Good call to arms. With the majority of software developers being liberal by definition and acts, we'll kick GOP ass if this comes to fruition. The neo-cons and republi-cons are the short bus riders on this one (as they are on most things except cheating and visciousness).
Posted by phidipides at June 11, 2005 08:20 AMGood idea, but it might be better if the DNC hosted a mega-site, software and tech support provided, that any Dem. candidate for Congress could use to set up, administer, and have available for supporters.
Why only point candidates to available packages, when they don't have the expertise to choose wisely, and surely don't know how to hire and manage a tech team to keep a site going.
If the project is too big for a single mega-site (which I doubt), then at least one site per state (or region, even) would be far better than individual candidate sites.
Surely this consolidated approach is a good, tangible sign of a united party behind candidates, and also serves a read need.
Posted by JimPortlandOR at June 11, 2005 09:13 AMOff topic:
Hey kids! We're only two away from 1700 dead in Iraq. The neo-cons and republi-cons who picked Sunday, June 12th as their square in the office pool look to be coming into some big money. The republi-con dream, slaves to kill for a handy release for their aggression, has become reality.
Posted by phidipides at June 11, 2005 09:13 AMHey, Paradox -- aren't you a little out of line here? Asking for something useful from the Democratic Party?
Great idea, and great request, actually -- good luck getting anyone to listen.
On Monday, I read Robert Parry's latest at Consortium News -- the Lessons of Watergate. Hit me between eyes like a two by four. Basically, the GOP learned that controlling the media is the best way to cover up their crimes; the Dems learned that they could sit on their fat asses, because GOP scandals and over-reach would keep them in power. That worked out well, didn't it?
The other thing that smacked me upside the head was that the Dems have a one-note response to failure -- more grassroots organizing! The Denver Democrats big push is revitalizing the grassroots, with new precinct and block captains, to knock on doors and rebuild the party. Do we have a message? No -- do we have scripts? No -- do we have anything to offer the Kerry volunteers who weren't utilized? No.
It's like the Czar's army -- no generals, no guns, no ammo. What did they do? Sent more troops into battle!
Not that the grassroots organizing is bad, but it's the crack cocaine of the Democratic Party -- all they need is another fix, and their problems will go away. But the problems are pervasive, top to bottom -- we need software and databases and leadership and most of all -- we need a MESSAGE that will resonate with the American People, so all of those grassroots door knockers will have something to work with.
And we need printed door knockers, to hang on the doors of people who aren't home.
Posted by ck at June 11, 2005 10:11 AMI don't think it's particularly important for everybody to use similar underlying architectures, since we don't reap any economies of scale on the backend maintenance like a corporation does, since it owns all the machines and pays all the sysadmins.
What is important is interoperability between the ways that the various sites expose their data to the other sites' software. APIs, that is. The simplest of these ways to expose your site's data is the RSS feed. But things like C#/mono, SOAP, RFCs etc. would allow us to take things to a dramatically more sophisticated level.
Standardization is really the key to projects like these. Until the world settled on the http protocol, for instance, the Internet wasn't really all that useful except to the very geekiest. Somebody (even somebody like Kos) needs to just put out a proposal on a potential standard for Dems' web services, and let the various geeks hash things out.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 11, 2005 11:48 AMFind $10 million, I am dead serious, pay the man, write the check and make the dude a multimillionaire on the spot so we can license that software to all of our House and Senate challengers as soon as possible. For this cycle our challengers will have to hire perl/inix admins for their sites.
Also, if I may put on my lawyer hat for a moment: Virtually nobody licenses software in such a way that licensees may license to whomever they please. Maybe this Scoop guy is different, but if he talks to an IP transaction lawyer, that lawyer will strongly discourage the drafting of such a license.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 11, 2005 12:12 PMThere's already something out there that states are just beginning to use and while not free, the local party sites (and candidate sites I believe) get a really good deal. The sites within a state (in fact within the whole system) can have shared content which is useful in that action and news items will be of interest to many sites. It also helps the smaller organizations (rural counties etc.) keep a site current without having to have too much in the way of manual input on a daily/weekly basis. It's not perfect (what is) and we just started exploring it in our state (ID) but worth checkin' out.
Posted by CJ at June 11, 2005 01:47 PMWith $10 million dollars I could set up an IT department, mirror sites with Akamai mirroring and transport for delivery of speeches and events over the Internet, a full VoIP telephone system and video conferencing system, a central donation center that would check maximums and sources, and the software you wanted.
The Internet is a lot more than blogging, and you need to think beyond that to full multi-media operations. While not everything will be needed for 2006, it's time now to start preparing.
Something that many Democratic friends were amazed at were the paid registration takers that the Republicans hired. With that kind of incentive you can often get yourself in trouble, but the teenagers in our area were ferreting out every Republican.
We need software that we can use at in local grassroots activities and in our local party organizations. We're all out there, rolling our own or working on random platforms. It would be fantastic if the DNC were to get us all licensed on a robust solution.
Posted by microveldt at June 12, 2005 07:28 PM