Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker is investing in a startup company called Votizen, which organizes virtual voter canvassing activities. Parker discussed his investment alongside Al Gore on Monday at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX. According to Talking Points Memo:
Votizen, which allows users to add their social networking contacts and see who among their friends is a registered voter, as well as to organize virtual canvassing activities, has spent the past three years painstakingly constructing the first-ever database of all of America’s 200 million registered voters, and eventually plans to host real-time data for the 800,000 elected offices throughout the country, down to the local level. …
Gore’s most memorable line from the event was that he thought "democracy has been hacked," by money and special interest spending, and that the fix was to be found in the Internet tools, specifically the crowdsourcing campaign and voter lookup activities offered by Votizen and another community organizing startup he’s invested in, called NationBuilder, which allow users to create their own "nations," i.e. communities.
Parker attempted to channel his Napster experience, stating: "The Internet is good at taking money out of old industries … my hope is Internet can do for politics what it did for copyright."