Salsa Scoop

Local Campaigns After Obama: Catch Wired for Change's PdF Forum Today

At this afternoon's 2 o'clock breakout session at the Personal Democracy Forum (I'm sorry, I can't help but find that title oxymoronic), catch Wired for Change's Jim Walsh, the brains behind DLCCWeb. He'll be joined by the likes of Colin Delany of epolitics.com and Clay Haynes of Catalist (the voter file that plugs into Salsa).

Here's what they're talking about:

More and more candidates are taking their campaigns online, but technical and strategic know-how remain a major hurdle to turning online support into real world results. Join a conversation on the future of online campaigns at the local level, how using data effectively is key to winning, and how organizing tools are changing to reflect the new realities.

 

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10:05 AM Jun 30, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

And April isn't even close to 40

Our very own April Pedersen, co-founder of DemocracyInAction and of Wired For Change has been honored as one of the New Leaders Council's "40 Under 40" -- "a diverse group of young leaders ... who exemplify the spirit of progressive political entrepreneurship."

I've had the privilege of working with April since DemocracyInAction's salad days. It's well-deserved recognition for someone with a rare combination of energy, vision and brilliance.

(Congratulations as well to her fellow-honoree Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a DIA member organization.)

Anyone in D.C. who wants to help April (and a few of her staff) celebrate, roll out to the awards celebration at Chi Cha Lounge tonight.

(Yes, that award registration page is another Salsa link. The New Leaders Council is not just the extoller of April Pedersen and DemocracyInAction: it's also a client.)

 

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03:10 PM Jun 26, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

E-xemplar: We Want The Public Option

Great stuff happens when you mix a tool kit like Salsa with a creative campaign concept.

Case in point: WeWantThePublicOption.com

This custom-built petition page offers signers the prospect of their name appearing on an advertisement that will air in the D.C. area in favor of the public option. It's a great way to show impact from an online petition as well as recognize the activists that sign it. And as you can see, it's clearly all about the cause -- not the sponsoring organization, which is practically invisible on the page.

So, how would one build a page like this? On the technical side, they've used our robust API to create a custom form that populates signers into particular groups. This does require working at the level of the code, but it's nothing more complex than HTML, The same process could just as easily be used to register people for Salsa events, apply Salsa tags, or create any other kind of headquarters data. While they could have hosted this type of page themselves, they've chosen to place it on a Salsa content page so that we pay the bandwidth freight when they get picked up by BoingBoing. Either way is fine by us.

The overall layout and design of the page itself, of course, are wholly custom jobs that Salsa doesn't directly facilitate. Once you've got a design, however, it's a simple matter of including the HTML in the layout of thecustom page.

 

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03:35 PM Jun 24, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Technology in politics: Obama deploys health care database

It's no secret that the Obama campaign-cum-administration has been forward-thinking in its use of technology.

Today, the president's Organizing for America online operation is set to deploy a "health care story bank" -- "perhaps the most ambitious test case yet determining whether the technological apparatus that fueled Obama’s campaign can succeed in driving Obama’s governing agenda."

Thousands of personal stories of the health care crisis that have been collected online will be available for lookup by state and congressional district, the better to whip votes.

It's an impressive technological undertaking in obvious service to the old maxim that should be near and dear to every web communicator: lead with the heart and not the head.

The health care discussion slides easily into wonkishness, but the insurance industry bought the past 15 years of parasitism withsome personal storytelling of its own.

(n.b. -- health insurance at $3200 a year is the nightmare scenario in the Harry and Louise ads.  In inflation-adjusted terms, that's around $4700 now, which is exactly what the average individual premium runs nowadays. Thank god we were saved from the big government plan.)

The fact that this kind of bad-faith drivel won a serious policy discussion would have to suggest the possibility that when the rubber hits the road, there was more to the legislative sausage-making thanstorytime. Like, millions and millions of dollars in lobbying by a massively entrenched economic sector. And a fainthearted reformist proposal where boldness was demanded.

Much love to databases, but those seem like higher cards in the game.

Apart from efficacy and traction, it'll be interesting to see how the collateral issues play with this toy:  privacy (inevitably some stories' details will be enough to track down the authors), authority (some will be false, exaggerated, unreliable, or merely susceptible to counter-narratives), gamesmanship ("troll" stories of varying degrees of sophistication will be submitted;how will they be policed, and how will those that get through be used?).   But nobody's ever used a tool quite like this, and any variable that puts focus on the individual victims of health care rather than Max Baucus is a welcome one.

One way or the other it should be worth the poking and prodding when it launches later today.  After that ... who knows?

 

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09:25 AM Jun 23, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

2009 Empowers Green Grant Recipients

This year DemocracyInAction Empowers Grants went green.

With a new president taking steps to protect our environment, we wanted to lend a hand to non-profits making a positive impact on our planet.

We received an overwhelming number of applications from fantastic non-profits doing just that. After painstaking (and difficult!) review, we are proud to congratulate the five Empowers Grants awardees, who will receive free access to the Salsa toolset for an entire year....

 

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10:45 AM Jun 16, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

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