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Starting a Political Career with Open Source?
byronmiller desires to get to the root of the following issue: "I have chosen to run for office to represent the people of the 16th district of Pennsylvania. I am looking for software and solutions to help manage a grass roots and budget friendly campaign. What applications are available for everything from district management/contact management solutions to online fund raising and campaign management solutions? We are already rolling out staff PC's running Suse 9.2, OpenOffice.org and of course Firefox. Are there any collaboration suites and mail systems that we can use for calendaring, notes, email and conferencing? Anyone build a campaign using open source technology or is Politics still only putting money where your mouth is? Technology is a major initiative of my campaign and i'm very interested in what political software and civic solutions are available - especially experience and reviews of such."
It's early days, so you'd need to be a little smart about it, but it might be worth a shot. http://www.hula-project.org/Hula_Server
Running open source in your office is a noble gesture, but doesn't really help anyone else.
Getting a vote in Congress probably won't help anyone either, since the leadership of the majority party can do whatever they want. But at least there's a chance that you could do some good down the road if you win.
Do what you can to win. Don't focus on things that aren't directly related to winning. Winning is hard, and if you don't focus on it, you will probably lose.
Winning might include open source -- if you want to set up community web sites to bring people into your campaign, for example, open source might be the way to go. Take what you can from Joe Trippi's Dean campaign.
But don't get hung up making people type letters in open office, because it won't help you win.
Some open source web tools you should look at:
http://www.advokit.net/ for voterfile, campaign management and voter relationship managemnet.
http://www.civicspacelabs.com/ is based on drupal, and provides a great way to make an interactive community driven site for your campaign.
ShadyDial, a predicitve dialer add on for asterisk.
You should also check out http://www.personaldemocracy.com/ for general commentary and discussion on techonology and software in politics.
~Nathan
Clark Tech corps
wired article
I for one welcome the possibility of an open source advocating/understanding overlord =P
(Granted the dean and clark campaigns weren't a political success, but dean's online campaign was considered initially a social networking success... until he ARRRRRRGGGGGD himself out of the race...)
Good luck!
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
The Dean campaign ran on open source software. Looks like the project lives on under the name "CivicSpace."
http://www.civicspacelabs.org/
Technology is a major initiative of my campaign ...
In what way is "technology a major initiative of your campaign"? We've heard candidates state the same things before, at all levels of government, but what does it really mean? While it's obvious that technology cannot be the sole focus of your candidacy, does it mean you are going to be pushing some form of Open Source adoption or what? Are you going to pushing digital rights legislation? There are a myriad of technological concerns that are being pushed into the political realm, where the people most likely to legislate are the ones least likely to be informed. Is this focus on technology merely a way to get low-cost assistance at pushing the same old non-tech issues?
So, again, how is technology a major initiative of your campaign?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
As a political consultant/PAC founder who bootstrapped the entire enterprise from hand-rolled code and open source projects, The best I've seen so far is the CivicSpace initiative started by the techies from the Dean campaign. It's still at 0.8.0.3, and so there will still be bugs, but they fix patches quickly and the team is quite responsive. In addition, if you combine a CivicSpace installation with some intelligently placed hooks into the great stuff at Democracy In Action, you will be able to communicate and co-ordinate with your grass roots (and collect money from them), all at an extremely low cost.
Tim
While the people who support CivicSpace mean well, I ran it for several months and found it all bark and no bite. PHP apps are so brittle, it is foolhardy to attempt to run large scale projects on them. And too many PHP libraries are not threadsafe. Although it seems more and more (I would assume inexperienced) democratically oriented political organizations are starting to use CivicSpace. This concerns me.
I think the main reason CivicSpace has caught on is that it takes little skill to set up. That part of it is extremely democratic, and first impressions are everything. Then folks start doing the things it can do out of the box, like blog, and blogging a campaign does not make (actually, it distracts from an actual campaign).
Note that although CivicSpace came out of the Dean *grassroots* campaign, it took nearly the whole campaign to make it even minimally usable (although there were a lot of "skins" for it early on to make it look nice), and even then not many sites of any consequence were running it. The actual Dean *professional* campaign ran on a grab bag of proprietary and open source software (Convio, Moveable Type, roll your own PHP) that never had a single sign on and seemed to change every few months as a new person would get an audience in front of the right campaign official and convince them that some new software would solve all the problems of the old software, which had been the new software only a few months before. Each successive generation seemed to go downhill a bit as folks who were supposed to be more qualified took over from folks who had supposedly reached the limits of their usefulness.
At one point there was a tour by some software folks from the professional Dean campaign office that claimed they would come to your town and talk about open source software and leveraging technology to people interested in it. I was too busy with CivicSpace (then DeanSpace) at the time to mess with being a host, but I went to the whistle stop functions for the tour in my town when some other people did host it. There wasn't much talk about actual software or content management or leveraging technology. Just a lot of jumping up and down about what a good time the campaign people were having on tour.
Be forewarned, when I used CivicSpace, it required PHP Safe Mode to be turned off and would not run in a PHP hardened environment. It is not secure enough for real campaigns.
If anyone reading this is a CivicSpace advocate, this is not meant to discourage you. If CivicSpace is serving your needs, by all means have at it. This is just my experience. Dealing with the hype and pressure to use CivicSpace in my activist network pretty much set us back the entire campaign.
Also, avoid Voter Activation Network at all costs. It's .Net, so you probably won't even consider it to begin with. Slow. Inflexible.
Anyway, I've found that rolling your own with a *robust and scalabe* open source CMS like Plone works best for me. There are value add companies that have very quick (< 2 month) turn around to provide something custom built on top of open source platforms to your needs. This is going to take you a lot farther than something free out of the box, supported by college students on Instant Messenger when they happen to be around, with a smorgasboard of common PHP message board functions.
Finally, remember that althought CMSes sound democratic, there are complex social patterns to successfully deploying a CMS your community will actually use and contribute content to. People will fuss to get things on the web. Then when you actually give them the tools to do so, they will still try to pass all the content creation off on the webmaster, creating both a bottleneck and a political problems (why is a webmaster the most qualified person to shape political messages? why is the webmaster supposed to know finance law? why is the webmaster suddenly in charge of scheduling and managing your rally?). You will need to devise a
Yes.
?? Will you protect fair use? Yes or no.??
Fiar use has no meaning. Fair use is like the clean are act, it sounds good but has no bite because the meaning doesn't PROTECT your freedoms afforded to you via copyright laws. We have to stop the UNFAIR business demands taking away our rights or come up with bills that define them to be easily understood and inclusive of all media types (digital/analog/printed...).
??" * Modernization of patent laws to protect innovation and technology." What heck do you mean by that??
Exactly what I mean. Modernization of Patent laws to protect innovation and technology - not prohibit such. Patents are used for the wrong reason and prohibit small businesses from innovating in many ways. We Need to be a bit more proactive in setting precedence for what could be patented and for what reasons instead of applying with the hopes (or lobbying for support of) getting approval on some unknown review process. (or the skill of your lawyer)
??" * Technology assurance programs, including product liability to ensure consumer protection." Again what the heck do you mean by that???
Take fair use and give it a law with Bite. Take consumer rights and make them known. What do you mean with or interpret as "fair use"? How do you know what to do with software you buy? Songs you purchase? Dvd's you own? Can you copy? Can you resell? Can you transfer license? What happens when your using something that advertises "secure online banking" but your information is exposed through a vendor mishap or lax security - why should YOU be punished for using a service sold to you as secure? How are you protected in such instances where your computer/network is unkowningly used to attack or break into others? What rights do you have as to what is running on your PC? Can you sue Spyware companies because they're breaking into your PC or is it assumed the risk we take is warranted and we shouldn't do anything to assure net access, net security, licensing protections and corporate awareness of consumer rights? I'm about consumer advocacy and awareness.
Technology & protocol standardization - open system specifications, common infrastructure, and unified industry adoption."
So the government is going to make system specifications the LAW? Good grief I can not think of many ideas worse that than one.
I beg to differ. Every industry has a standard protocol of acceptance, qualifications and industry standards. Medicine, Healthcare, Global Trade, you name it they all have rules, standards and laws to define them.
I'm not asking the government to enforce specific technologies but to create an environment that strives to create industry acceptance of such as a standard.
IT is being highly commodotized, in order to trade on the open market and to remain useable and accessible by all laws have to be created to set precendence on the industry, standards and adoption of such.
Byron Miller for Congress.