Jim Gilliam is a geeky activist with big ideas. Shortly before the 2008 election, Jim started WhiteHouse2, a website imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet. He is currently turning this into NationBuilder, a platform anyone can use to bring democracy to their government, business or non-profit in a radical and fun new way.

Shortly after the Iraq war started in 2003, Gilliam hooked up with award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald to research Uncovered: The War on Iraq, and tell the stories of dozens of government insiders, from CIA officers to weapons inspectors, all desperate to tell the world that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Released in just four short months, the film reached millions of people worldwide without any corporate distribution, based entirely on activists holding thousands of free screenings in their homes, churches, and small businesses. The grassroots political documentary was born, and Jim later evangelized the model at numerous film festivals and created a free web service, Brave New Theaters, enabling any filmmaker to use the same techniques to tell stories the traditional media is too afraid to touch.

This interview was conducted on June 15th at 10:00am and has been edited for clarity.

2:02 PM Anna Curran: Jim, your professional background includes experience at Brave New Films, Carolina Productions, Business.com, eCompanies, Lycos. Can you tell us about the evolution of your career and how it prepared you for the projects that you are involved with today?

2:05 PM Jim Gilliam: My dad worked for IBM, so we got one of the first IBM PC's when they came out in 1981. I wasn't really interested though until about 6 years later when I figured out that computers could talk to each with modems. Then I was in love.

I was in college when the dot com thing really got going. I got cancer, survived, and then decided it was time to get on with my life. The Internet was my ticket out.

Went to a startup in New Hampshire that eventually failed, but it hooked me up with people at Lycos, one of the first internet search engines. I ended up building software to manage directories, and when Lycos acquired Hotwired (and Hotbot), we used it to implement the Open Directory project throughout both the search engines. It was one of the first really big projects of what we now know as "web 2.0."

At the end of '99, a couple of folks at recruited me to start a bunch of companies, and we did.
I ended up being the CTO at Business.com, which was (and still is) a business focused search engine. After about 2 years, 9/11 came, and I realized I wanted to do something more meaningful. I was pretty good at the Internet thing, but all I was doing was making rich people richer, and what's the point of that?

I got much more politically engaged, and got involved as a MoveOn member, which eventually led me to Robert Greenwald. He was looking for someone to do research about Bush for a couple of months and "didn't need to get paid very much."

So I started doing that, with the promise from Robert that I wouldn't have to fix anyone's computers. I wasn't going to get paid $500 a week and get stuck fixing people's computers!

I was pretty burned out on tech stuff, so had been blogging about all the craziness happening in the run up to the Iraq war. I was pretty determined to do what I could to stop it. Even if one person couldn't do anything, I at least had to try or I wasn't going to be able to live with myself in 5 years.

It turned out that I knew nothing about making documentaries, but I knew a lot about computers, which was probably way more important. Robert was the storyteller, and I was the internet guy.
We were able to make Uncovered: The War on Iraq in a few months.

It was a huge success, way beyond what we thought. We didn't go through any TV outlets or other traditional gatekeepers, We just sold DVDs directly over the internet. MoveOn did an email blast, and within a couple days we had raised a million dollars selling about 30,000 DVDs. That led to Outfoxed. Then we created Brave New Films, which made Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, and Iraq for Sale.

2:18 PM   Anna Curran: That leads into my next question...You were involved in founding Brave New Theaters, a free web service allowed a grassroots distribution model which enabled any filmmaker to use the your model to tell stories the traditional media is too afraid to touch. In a sense, you were giving a voice to the voiceless. Your current projects of Nation Builder and WhiteHouse2 could be looked at in the same way-- giving a voice to the disenfranchised. What drives you to be involved in creating this space for people?

2:27 PM Jim Gilliam: That all comes back to the Iraq war, and the Uncovered movie. Most people have forgotten this, but at the time, it was considered treason to even question what the President was doing. It was totally insane. I was online, desperate to find information about what was really happening, and I found it in blogs and other alternative press. But the mainstream media was completely ignoring what I believed at the time was the biggest story of my generation. That Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, all the experts knew it, and the Bush Administration was just making excuses to invade Iraq.

With Uncovered, we used the house parties, and Internet distribution to get this story out. No one had ever done anything like that before. It was enormously empowering. I had gone from being very apathetic, nothing I did could possibly make a difference, to driving up to the first screening at an indie theater in Santa Monica and seeing a line around the block waiting to get in.

The whole world runs on stories, and we can change the stories.

The tech to organize all those house parties was a total mess, so I needed to build something. As I was building it, I realized it was just as easy to make it so anyone could use it. So I did. I never wanted there to be another story that couldn't be told. We've proven it works, and the documentary world totally gets it now, they've been studying what we've done, and others are doing it too.

With Brave New Films we really tried to get the audience involved as much as possible in running the company, but there weren't really any tools to do it effectively. We did things like asking people to shoot photos of abandoned Walmarts, help name the company, and vote on the cover art.

I got excited as it was clear Obama was going to win, and we'd have an opportunity to do a much more advanced version of that for the whole country.
The great promise of the Internet, to me, has been that we can create a new way of organizing society... very networked oriented instead of top down industrial era.

2:28 PM Anna Curran: You are the founder of WhiteHouse2, a project that allows citizens to participate in setting priorities, collaborating on policy, and creating a massive database of close to 2500 talking points covering all sides of every important issue facing our country. Can you tell us about some of its successes and some of its failures?

2:29 PM Jim Gilliam: When it was clear Obama was going to win, I was concerned that now all the folks who have been fighting for years to make this happen were all going to want their thing done at the same time. We'd all be fighting with each other for attention in the first 100 days. But if the major progressive groups all agreed to a list of 5 or 10 things, and then everyone supported each other (sort of like Newt Gingrich's contract for america), then we'd all be more powerful.

Well, that didn't happen, obviously. But then I realized that I could try to do it all online. Try to get all the big groups on board to just email their list with this link, and then people could set the priorities. We'd track it like it was the Nielsen's TV ratings, so it would be very media friendly.

Well, that didn't happen either. I got virtually no support at all from progressive groups, in fact, some of the most influential progressive leaders came to the site and endorsed a silly godzilla thing. They viewed it as a joke, not something to be taken seriously.
Instead, it was the open government, and the conservative movement who embraced it!

2:32 PM Anna Curran: Go figure!

2:36 PM  Jim Gilliam: Yeah, seriously. Quickly, the FairTax became one of the top priorities on the site. It's very popular amongst conservatives, but basically lost traction when Huckabee exited the race. So that's been the big surprise, and I guess it probably shouldn't have been. A)The party out of power is going to be more motivated to get involved, and B) The people who have power (the big progressive groups), don't want to give it up, even to their own members. They are too afraid they will all support single payer healthcare, which they think is a political non-starter.

The site started very simply, just set the priorities. It forced people to think what was most important to them, which was the basic goal. I've gotten interest from people all over the world in making sites for their country or city, so I'm making it a platform, NationBuilder, that anyone can use. It looks like it will probably get more traction outside of the U.S.

2:38 PM Anna Curran: Can you tell us about Nation Builder and its goals? How does Nation builder differ from WhiteHouse2? When looking back on all of the work that these two projects have required, what part was the most fun? Did you ever have oh-this-is-never-going-to-happen moment? And Can you give us a preview of what you are going to be talking about at PdF2009?

2:45 PM  Jim Gilliam: NationBuilder is actually running WhiteHouse2, so it's exactly the same system. I believe it can be used in different contexts, corporations, non profits, governments, etc.

One new feature that you won't see on WH2 that I'm particularly excited about is "branches."
It's modeled after how the three branches of government work in the U.S., except instead of it being Executive, Judiciary and Legislative, it's a way to organize different constituencies with different goals. So, a corporation might have Shareholders (who want stock price to go up), Employees (wages to go up), Customers (prices to go down), etc. You can balance and track these different interests to make better decisions. Say, you've got a hundred employees and a 100,000 customers. It's not really fair for those 100k customers to completely dominate the agenda! So this weights each branch evenly in determining the results of the overall rankings.

The most fun has been working on something directly based on user feedback. Usually when I've built websites in the past, I'm always having to fight people within the company who have different goals. I always try to put the user first, but frequently the people within the company don't see that, they only see what they need to do their job. So it's always a constant struggle. I've been surprised at how much fun it is not having to worry about that.

I'm working on the PdF presentation right now. It's going to look at what change.gov and the White House have done so far in engaging citizens and show how it can be done better, based on what I've learned at WhiteHouse2. The big challenge I've had at WhiteHouse2 is simply getting people involved, but WH1 doesn't have that problem. The big advantage I've had at WH2 is I don't have any bureaucracy, which WH1 has tons of.

2:46 PM  Anna Curran: Are there any conferences or events that are on your must attend list?

2:48 PM  Jim Gilliam: PdF is the big one for me. I've been working for months now trying to get NationBuilder ready in time! I'll also be at ParticipationCamp the weekend before since I'll be in town, and then Netroots Nation in August to talk about crowdsourcing with Tracy Viselli and Josh Levy I'm in Los Angeles, so it keeps me out of a lot of the DC circuit. Oh, and TransparencyCamp is coming to Google HQ in August, I'll be there definitely.

2:49 PM Anna Curran: To conclude, Van Jones sometimes talks about his "Board of Directors" which is composed of people dead and alive, like George Washington, that he looks to for inspiration in times of need. Who would be on your Board of Directors?

2:50 PM  Jim Gilliam: Ha! That's a good question. Let me think...

2:51 PM  Anna Curran: Take your time.

2:55 PM Jim Gilliam: Buckminster Fuller, definitely. And I'm always inspired by Cory Doctorow's book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"

I think Umair Haque is brilliant, he is definitely alive. Rick Warren really inspires me, but I don't agree with him at all. I just respect how he's grown the most influential movement the world has ever seen (Christianity).

This is kinda cheesy, but my dad is a computer genius. I can bring up any issue I'm having, even if it's really technical, and he'll always have a new way of looking at it. Like, I have this problem on WH2 right now where now that Obama is doing most of the things he said he would, all those things are coming off the priority list! So the only things left at the top are the things he's never going to do, which is kind of lame. So we came up with this idea to let people bet on when the priorities will be finished, like a prediction market. We can then also sort the list that way.

2:56 PM  Anna Curran: Foiled by your own success!

2:56 PM  Jim Gilliam: Yeah. And Robert Greenwald.  I don't really look to any politicians, either current or historical.

2:57 PM Anna Curran: Got anyone else or is that it?

2:58 PM  Jim Gilliam: That's it.