Our own Micah Sifry moderated a conversation with Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark at the Government Web Managers Conference on April 29, 2009.

Craig advocates for public/private partnerships and the ways that the Internet can be leveraged to identify opportunities for public service.

I've done my best to include as many sound effects as possible as played by Craig using an undisclosed iPhone app. Sound effects, my comments and observations are in [brackets].

Micah: I first met in San Francisco at the first web 2.0 conference in 2004. He approached me at a conference and said, "Hi, my name is Craig. I run a small community website, and I want to help." And we've had a good working relationship ever since.

Craig is obviously best known for his work on Craigslist, but he has since turned a lot of his time, attention, and energy to improve the government space.

Craig, why are you doing this?

Craig: Like most people, politics doesn't matter to me very much. I'd rather be watching TV. Throughout history, people have not been that interested in governance, but we're on the cusp of some serious social change, and it's too important for us to sit idle. I firmly believe we're in the first years of a major change, so I thought I should play my part.

Of course I'm out of my depth, which is something I'm used to working on Craigslist for the past 14 years. I'm like the Forrest Gump of the internet [rim shot].

So I've been trying to get involved in small but scalable ways to help foster grassroots political involvement. Big stuff is happening now, so I've been trying to help the people who really know what they're doing. I've been coming out here to talk to people from the Federal Web Managers' Council to see if I can help them. As a nerd, I'm used to being a "doer of things." Now I find myself in the role of "talker about doing of things."

I blogged yesterday about the importance of getting innovators and pragmatists talking at the same table. I want to advocate for more of this in Washington to spur innovation.

Micah: Are there any particular things going on in DC that you find inspiring?

Craig: There are a lot of specific things that I really like. I really like what Katie Stanton is doing with Google Moderator, and I'm very happy with the work being done at Recovery.gov with regards to transparency.

I'm also on the board of Sunlight Foundation. Where we're working to take government data and information and make it available to the public.

I'm even involved with Consumer Reports now. As a middle aged guy, appliance reviews have become exciting.

I'm also on the board of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Micah: I'm sure a lot of people have questions about craigslist. Would you mind telling us how it got started and how it started to grow?

Craig: In 1994 I was working at Charles Schwab, working on security issues and showing people how the Internet worked. I'd do brown bag lunches to show people how brokerages would be using the Internet in the future. Around that time, I started a CC mailing list to talk mostly about art events. People enjoyed the list and started sending me suggestions. I listened and we built out the list and started enhancing it, which is our process to this day.

Jim Buckmaster runs Craigslist because I'm a very bad manager. I work there half time on customer service. We try to help people, we listen to them and figure out what makes sense, and see how we can be better.

It's hard though. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions on either side of issues, and you have to have thick skin to be able to handle it. Even after 14 years, I have a hard time dealing with it.

Jon Stewart points out to us that we hear a lot from people on the extreme ends of issues because all the moderates have things to do. I spend a lot of time deleting spam and dealing with trolls, which is probably what a lot you [government web masters] will be doing in the near future. Good luck!

At one point, we tried to figure out if there was a way we could help pay the bills, and people recommended that we charge people who pay to post things because they're already paying to advertise elsewhere. We charge people in NYC to list housing and charge in some cities for job listings.

We don't see the need to charge for much else. We have human values, like "treat people how you like to be treated." But we also have nerd values like "once you make a comfortable living, it's nicer to focus on changing things."

Micah: How many employees?

Craig: As of last week, 28.

[I lost the script here, but for some reason Craig said the following and added a sad wah horn sound to great effect.]

Craig: There's a great Oscar Wilde quote that says "When you tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." [wah horn]

Micah: How do you possibly manage the site w/ so few resources?

Craig: We trust our community.

If you see an ad that's wrong for whatever reason, you can flag it. If someone else flags something, it's removed immediately. That's for listings. Unfortunately, we have to moderate discussions by hand. But like Churchill said, "Democracy can be a lousy form of government, but it's the best we've tried."

Micah: How do you decide to add a feature to the site?

Based on feedback. We try to listen to people and add features based on what people are asking for, but it can be difficult.

Micah: Like Jeff [Jarvis] said, you know you're winning when people start using your platform in ways that you hadn't anticipated. Has that been true for Craigslist?

Craig: The best thing that we've seen is the response to Katrina. Immediately, people fleeing the storm started using Craigslist to tell their friends and family where they were headed. Later on people used it to ask where their friends and family were. The community used it to help to survivors, housing and even jobs.

Micah: You put a link on the homepage to something pointing to a Katrina resource in the left rail, which is prime real estate for Craigslist.

Craig: It's difficult doing things like that because people will end up asking us to do it for them more often.

We did something similar for blood banks and we were asked to take it down because the response overwhelmed the banks! That's a good thing.

Micah: What would you say has been the biggest mistake?

My mistakes have to do with not listening to good advice from experts that we engage. Particularly not listening to our lawyers (wah horn).

This is important to consider though. When I worked at IBM, they'd send me to trade shows, and we'd get briefings from lawyers to let us know how we could represent the organization.

The deal is that in any organization, you'll have a lot of people who want to serve the public better and understand what's going on, and they need good ways to send their messages upwards.

I just blogged about this on Monday about how social media is becoming so popular in Washington. I keep saying, trust your people. Trust them, give them a briefing, and let them do things.

In hierarchies, you tell your boss what they want to hear, and you get ahead. They go ahead and tell their boss the same thing, so by the time the upper upper management hears things, the info is screwed up. It's important for managers to be able to receive unfiltered information. This is why the president needs a Blackberry.

Micah: Based on the discussions happening here at the conference, I get the feeling that the spirit is willing, but the body is week. People want to do this stuff, but there are a lot of barriers. For instance, the lawyers might be getting in the way. What advice do you have for people who have those worries?

Craig: Wait. Someone just said on the twitterfall that I'm cute. [slide whistle]

Speaking as a nerd, I can explain that way back in 1994, when I was at Charles Schwab, part of my job was looking at weird things people were doing on the network and reasoning with my superiors.

One of our great social theorists, Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, writes about Mordac, "Preventer of information services." I've been Mordac, and I've also been Dilbert.

A good thing about my position is that I can blog about whatever I want and I can say things that you [web managers] can't say. I want to help you figure out how to fix your IT departments. The truth is that your IT people probably really want to help you. They get the Internet. They understand how it works and how to help you do your jobs better, but, as I like to say, "free the nerds." Let them help you. (for the record, I used to wear a pocket protector and thick glasses taped together).

Micah: you've talked about a Craigslist for service which has come up in policy papers. They've just launched Serve.gov. Do you really think that government needs to get involved in that? How can they help?

Craig: A year ago, I saw the phrase "A Craigslist for Service" come up in the party platform, and I thought "I've got to stay ahead of that," so I wrote an essay about it on the Huffington Post.

As citizens, we create higher government to do things that we can't do for ourselves, but sometimes you need a little help from the government to figure out what to do. Some of us choose to serve full time. The military, police, teachers, and people who work for government agencies do it. Some people advocate for it by being "talkers about things to do," and other people have money that they can use to provide service. The idea is that a lot of people have opportunities to serve, and we want to figure out the best ways to help them do that.

Micah: but just for argument's sake: why should we create a government site to do that? You could do that on Craigslist right now. What's the special extra thing that the government could bring?

Well, there are a lot of sites that try to do it, but we need something to bring it all together and connect things that aren't being connected right now, and the government could be good at that.

For one thing, there are a lot of people here from the VA, and there are a lot of smart groups out there that are doing great things for our vets, particularly for our wounded veterans. If you're airlifted out of a situation, you lose your stuff! So this group puts together care packages of stuff, like Game Boys and clean socks, and sends them to the veterans who need it. We need someone who can vet groups like that (no pun intended) and figure out if we should give them some money.

As I said, I've joined the board of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to work on VA advance funding. I got involved with them because I feel like if members of the military are willing to commit themselves to serve me, I should do the same for them.

[Audience questions]

A woman from a local government agency: Craigslist has been enormously successful, but with the recent bad press about what happened in Boston, how do you respond to that?

Craig: I'd like to point out that we work very closely with law enforcement, but it's a very long story. I'd ask you to check out blog.craigslist.org. It should answer your question.

A man who was standing behind me: Would you mind if we go into the "free" section of the site and advertised our free government information and services?

Craig: you could do that, but I don't think that's the best way to do it. I'm about to talk about marketing and promotion, which, as a nerd, is a crime against nature. There's a lot of great work you're doing, but a lot people who don't know what it is. We don't need 10,000 points of light, but we need about 100. We need a few points where people can find out about government information, about the work you're doing. You should also get on Stewart or Colbert.

Vivian [?]: Could you give us a few examples of suggestions that users have made that you've used.

Craig: essentially every category and every city is on there based on user feedback. We're currently exploring the ability to search for things in nearby cities.

We also have the best of craigslist which was based on user feedback. There's a lot of interesting and funny stuff in there. My favorite is an ad for a job—someone was looking for someone to take the CPA ethics exam for them.

Nicole Burton: What is the business model?

Micah: Tell them your exit strategy, too.

Craig: we're a serious business and a serious community service at the same time. We charge for job postings in 17 cities, and we charge for apartment listings in NYC. The brokers asked us to charge them to cut down on some kinds of abuse and the perceived need to post and repost. I don't know if that's a business model, but it works.

My exit strategy to get out of customer service is death. I want to do something meaningful for a long time.

[Again, I lost the script, but Craig cracked a few more priceless jokes:]

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" [rim shot]

"Remember to tip your waiters."

A man wearing a blue shirt: I know that Wikipedia doesn't like to do advertising and you don't either. What do you think of government sites becoming a platform for advertising to generate revenue?

Craig: I think that could present a credibility issue.

[I clearly missed Craig's segue into this next statment]

I'm optimistic about the idea that people under 30 are a civically minded generation, and I want to get the kids involved, although I do want the kids to get off my lawn [boing].

A man who was standing behind me: Is there any kind of stamp of authority that government sites could use to put a seal of approval on things? How do we make sure that government resources online are perceived as credible?

Craig: You need a central source of credibility. But just like everything else, you need experts sometimes, but sometimes you need the masses. So you need to balance that centralized officialness with millions of people working together to solve problems.

The idea with our government is that we've created a constitution that sets up a system of representative democracy. We just have to hope that the reps are listening to the people and they act under the assumption of assent of the governed. Now the Internet can allow people to participate and speak up much more loudly. This is governance, within governments, large organizations, or whatever: you guys are a big part of this, and governance has a lot to do with how we manage information online.

Glen Price: I'm one of the guys who started the TSA blog [applause from the audience, not Craig's iPhone]. What are the chances of you doing a guest post on our blog? You fly a lot, so it'd be great to have someone who's been through the experience.

Craig: I like this idea, so please email me and remind me. I'd like to do it.

Micah: It seems like Craigslist avoids doing something that a lot of other sites do a lot which is to provide a big leaderboard of big hot stuff. That doesn't happen on Craigslist. It's pretty flat. You're not highlighting the hottest restaurants or best real estate broker. Is that by design?

Craig: We don't do that because of how we've evolved as a classified site, but I like those kind of sites because they highlight the power of grassroots democracy. They're great because they leverage the involvement of millions of people to highlight what's important. I look forward to what happens when we get billions of people involved.

Woman from the VA: We have to fundraise for the wheelchair games for disabled veterans. We also need to get volunteers. How do we do that? How can we tap into the Craigslist volunteer thing.

Craig: You can post it into our volunteer section, but enough people might not see it. I might be able to help through Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and I'll think of some other ways to get the word out. Send me a paragraph about it that I can post on my blog.

By the way, there's a PSA from IAVA that's one of the most effective I've ever seen:

Holly from natl archives: How do you manage your email?

Craig: Personally, there's an element of obsession. I'm flying back on a flight on Friday that may have wifi. Aside from that, I use an exceptionally advanced email tool called pine [slide whistle AND rimshot]. It's about 20 years old. It's purely text oriented. I don't have to use my mouse. The spam filter we run is pretty good, but it does make some false positives, which is unfortunate because I don't like to miss things.

Micah: did he answer your question?

Holly: He did. I actually use Pine [applause]

Micah: you didn't answer the question for me. You're getting about 500 emails a day. How do you do that?

Craig: Brevity is the soul of wit, so I respond to a lot of the messages with a simple "thanks."

Rand Ruggieri: I'm with the Federal Web Managers Council. You mentioned something about public-private partnerships. As federal web managers, we're trying to be the source of official data. Public/private partnerships seem to blur our role. How do we stay authentic?

Craig: I don't have a direct response, but I'm a big believer in public/private partnerships. What you need is how to involve people who are good at getting the word out. For instance, I can do my little role in getting the word out.

However, in any democratic system, when you have a few stakeholders, getting consensus can be hard to get. It may become exponentially harder to achieve consensus as you add people to a program. That said, I've found that I can speak up in some scenarios and get things done. There's a big lesson there, but I'm not quite smart enough to figure it out.

A woman: What iPhone app are you using to make those sound effects?

Craig: I don't want to advertise it, so ask me later. I downloaded it an hour ago, and it's changed my life!

Zach Miller: Would you consider being chief nerd officer?

Craig: I'm flattered, but I think there's a need for a nerd-off with another guy who's already in the White House before that happens. I think Colbert should moderate it.

Please send any clarifications or corrections to jed [at] capturagroup.com