activist

Cross posted at: The 41st Vote.

I am degreed in Computer Information Systems.  I do not make my living in the field and am not a "coder".  I have always been more focused on the Business Process side of it and how  do you use technology to solve a problem and improve processes.  That being said, I have become active in my local party and as, you can see from this blog, activist on the web.  I am determined to help bridge the gap between the GOP and the Democrat party when it comes to the use of technology.  To that end I fully support the goals of Rebuild The Party, one of which is to "Recruit 5 million new Republican online activists".

Wordpress has developed into a powerful tool for activists. It is simple to setup and administer for those less technically inclined, . As a result it is ubiquitous within cyberspace. While Drupal, and to some extent, Joomla have extremely powerful widgets that can be utilized for political activism (CiviRM, Write A Newspaper etc.). Tthe added administrative overhead of those extrememly powerful platforms make them less so.  I have an idea for a plug-in that could greatly empower the  grassroots t impact the behavior of our elected Representatives.

In developing this blog, I have scoured the Wordpress site and the Internet looking for plug-ins that can leverage the power of my blog by making it simple for day to day people to impact a specific piece of legislation or political opinion.  I am most focused on enabling people to contact their Congressman or Senator.  As many of you know, the Congress has gone to great lengths to filter and make it more difficult for people to contact them.  Mail suffers from delay resulting from the need to process it for biological terrorism and spam drove most of them to secrete their e-mail addresses When we capture the eyes and imagination of a member of the grassroots, we need to capitalize on that by making it simple for them to express their will immediately and in the broadest form.

To that end, I thought of a need for a plug-in that would have the following Charter:

"Empower the user to immediately respond, through all available means,  to the party that can impact the desired outcome."

1. The specific requirements:
   1. Provide an interface to a predefined template with wording that will form the basis of the communication for a specific purpose.
   2. Provide a method of searching for the most effective targets of that communication, specifically that constituents elected Congresman for his District and surrounding Districts within a specific radius and the Elected Senators that represent him.
   3. Provide for the ability to send the communication by all the following methods of transit, both individually and in concert:
      1. E-mail
      2. Fax
      3. Snail Mail
   4. Provide access through an API, to a database, to be maintained by a sponsoring organization that will contain the e-mail contact, FAX number, telephone number and the Washington mail address for each and every member of Congress and for all of this information for each and every elected State House Member and Senator of the 50 states and the territories.
   5. Function as a plug-in to the Wordpress platform.
   6. Provide the ability to insert the title of the blog post from within which that individual was stirred to react.
   7. Insert the permalink of that post into the e-mail body.
   8. Ability to color the background of the subject line with a color determined by the blog author for visual targeting.
   9. Insert the e-mail of the letter submitter, simultaneously capturing that information to the blogs subscriber list.

It may be that we need to scale back the scope.  That is for the coders to determine.  My purpose is to place the idea into the activist community to try to stir someone to undertake the development of the plug-in.  I intend to cross post this at Rebuild the Party and the attendant community sites.  The database will require the largest effort I am sure, but among all of the activist out there we can reduce the manhours per individuals to collect that data.  I know that the data is available for purchase, however I am unsure that it would be feasable to utilize that data within the scope of this requirment due to licensing terms. I anyone woudl like to discuss this, find me at these links Facebook or through the Action Network of the Rebuild the Party website.

This letter was written as a follow-up to some points I raised about idea creation for the GOP in an earlier blog post.

To the future chairman of the Republican National Committee,

We face a tough road over the coming days, months, and years as we work to transform the Republican Party into the party of the future so that we can recover from this year’s devastating losses in the House, Senate, and ultimately, White House. The path ahead will be a challenging one, but I am convinced that we are up to the challenge and that ultimately we will prevail.

In order to do this, however, we must recognize as a party that many of the ways of the past are no longer the way of the future. For example, Barack Obama has proven that new media and the Internet are essential to winning elections. Similarly, we now see that we must be able to raise a large percentage of money and build a powerful infrastructure online.

Following this logic, we also need to realize that peer production is the way of the future – not just in politics or business, but in all walks of life. At a macro level, this means that we must democratize the Republican Party by opening it to mass collaboration. If the Republican Party wants to be the party of the future, it must adopt this sort of collaboration driven, peer production based model.

Indeed, peer production has proven enormously and unequivocally successful as a business model. Corporations are scrambling to replicate the impeccable successes of companies like Goldcorp, Inc., who in 1999 was on the verge of bankruptcy because it was unable to locate sources of gold on its property. Out of desperation, CEO Rob McEwen issued the “Goldcorp Challenge,” inviting anyone and everyone to help the company locate gold on its campus. The success was astounding: due to peer production, Goldcorp went from being an underperforming $100 million company to a $9 billion juggernaut. Many other leading companies, including IBM, Boeing, and Procter & Gamble have adopted peer production as a central component of their business model to similarly resounding success. Although political trends tend to lag behind business trends, peer production is clearly one trend in which we cannot afford to fall behind.

In fact, Barack Obama’s electoral success was not really due to his use of the Internet. Rather, the Internet only served as the medium through which Obama’s volunteers and supporters could peer produce. In the end, it was the Obama campaign’s understanding of the necessity of utilizing peer production and its ability to do so that fueled his victory. MyBarackObama.com was immensely successful in doing this, resulting in his supporters peer producing 200,000 offline events, 400,000 blog posts, 3 million phone calls, and $500 million. Everything at MyBarackObama made it unambiguously clear: “This campaign is about you.”

Democrats, following in the footsteps of countless successful corporations, are going to continue to use this model in 2010 and beyond because it is a proven winner. Accordingly, this begs the question: are we going to do the same? Please, Mr. Chairman, let the answer be an unmistakable, “Yes!”

Lawyer in preacher's defamation case hit with $90,000 penalty
<!-- end deck -->Posted: July 01, 2008
9:29 pm Eastern

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Justice Louis Butler

A Wisconsin attorney is challenging a state Supreme Court decision that he should pay a $90,000 penalty because the deciding vote was cast by a justice who accepted money from the attorney's opponents.

The case that sparked attorney James Donohoo's dispute with the high court was brought against a "gay' activist group called Action Wisconsin, which later called itself Fair Wisconsin. That group had described visiting pastor Grant Storms, who appeared at a conference on homofascism, as having advocated the murders of homosexuals.

Donohoo, on Storms' behalf, brought a defamation action, which a trial court judge, Patricia McMahon, dismissed as frivolous. An appeals level panel reversed the decision, concluding that the jury should have been given the dispute to resolve.

The state Supreme Court, however, stepped in and with the vote of Justice Louis B. Butler Jr., who had accepted campaign contributions from those opposing Donohoo, reinstated the order for him to pay about $90,000 in legal fees incurred because of the case.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=68539