Since the beginning of the improvisational rock band Phish’s summer tour a fan of the band has been able to successfully stream several concerts from inside the venue to more than 3000 avid fans simply by harnessing technology offered by the iPhone and the website Ustream. This user-friendly technology and one tired arm may have changed the game in the consumption of concerts forever. This accomplishment may force popular bands to consider streaming their shows in high quality and at a reasonable price in order to squash the arriving phenomenon of fans streaming shows live for free to other fans. The only alternative would be to ban iPhones and proceed to carry out full body searches of every concertgoer. In short it would be a collective punishment that would ultimately not work if they failed to confiscate a single iPhone among the thousands of fans.

So ‘what does this have to do with politics?’ you may be asking yourself. Well let me answer that question for you. For a long time local politics has been a process confined to the highly motivated local players that find such activities both socially and economically stimulating. Even mainstream cable television and mainstream local news have not been willing to fill up local airwaves with the proceedings of local politics, outside of limited sound bites. Therefore a market of citizen streamed local proceedings exists in the marketplace of local citizens. And it would not be difficult to sell this streaming technology to local of media or political groups.

People could launch this phenomenon by making sure the footage and the knowledge of the phenomenon as a whole is made available to local television news and technological measure could be the beginning of a domino effect in local media and a progression in the transparency of government as a whole.

Streaming of local proceedings could be sold to local Democratic and Republican (and perhaps third) parties as their chance to be on the cutting edge of technology, when in reality it would be working against their interests by opening up the door to the smoky back room crony political proceedings in a way that is not logistically possible to the local press, given their limitations of time and space. Time is money and citizens that would not be willing to devote an entire weeknight to local politics, would be more likely to tune in for 30 to 60 minutes to interact with their local officials.

Things are changing quickly do to rapidly progressing technology and we are seeing an explosion in the potential for citizens to now harness this technology to make their voices heard.

Even if local political organizations attempted to manipulate this technology by holding essentially staged meetings for public consumption they would eventually be held to the standard of the manufactured streaming broadcast when people began to show up in the flesh and became involved. If they fought the swarm of new participants it would only reveal their desire to keep local political proceedings confined to the city’s elite class. The essential idea should be to have some interactive element to the streaming meetings, such as a Q and A portion to the meeting where the home viewers could ask questions or present their own ideas.

Just as in the case of the success of the guy who has been streaming Phish shows from his iPhone, in the local political realm their must first be a demand for such a broadcast. But it will be difficult to determine how great the demand is until the potential phenomenon is already in full swing.

Again, I am not talking here about local public access streaming your local government proceedings, the key here is that it is peer to peer broadcasting in a way that is unfiltered.