Alex Steed, our dear friend at Make Something Happen, had a fortunate opportunity to chat with Lawrence Lessig at the Netroots Nation convention.

I’ve long been a huge fan of Larry Lessig and it was a joy to see him at Netroots in Austin last week.

Below are excerpts of the interview and you can read the entire thing here.

I asked Lessig why, after 10 years of tackling copyright and intellectual property issues, he had decided to move on Congress. He responded, We had hit a level of success, the issues were no longer hard, and I felt like I was getting lazy so I said ‘I’m going to throw everything I am doing away and do something different.’

Even more amazing, he explained, And I in fact said, ‘I am going to do that every ten years. Every ten years I am going to throw away all of my intellectual capital and work on something new.’

And so here he is, trying to corral Internet grassroots activists on the left and right to act against what many consider to be a failed government body. Here, he discusses using the carrot model to change the government, how true change has to be purple and how he plans to attract the attention of the not-so-obvious audience.

Make Something Happen: Outside of a crowd like those at Netroots Nation, which is predisposed to being supportive of your work, how do you plan on bringing the attention of the public to Change Congress?

Lawrence Lessig: We’ve got a big push now to grow a list of people who want to participate in as many different ways as we can. Part of what the Trippi organization is doing is helping us think about how to parse, simplify, or extend the message so that it can reach a wider range of people than those who are otherwise coming to events like [Netroots Nation].

I spent an enormous part of my life speaking and not all of the speeches are ones that I give for 2000 person audiences, so I speak in every venue I possibly can to get people to think about that. Everything I produce, I make available for other people to use as well.

I think that’s as much as we can do right now. As this thing gets going and other people who are running campaigns begin to incorporate this message into what they’re doing, I think that will be another kind of leverage point that will be very important to us as well.

Read on…

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