Hi, my name is Yil and I'm lazy.
I started being lazy years ago and thought it was something I could control. I didn't think it would impact my life or those around me, but it has. You see, I'm guilty of not voting very often. If it wasn't a Presidential election or a close Governor/Senate race I didn't seem to turn out and thus I must take some responsibility for the mess we're in.
Thinking about ways to motivate myself I hit upon an idea for this site that might get my ass into the voting booth more often. A "Go Local" button!
First a little background. When I started to attended college back in '88 in a different state when I was 18 and able to vote I didn't bother to change my voting address or request an absentee ballot. When I returned home in 92 I returned to a town that Democrats didn't bother running for many offices because they didn't stand a chance which only reinforced the perception that voting wasn't going to make a difference especially for the smaller elections. Dean, to his credit, at least recognizes this is a problem with a simple solution. Dems might not win, but at least we're in the fight and get to put out a competing message in the local paper!
The problem is really mine though. I often don't even realize there is a local election taking place! I like to think of myself as informed since I read a lot of popular blogs, but they usually only cover the national or big picture stuff.
So I think I came up with a great idea for this site. The first step is to create an additional field in the user profile for people to record their congressional district, their state district, and their hometown. [A rich ajax enhanced page here would help you fill this in correctly for those needing help.] With just this change alone and a few support tools we can see where registered users are from in the US. That can be used to identify hotspots where significant numbers of people are geographically close enough that they might want to consider a meetup type event!
But remember, the goal here is to help me and others like me vote more often and by extension increase Democratic chances of victory. So the second step is to offer a service similar to diary author subscriptions but for diary TAGS who match election tags such as NJ-01, or NJ-Gov, etc. Whenever a new message tagged with an election identifier matches my user profile it should show up in a brand new "Go Local!" (or something) box right above or below the recommended diaries. It might look like the same as the recommended diaries but be limited to just 1 item so it takes up little space on the front page and might not even show the single item if there isn't a new diary. The "Go Local!" title/button would always be present and clicking it would effectively do a tag search for diaries "local" to me.
Remember. I'm lazy. I need HELP. This means that anytime a diary that affects me locally is posted it can't be up to me to find it via multiple tag searches or it won't happen. Making this worse is local diaries, almost by definition, will never make it onto the recommended list because they won't have broad appeal and will scroll off the recent list too fast here. There has to be a simple and easy way to find them and more importantly for them to find ME! I believe this will increase my chances of getting involved.
Of course once even the basic framework is in place to allow users to update their profile it becomes easy to find where there are 50+ readers in a particular congressional district. We can now use this hard information to get the candidate and perhaps more importantly his or her staff to create an account here. 10 minutes of someone's time to reach 50+ progressive activists who might become campaign volunteers? This seems an easy sell to me. Of course once they or their staff have an account and make an attempt to keep us informed and let us know how we can help we can cultivate the relationship further. If nothing else it increases our chances of letting them know how we feel about issues if they at least visit here!
The courting of our representatives won't happen overnight but once the candidates with the largest representation here can see a positive effect in their campaign from a little time and effort word will get out. This site's popularity will grow which will create more hotspots, etc. We've already seen some big named important people here, but it's a small fraction of our representatives.
Lots of other smaller possibilities exist. An auto generated homepage for each district seems a likely idea which could contain a link to the current officeholder's webpage, local campaign site, followed by the result of a tag search for the district, etc.