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General SocNet for Politics (name TBD)
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
SparkLoop is a politcally focused social networking tool where anyone who cares about democracy - from the barely activated to the committed activist - can go to respond to stories, communicate priorities to elected leaders, and connect with others.
Supporting organization:
None directly, although at least 3 groups are interested
URL:
http://vizbang.com/AB
City:
San Francisco
State/Region:
CA
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
The dissolution of the "connective tissues of democracy," - namely, democratic citizen groups and political parties - has continued unabated since William Greider's 1991 book "Who Will Tell the People." One byproduct of this decay is that the process by which citizens provide feedback to elected officials, a critical link in the feedback loop that powers our democracy, is broken. Elected representative's offices are completely overwhelmed by mountains of citizen feedback, both personal correspondence as well as the new kinds of internet driven communications organized by advocacy groups. This time consuming kabuki dance of communications does little to provide these officials with any kind of remotely accurate understanding of their constituencies' true priorities or concerns, and wastes scarce staff time responding to large volumes of messages.
A generalized politics focused social networking system isn't going to fix these problems on it's own, but it could become a powerful tool in supporting and augment the person to person revolution in politics and campaign tactics that is already occurring.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Revenue could come from various sources: beyond campaign and noncampaign related advertising, any campaign would be welcome to set up a basic account on the site, but extra features could be offered for additional fees. See the draft specification document for initial thoughts on other potential revenue streams.
Potential obstacles:
There are nontrivial design, user experience, engineering and scalability issues involved in this project. But since the basic functionality is already mapped out and modular, something functional and useful could be built easily. The "yet another social network" is also a potential obstacle; but the reddit or twitter style microblogging functionality and open API could offer a path through this.
Resource Needs:
This project needs design and engineering talent the most. A very early streamlined version could be designed and built with around $50k in seed funding.
Key Milestones:
* leverage $25k from other campaigns/organizations
* engage design/engineering firm
* subset existing wireframe into 60-day 1.0 proposal
* secure basic identity and design
* choose base technology
* code code code
Project Summary:
This (as yet unnamed) politics social networking project is a site where anyone who cares about politics, from the barely activated to the committed activist, can go to easily respond to stories, let their elected representatives know what their priorities are, see what their friends are thinking and connect with others.
Comments
Speaking of names
There's more information...
Thanks for the thoughtful comments! I have a lot more about this written up here...
http://vizbang.com/AB/
Including a very rough UI mockup...
And yeah this was definitely inspired by theyworkforus, although what I have in mind goes pretty far beyond what they've implemented (so far, at least). And this is interesting - Deval Patrick's team just implemented a voting system a little similar to what I'm proposing...
http://devalpatrick.com/issues.php
Now if I could only name the blasted thing!
The Deval Patrick site is
The Deval Patrick site is VERY interesting. I sent a message describing it, They Work For You and your proposal to a few email lists (progressive exchange, NTEN online community building and NTEN 501c3-tech-DC) because I thought some of those folks, especially bloggers, might be interested in the implications of this, and in your project specifically.
A little more...
I sense there is a lot behind this, and I appreciate the direct-democracy aspect of it -- I assume it comes at least in part from They Work For You? But I feel like there needs to be a little...more. I'm just not clear on what the thing will LOOK like, what tools it will have, what the OBJECTIVES are. Is it just a way of routing email to members of Congress? I sense that it's a lot more than that -- that it's not just Congress.org. There are references and a screenshot of something that looks Digg-like, but I'm not clear on what it is or how it fits into the site. Your elevator pitch just sounds very vague -- any number of websites, not least of all Congress.org, could claim the very same thing. It sounds like there is more there...but I just can't tell what it is. Please connect the dots and lay out the plan a little more.
Also, as you note, the
Also, as you note, the scalability problems are nontrivial...that's my understanding of why something like They Work For You hasn't arisen (yet) in the US, or at least why it might not be as successful -- because UK MPs represent far smaller numbers of people than US legislators, and so even a fairly large number of people demanding they respond to a set of priorities may not faze them. But simply stating that there's a scalability problem doesn't give me confidence there's a way to address it...
--ivan (quixotic1.com/Genocide Intervention Network)