection with your representatives. Ted Balaker: Who doesn’t want an intimate relationship with the local government workers? So, you must come across a lot of surprised government workers who’ve thought like— Matt Harrison: Well we actually think— Ted Balaker: “How did you find me, right?” Matt Harrison: There is that. There is a little bit of resistance but, we think it works well because there is a personal connection between you who submits the question or submits the complaint and the person who’s receiving it. So, they get your email, personal phone number. The public servant has someone to contact. It's not just some amorphous website where you don’t know really who’s submitting the request. You actually have a person on the other end who’s demanding and is very aggressive in making sure that it gets done. Ted Balaker: That shifts gear a little bit talking about another iPhone app. Justin, you gave the world WeedMaps? Justin Hartfield: Yes. That was me, thanks. Ted Balaker: For those who don’t know what it is, what is it/ Justin Hartfield: WeedMaps is a medical marijuana dispensary locator website. It's kind of Yelp if people are familiar with that and it finds legal marijuana dispensaries in California, Colorado, and Montana. There are a couple in Nevada and more and more states; New Jersey and Maine being the two newest states that are going to be adding dispensaries. So, it's basically a web application and an iPhone application that let's you find the nearest dispensary and interact with other medical marijuana patients. Ted Balaker: First, explain what happened recently in Los Angeles for those who don’t know and how will our app respond to that. Justin Hartfield: The Los Angeles city council recently passed an ordinance that’s going to limit the number of dispensaries in Los Angles to essentially 70. it's well-circuited to put some what I think is unfair restrictions on the zooming of those dispensaries. And so via the iPhone app, you can just click a button and it sends off an email to your local LA city council member asking them to repeal this initiative. So this could be a joint venture between WeedMaps and the Prometheus Institute. Ted Balaker: And your guys next big thing with Prometheus is an interesting project that incorporates they new iPad technology. Can you talk about that a little bit? Matt Harrison: What we’re trying to do is go inside the book. We’re going to introduce social networking features, commenting features and interactive digital video inside the book so that people can get to the features they want, share the features that they want and really interact with the ideas in a way that’s really unprecedented. What we’re going to do is we’re going to start with libertarian classics, the ones that are out of IP protection currently, all the great human action, road to start from, etcetera, all those books that have so much more potential in this generation but need to be put in a medium, a format that people can identify with, people can share, the people can understand. Ted Balaker: So then, someone cracks open the road to Surftom