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Software for the Grass Roots
An anonymous reader writes "In February at the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In, technologists from the Dean, Kucinich, Clark and Kerry campaigns laid down arms to share tech plans while their respective camps were still battling it out in the primaries. A (private) list and requirements for fall campaign organizing ensued. Just six weeks ago, a few of the developers converged in San Francisco for a show and tell of their emerging free software tools. Today, the AdvoKit project was the first to tag beta, hoping to kick-start the campaign software revolution in time for November 2nd."
The GOP plays Big Brother for our own protection (becasue they truly care about us, the people), while the Democrats want to know our most intimate details so they can harm us (look into fluoridation of water to find out more), understand?
One wants to prevent your wife from knowing you're cheatin on her, the other wants to help you score with the babysitter.
I believe John F. Kennedy was listed in the Guinness Book of records as achieving up to 300 words a minute in his political speeches. That figures out as one word per 0.2 seconds. Since you only need to convince 50.1 % of the voters to vote for you, the candidate actually has approximately 0.4 seconds per voter, and thus at JFK talking speed the candidate should be able to deliver two words to each voter.
Two words should be quite enough to say for example: "vote me!", "I'm best", "Kerry's insipid" or "forget Bush". Even political agendas can be discussed: "lower taxes", "better healthcare", "strong defence", or "no abortion". So you see, in theory the plan is quite doable.