With the end of quarter filings today, donating is all the rage. I love reading Sarah Carter's diaries, but I must admit I periodically recommend them without donating. It is a problem I hope I can overcome. I even occasionally follow the ActBlue links and refresh them when I get bored to see how much the contributions have jumped.
Obviously a lot of people are giving, but overall there are only <strike>3,539</strike> <strike>3,564</strike> 3,637 donors on the combined netroots page. After reading through the comments of some of these diaries though we seem like the most down on our luck group of individuals, which may be the reason we are most passionate about our government. But the question that I typically ponder as I peruse the daily writings is who really is giving versus who is just sending some `recommend' or comment love, and as I have stated I am guilty of this more often then not.
[As a side note if you want campaign contribution reform we should move to a system of recommend/troll rate versus donations. There are a few people I would love to troll rate out of Congress.]
Now I realize Jack Carter is not on the netroots page and Larry Kissell was a recent entry, yet a long time favorite diarist for several of us, so there are many unrecognized donations occurring. And mad props to those of you currently supporting our future netroots candidates. But I want to focus on this ActBlue page for a thought. Why is it that a comment recommend or user ID dictates our self assigned hierarchy? After all this sometimes is more just a rating at how good we are at slacking off at our respective jobs versus our impact on the democratic process.
I wonder if we should shift from a world of mojo happiness to one of karma or karma+mojo. In my head I define karma in this regard as the act of donating or to make it more democratic donating or volunteering for a candidate. We have a list of 15 active and amazing candidates, with a promise that that list will grow to at least 20. So we have established one variable already in whom we want to measure our contribution levels. Now I could easily see this list eventually growing such that we add other measurable values such as a Democracy Bond donor or something else, I like choices!
The details of it all I don't plan on working out, and feasibility isn't something I care to spend hours on since in the end I won't be the one implementing this. That said, I see a system working like this. I have an account set up with ActBlue where I have my user ID for kos, mydd, swingstate project, etc, etc listed. Whenever I donate via the combined netroots page, I get credited with karma points that carry over to these respective sites. I don't necessarily gain any abilities more that the super powers I already possess, but possibly my user ID is tagged in such a way so that my karma points are made public, or you get a pony next to your name for each karma point earned. Now I also have no desire to debate the equation for karma points, is it dollar amount or number of contributions or both, blah blah blah. I don't even know how mojo works. I figure there is just a mojo fairy that gives out trusted user status and maybe s/he could also be a karma fairy. Anyway what would the end use of this actually be? Well primarily it would kick some people off of their high horses and let you know who is actively making a difference and who is just here for the ride. I don't mind if you are here for the ride though, I did that for about a year. Imagine reading a comment by mcjoan or hunter and seeing not only do they like to write a lot, and maybe I agree with what they said, but wow they are kicking my ass in karma points too, they actually are putting their money/walking shoes where their mouth is. I only pick them out because I just watched the video from yearlykos that mark warner's campaign emailed today. Kinda weird, they don't look at all like the people in my head that I imagine when I read their stuff.
So there are still a few issues to address like how to award volunteer karma or what do we do with our international participants (benawu you are from Australia?), but it is Friday afternoon and you are either watching the World Cup or procrastinating so maybe you want to kick the idea around for a bit.