As a guy who does web development pretty much for a living, I've been thinking about how recent developments in social networking on the Internet could improve the tools that we use to communicate around and about elections.
Frankly, the tools that exist presently fall into two categories:
- Horribly implemented, like the DNC's PartyBuilder
- Not particularly well matched to the task at hand, like the use of wikis for virtually all organizational efforts
I do not mean to bash wikis. They are excellent tools for particular types of efforts, like collective knowledge acquisition. They do not, however, provide particularly good data aggregation. And data aggregation is the name of the game (more on the flip).
Think about the best social networking applications, like MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube. They succeed because the provide easy ways to add, edit, search, and filter the types of information that users of the site are interested in.
More importantly, they provide those capabilities in an easy to use package that people not particularly familiar with computers can understand and feel connected to. They also make links between people with similar interests, which keeps people engaged in the site.
The DNC's PartyBuilder application tries to do these things, but it fails miserably because it puts usability at the bottom of the list of its priorities instead of the top. It also tries to do way too much, when a much simpler application would be much more well received.
With all that said, I've been thinking about what a great party-building web application would look like since Dean lost the primary in 2004, and I'd love to get the feedback of the Kos community about it. I've already mentioned the idea in the context of a tool to help New York Democrats, but now, for wide consumption, some ideas:
- The site would connect candidates, volunteers, bloggers, and donors
- Candidates would sign up, and provide basic biographical information, answer some issue questions, and indicate what kind of needs they have
- Volunteers could then search through the database to find volunteer opportunities. They could look at friends' profiles to see where they are volunteering, sort by things like largest need, gap between cash and volunteers, etc. Participating campaigns would provide information, but the website itself would also track volunteers, and also pull in funding information from public sources.
- Bloggers could set up their own blogs (similar to diaries on Kos) which could be linked to a campaign. Campaigns could have their own blogs, and bloggers could link to their articles on other sites (create a sort of meta diary). Visitors to the site could sort diaries by campaign, location of the blogger, status (i.e. volunteer, donor, etc.)
- Donors could search for campaigns based on information pulled from all of the above. By tracking campaigns this way, donors would have an excellent way of tracking how campaigns were doing and allocating donations accordingly. Donors could also establish donations at regular intervals, allocate automatic donations based on certain criteria, and create reminders for donation deadlines
- Campaign wikis for the types of things that wikis are good for, like opposition research, repositories of ads
- A place to enter commonly used information like polls, which could then be aggregated and searched conveniently
- Allow campaigns to upload voter lists, which could then be used for people-powered, database-driven phone drives, letter campaigns, and other coordinated activities.
The idea would be to take the energy of a site like Kos and organize it around electing and recruiting candidates. Candidates, especially outsider candidates, who were interested in running could test the waters by setting up a profile and trying to solicit interest around their campaign.
Because diaries could be filtered by all of the metadata in the site, it would be possible for a user to set up their front page to show them blogs about NY races, Congressional races, Congressional races with under $X, Texas races with primaries, races where the incumbent is a Republican and the Democrat is down less than 5 points in the 5-poll average, etc.
But the real power of this would lie in the community. The more community members that used the site, the more we could create a people-powered alternative to the wheelings and dealings of the national and state parties. Dean is working on opening up databases to any candidate in the nation.
By creating good people-powered database information, perhaps we could even persuade the DNC to make all of that voter data available for this type of site, which could make the possibility of winning smaller, more local races even greater.
It's pretty early in the morning here, so perhaps I wasn't perfectly clear about the potential benefits of a system like this. Feel free to ask for clarification if it is needed.