I have an "unsexy" but useful way for Democratic-friendly volunteer attorneys and others to contribute to efforts to hold Team Bush accountable.
Microsoft Office is burying lawyers and, really, all of us in dead-tree and electronic paper more and more every day. Emails, text documents, spreadsheets and powerpoints - from such documents I make my living as an attorney in Washington.
There is a medium-sized army of attorneys in Washington (and other cities, but Washington most notably) that review and categorize massive volumes of documents for massive litigation and transactional cases. These attorneys usually work for agencies that place them for substantial pay with law firms at the highest period of urgency: when deadlines are real. This relatively low-prestige, high-tedium work is what makes modern litigation possible. If you wish, you can learn more about the precise details of the litigation work from my own site at Document Review Work - The Market and Document Review Work - The Actual Work, but I did not write this diary to blog-whore.
When the Department of Justice, the White House, Congressional Republicans or other entities attempt to bury an opponent, a newspaper, a blog in garbage, it's helpful to have a volunteer army to ferret through the documents and to code them in an organized way. The same modern technology (whether commercial, home-grown, Linux open-source - best left to the techies) that allows for the massive review of literally millions of documents and tens of millions of pages in an antitrust suit or FTC/DOJ merger filing allows for the less formal, perhaps less security/privilege-obsessed review of documents that have been made public, and their categorization for the benefit of the liberal blogosphere and the more neutral traditional media alike.
What I am envisioning is something like this. A document dump gets announced. Say 2,000 documents of native format, .tif scans of paper or whatever, perhaps similar to the recent Attorney Purge dump. Their custodians make them available in someway (piecemeal or however) online. Amidst the "juicy" documents will be hundreds of boring "let's get lunch" emails and spreadsheets about the consumption of office Kleenex. So the volunteers get assigned to code these documents in a mechanical, rigorous way as a handy reference. Example of possible codes for the Attorney Purge dump: Junk, Strategy, Rationalization, Lam, Sampson, Fired, Performance Issues, Hookergate, Local Press, Congress, etc. These codes might help our allies run efficient searches and buttress their rapid-response efforts to bullcrap claims from Team Bush, etc. Instead of searching through 9 boxes of crud, they hit search on Microsoft Access or some MySQL database and BANG - the big payback. A great tool for making Fox News look like fools.
Ok, how would this work? Well, this diary is an attempt to explore the willingness of volunteers to volunteer. I am not a software/code maven but there are a lot of different ways to make it easy for volunteers to code, say, 50 or 100 documents or pages of a dump. Maybe HTML forms on a simple site, maybe Google spreadsheets, maybe MySQL - not my call. But a unified index of a document dump would prevent duplication of labor among multiple liberal allies, keep the reporters reporting while we coders code and ultimately make their job easier. Frankly, it would be awesome if contract attorneys in DC were to be the ones to volunteer, since our coding skills are sharpened through constant exhausting work, but volunteers from throughout the community would be welcome. It's also a great way to contribute to websites who ask for donations, and you want to give, but cash is tight. If you increase their efficiency and strength, that may be better in some ways than cash.
This work is not sexy; honest labor usually isn't. But if you are up for some useful if non-thrilling work, let me know below. If you have programming or database or document review experience, PLEASE let me know below.
Karl Rove does not want you to help. He wants you not to give a damn. So please consider giving a damn on this volunteer proposal, and thank you.