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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 AGPL is a GNU recognized free software license.
It's essentially a modified GPL - with a "running this software over a network constitutes distribution" clause.
Very cool - I had no idea this was around - might be worth some Free Software developers jumping onto until GPL v3 comes out (which will have a similar clause).
For those who have no idea what I'm going on about - read devchannel's explanation: Closing the GPL's distibution loophole
My pics.
Also worth checking out is CivicSpace, the new incarnation of DeanSpace, currently being developed by Civic Space Labs. They recently released a free (speech and beer) zipcode database, and are building in tools mimicing the "get local" aspects of the Dean campaign along with some really cool GOTV stuff.
Everything is based on Drupal, and is very tech friendly....RSS feeds, iCal files for events, etc. It's syndication gone political and is damn impressive stuff.
I built a few sites during the Dean campaign using the first iteration of the tools, and have watched them progress from there. It's definitely worth checking them out if you're looking to build a camapaign site for a candidate or a movement.
Its still active and of the major campaign blogs it kicked major ass. It allowed all registered users to have their own blog, which became a very useful feature for individuals to post and retain community information.
It also didn't moderate (except for particularly egregious postings) by removal of posts. It used the moderation system from kuro5hin.org (and was based on scoop), which let the users moderate posts up and down. It worked pretty well, and the community kept a pretty fair hand in moderating.
When the Clark campaign was in full gear, it was the best of the major campaign blogs, by far. There was and is no comparison. And it formed a nice community that is still actively discussing things today.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Where do you get that AdvoKit is a tool to make money? AdvoKit is tool to keep track of voter records and volunteers. AdvoKit can be used to find lists of voters in your area and to record results after those voters have been contacted. (ie, did they like my candididate, do they want a yard sign, do they want to volunteer, etc). It also keeps track of the volunteers so you can manage your campaign.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
We need more effective use of technology in politics. Currently, most campaigns don't get it and are using cobbled together systems that break under load. Some background: I was Governor Dean's Legislative District Co-Ordinator in a suburban/rural part of Washington State, and responsible for contacting over 86,000 voters in under 10 months. At no point was Gov. Dean planning on visiting my area - Seattle gets all the politicians, but we're on our own out on the Eastside. My technology challenges were two-fold: organizing a team of thirty volunteers, and then doorbelling likely voters. The software provided by Gov. Dean's campaign was initially very late and very buggy, which is what most campaigns have. Instead, I settled on using a combination of OSS packages and integration with a proprietary mapping software package which was donated to me by the campaign. I wasn't real happy about the mapping software, but it worked. The reason we used this combination was that a politician doesn't need to (and realistically cannot) visit every door in a precinct, in a legislative or congressional district, or in a state. There are voters out there who are highly partisan and will still vote based on the letter D or R to the right of each candidates name on the ballot. The challenge on Gov. Dean's campaign was to get my volunteers in touch with undecided voters who voted regularly, but lived in areas where there could be as few as five voters per square mile. We did this by using some basic data analysis (on MySQL) of voter data and then geocoding the results for the mapping software. It worked, and even though Gov. Dean didn't win the caucuses, we turned out a record number of voters. Most campaigns don't grasp the potential uses of technology. I recently offered a free blog to the candidates in my area. I'd host it, publicize it, and pay for it - all they had to do was type on it. In small campaigns, it's very hard to get voters to so much as recognize the names on the ballot. However, the professional consultants - who get paid to be smarter than your average person - recommended against this. My rationale was that Google likes blogs, voters like Google, and thus the voters can easily find the candidates and see how things are going and what they're about. I support the development of open source political packages and may start working on one of these projects. Most campaigns don't have a technology budget and just cobble together some Access databases, some spreadsheets, and a quick website. A free software package which offers all those features and is under continuing development will easily surpass a Rube Goldberg collection of software.