The site is up and running, but like most other new sites, the Democracy Network is still in rapid-growth mode. "We are testing ideas by implementing them and seeing what happens, except that we're doing it with the fundamental structure of democracy, which to me is a very important task," Westen says. "There are a lot of people who work in digital communications on video games, home shopping, movies on demand, online auctions, and more. But to me, the most interesting sites deal with how our government functions. The potential gains that these sites offer are enormous."

The Making of an Activist

Westen traces his interest in communications and in democracy back to his days managing the campus radio station at Pomona College, and to his time as a law student and activist at Berkeley during the turbulent 1960s. In the 1970s, he formed the nation's first public-interest law firm and advertising agency, Public Communication Inc., which created such famous public-service announcements as the 1972 Chevrolet engine-mount-recall spot featuring Burt Lancaster.

But it is his four-year stint inside the federal government as a deputy director in the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection that Westen describes as the source of his real education. Shortly after Westen's arrival, FTC Chairman Michael Pertschuk, who had already established his own reputation as a political activist, asked Westen to figure out what to do about television ads aimed at children. Under an FTC rule-making proceeding that has been described as "the most controversial agency initiative ever conceived," Westen worked up a proposal that ranged from the mild (requiring increased disclosure of the products being advertised) to the comprehensive (banning all ads aimed at children too young to understand the seller's intent).

Suddenly, Westen found himself locking horns not only with broadcasters and advertisers but also with toy manufacturers, cereal makers, and even cigarette companies (who feared they would be next). Instead of fighting Westen's proposal head-on, his opponents amassed a $15 million campaign fund and used it to lobby Congress to take away the FTC's authority to enact such general rules, limiting the agency to working on a case-by-case basis. In 1981, when Ronald Reagan brought a conservative administration to Washington, Westen knew that he had lost that battle.

Westen's experience in government convinced him that much of the problem with politics resulted from the way in which campaign financing drives the system. So in 1983 he founded what would later become known as the Center for Governmental Studies to try to reform the political process. In addition to looking at the problem of campaign financing and its warping effect on the system, Westen began focusing on the other half of the campaign-finance problem: the demand for money that is prompted by the expense of buying paid advertising in the media. In 1989, he founded the California Channel, which provides C-SPAN - like coverage of California's state government. Today, the channel broadcasts gavel-to-gavel coverage of the everyday workings of California state government to about 6 million homes. That experiment with alternative communications technology prompted Westen to ask the next question: What impact would interactive technologies, such as the Internet and video-on-demand, have on the political process? Westen's response to that question was to create the Democracy Network.

But for all of his activism, Westen is no starry-eyed utopian who views the Web as the answer to all of the world's problems. Quite the contrary: Without serious campaign-finance reform, Westen says, the quantity and quality of public participation in America's democratic experiment will continue to decline. So strongly does Westen hold to this view that over the past 15 years he and his organization have directly written or helped to shape dozens of state and local ballot measures, laws, and ordinances seeking to bring about campaign-finance reform. Still, the Web does offer a new and important tool for changing the national political discourse. "What I do think," Westen says, "is that the Web will have a more positive effect on politics than any other technology that has come along in the past 200 years."

Eric Ransdell (ransdell@well.com), a contributing editor for Fast Company, is based in San Francisco. Visit Tracy Westen's Center for Governmental Studies on the Web (www.cgs.org).

Sidebar: What's Fast

Democracy is hard work -- just ask Tracy Westen. Fast Company asked him to outline the rules that he follows in his work for the Democracy Network.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.