When you get a chance, check out the Florida Progressive Coalition web site. The purpose of our group is a popular one these days -- turning Florida into a blue state. Others will approach that task from different avenues, but one of the ways we are approaching the problem is through information. The members of the coalition are building the biggest and most comprehensive place on the web for information and communication about politics in Florida. Part of the site is our blog, which, along with FLA Politics, is one of the biggest progressive group blogs in the Sunshine State. You can check out our mission here
A quick tour of the features of our site:
- Issues: We have a section devoted to every single issue that affects Floridians. We want to be the place where people go when they want to know what's going on with any particular issue in Florida, containing the most thorough information on any political topic.
- Progressive Organizations: We want to create a complete list of all active progressive organizations in the state of Florida either at the state-wide level or the local level. We want names, contact information, web sites and as much information we can to help channel interested individuals to the groups that are fighting for the issues that they find important. Organized both by issue and by locality, we want to make it easy for people to get involved and, eventually, help foster communication between groups to get everybody working together.
- How To: We are trying to gather the most comprehensive list of articles and guides on how to be an activist and how to achieve political success from the grassroots level to winning office in Tallahassee or D.C. From contacting your government officials and media outlets to blogging to getting things done in the real world or winning office, we hope to gather the best resources to help progressives change Florida and change the world.
- Elections: We have a page for each elected office in Florida from the legislature level on up. Each page contains incumbents, challengers, election results, media and blog coverage of the race, historical information on the office and other relevant info as needed.
- Politicians: We have individual pages in our wiki on all the prominent politicians and candidates in the state from the legislature level on up. As time goes on, the database will have more and more politicians in it. A basic page for a politician will include a bio of the person in question, contact information, links to official and unofficial websites, links to blog posts concerning that politician, issue stances, media coverage of the politician and a professional history.
- Other areas of the site will be focused on Regional Politics, Endorsements of candidates and issues, Election Resources, Activism Resources and various other things as our members and readers see fit. Eventually, we want the site to not only focus on the present and future, but the past, too, making this the most comprehensive site about the history of Florida politics, too.
Obviously, this is an on-going project. As time goes on, more and more stuff will be added to the site and the things that already exist will be expanded. We need more help in getting the project started, since there is so much to do. Won't you help us?