Tuesday, July 27, 2004

CivicActions: Empowering Democracy from the edges

Wow. Another incredible find (for me) here at the DNC.

I met Henri Poole, a director (?) of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). He introduced me to an FSF-sponsored project, Civic Actions (www.civicactions.com).

I spoke with Henri for about 15 minutes or so and got his card and the URL.

I only just now skimmed through the site but was very impressed with
what I saw. I have *not* looked at this in depth yet, but it certainly
seems appealing.

If this system does what I think it does (or will do eventually) we've just gotten a huge "gift from the sky" for political campaigners.

From their description:

Digital Democracy
  
Two of the three tools that Trippi identified as winners in Dean's run for President are edge tools.

CBS reports: You may know the winner of the Democratic presidential primary campaign. And you probably know the Republican candidate.But, as New York Times columnist David Pogue reports for CBS News Sunday Morning , behind the scenes, there's also a third key player. It's a campaign worker popular enough to reach millions of voters, inspiring enough to attract thousands of volunteers, and powerful enough to change the election process forever.And who is this great communicator? It's not a who, it's a what. It's the Internet.

First, the blog, which is short for the word "web log," made a huge impact with journals on the Web.

The second new Internet tool is also connecting voters with the campaigners, but offline. Every night, in hundreds of bars, restaurants and bowling alleys, Americans are meeting up to talk politics.

The third small idea that became very big in the election of 2004 are Web sites like MoveOn.org.

Friend to Friend Politics
  
Dan Robinson (E-Volve) recently turned me on to some very interesting work (background here) being done by Pat Dunlavey in Massachusetts. In short, Pat conducted a Voter ID/Get Out The Vote campaign utilizing a social network to identify warm-call lists. When compared to a similar campaign done by cold-calls, the metrics are quite impressive. Contact rates of 84% vs 45%; ID rates of 57% vs 31%. Dan has informed me that a technical specification for the system is soon to be released (under a free software / open source license). Anyone up for working on a project?

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