ADF – OurTown
In the novel American Democracy Forever, the OurTown social media app provides the glue that unifies the Forum clubs and supports their discussions and actions. It was developed by PARC in the late 1970s using the newly created Smalltalk programming language. It was prototyped in the San Francisco area on a private telecom network, and...
ADF – Forum Productions
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Dr. Charlie Durand created the Forum Media Group (FMG) to own and operate a network of radio, TV, newspaper, magazine, and cable companies, to create a bubble of liberal thought over the United States. Knowing these entities would need a reliable source of graphics, videos, and other media products,...
ADF – Tax Reform
The novel American Democracy Forever introduces a tax reform proposal developed by the Forum Clubs and indicates that extensive modeling is needed to validate it. A later chapter discusses the modeling and beta testing of the proposal, but the details of the proposal are not discussed; the reader is left to wonder what the tax reform...
ADF – CARPA
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand creates a new corporation, the Civic Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as CARPA, in imitation of DARPA, the US Defense Department's Defense ARPA, DARPA. CARPA's mission is to work with the Forum Clubs to identify civic problems, develop technical solutions, prototype them and then market them...
ADF – Education Reform
The chapter of American Democracy Forever on education reform was the result of a discussion about the education industry with my friend Dr. John Wands who had been the chairman of the English department of a private high school for girls. After bemoaning the generally sad state of American education, ADF proposed a bottom-up approach...