As a Former Party chair, one of the tasks that fell to me was organizing the annual Fish Fry in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. What does that have to do with graph theory and networks? Read on ...
{This diary is in memory of my Friend Carlene Barnhardt, who could sell more tickets than anybody, and would have loved the opportunity to vote for Larry Kissell this time around in NC-08. }
We would sell tickets before the event. Various party activists would get 10, or 20, or 50 -- and knew the people that they would go to in order to sell them. Here's the interesting part -- if a person had already been sold a ticket by another person, he or she wouldn't buy a ticket. The pre-sale of tickets not only raised money, it insured that the social networks of the activists were not too incestuous -- that large segments of the community would be "spanned", or covered, by being known to at least one activist. The person buying the ticket usually felt obligated to tell the person selling the ticket exactly what he or she felt about the current political situation, and this information would propagate up, back to the Chair, when the ticket seller would turn in the money. A kind of poll -- that was very careful not to sample the same people over and over again! This coordination of information and outreach was actually far more important than the money raised.
So, what I want to do is look to a modern day way of doing this; a way of assigning responsibility for outreach, particularly in college communities, to a group of people with nearly 70% penetration with a social networking site. I'm looking for other people who have thought about the problem, in a conceptual or a technical way, to put together a little virtual working group. Let's stay ahead of the curve, and not fight the last war. On the conceptual side, I'm interested in modeling ways of telling something about someone's politics from the information in their profile. On the technical side, I'm interested in the best way to engineer the spider, and the right way to query the system.
DailyKos is the most popular political blog. Why? There are, of course, lots of reasons, but a glaring one is the superiority of Scoop. Everyone I've every talked to in meatspace (that is in the real world) has said that they prefer using this site to any other. Technology matters in politics.