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."

Comments

clark tech corp / dean space

[enrico_suave]

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.

In what way ...

[zangdesign]

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?

CivicSpace

[3.2.3]

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