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- Uppity Wisconsin - Making Wisconsin Progressive Again
Uppity Wisconsin - Making Wisconsin Progressive Again
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Uppity Wisconsin is a collaborative news and blogging site for progressive politics in Wisconsin. Our proposal is to add action items, membership database, and to fund further collaboration with other progressive groups.
Supporting organization:
Cruiskeen Consulting LLC
URL:
http://www.uppitywis.org
City:
Menomonie
State/Region:
WI
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Uppity Wisconsin is a site for discussion of progressive politics by people in the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin is historically a progressive state, and Uppity Wisconsin attempts to help make Wisconsin progressive again. We are the Wisconsin site of the Fifty State Blog Network, a project to have a liberal "go-to" site in every state for political discussion.
The social impact of Uppity Wisconsin is to provide news about and support to progressive causes. We have bloggers from around the state contributing articles and events on a regular basis, and we seek input on these articles from our readers. We want to work for progressive causes, and support progressive Wisconsin candidates. During the past year we have been heavily involved in attempting to defeat the state Marriage Amendment to our constitution, and to fight the institution of the death penalty in WIsconsin (sadly, we didn't do too well in keeping either from passing as a referendum).
The site is bult on the Drupal Content Management System, and is primarily a group blogging site where different bloggers create content. Steve Hanson serves as the editor, and maintains a front page of the more interesting blogs. We also maintain a points system, rewarding our bloggers with points that at some time will be useful to purchase books and other merchandise. Individual blogs, the main site content, and upcoming events are available as RSS feeds. Additionally, the calendar of events is available in Ical format, and on Google Calendar as a public calendar. Our readers can contribute to any of these resources by registering an account on the site.
We also aggregate news from around the Internet that is of interest to people involved in progressive politics. The site provides a database of links to other progressive resources, which our readers can update themeselves.
Our plans for the upcoming year include adding support for tagging and easy social bookmarking, and to add a section of Action Items and Petitioning to the site.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Uppity Wisconsin is funded by money from the founding company (Cruiskeen Consulting LLC), from donations, and income from advertising and affiliate sales (primarily of books from the Uppity Wisconsin book store and Uppity Wisconsin merchandise ). Some of our advertising revenue comes from the Blogads network, which we have recently joined.
We are also attempting to receive some funding from the 50-state blog project (funded by BlogPAC).
Currently our operating costs are very low (primarily hosting costs which are being provided by Cruiskeen Consulting LLC). We would like to increase our advertising revenue to help fund improvements to the site and to allow us to purchase some content, particularly political cartoons, etc.
Potential obstacles:
The largest obstacle to Uppity Wisconsin is a shortage of participation. This has improved greatly over the last several months, and we have attracted a number of well-known Wisconsin bloggers to the site. It is our intention to improve the site, and therefore attract more writers and readers. We would like to be able to have some additional funds to make small payments for expanded content.
Finally, our web infrastructure could use some improvement by increasing our disk storage and memory in our existing servers as our content and readership increases.
Resource Needs:
We could use some development funds to help us develop more modules that would be useful to politically engaged web sites using the Drupal platform. These modules would be contributed back to the Drupal project as GPL-licensed modules.
Additionally, we would like to integrate the CiviCRM system to the site and purchase local voting rolls to produce an online database for local campaigns for progressive candidates.
Finally, we would like to extend our outreach efforts to other grassroots progressive organizations throughout the state, and we hope to have a state-wide progressive web conference later in 2007.
Key Milestones:
Uppity Wisconsin is one year old today (March 15, 2007). During the next 90 days we would like to:
- Increase our outreach to progressives throughout the state through presence at meetings and improving our progressive web sites ring (Progressive Webmasters of Wisconsin). We would like to partially sponsor a progressive webmasters meeting later in the year.
- Integrate CiviCRM in our site to provide better tracking of members and voters.
- Build collaborative tools with other progressive groups in the state.
- Add more private work areas to the site for groups attempting to build progressive coalitions.
- Fund some investigative reporting on expanded issues of concern to Wisconsin residents.
- Integrate OpenID technology into the site, and promote its use with other sites in the 50 State Blog Network and Wisconsin progressive sites, allowing a single identity to be used on all of the sites.
Project Summary:
Uppity Wisconsin is a site for discussion and promotion of progressive politics in the state of Wisconsin. Our goals are to promote progressive candidates and to help Wisconsin move back to its progressive roots. We are a collective space for writing on progressive topics, and also aggregate news and events from Wisconsin and the rest of the country.
We have greatly increased our connections to the progressive community in Wisconsin during our first year of operation. During the next year, we would like to have more tools to reach people and organizations around the state. We would like to integrate the CiviCRM system into our web site, allowing us to more easily collect donations and to track members. Additionally we would like to improve the look of the site, and add some political cartoons to the mix.
We would also like to develop several different modules for the site to make it easier for our readers to become politically involved through private work areas on the site, an action items area, and improved sharing of information with other progressive sites in Wisconsin and throughout the country as part of the 50 State Blog Network. This would include using OpenID technology to allow a single sign-on capability through all of the 50 State Blog Network sites, and with other web sites in Wisconsin.
Comments
Excellent project
This can be an excellent project that uses technology to engage the public in ways that change the world for the better. Very well thought-out.
As I see it, the key challenge will be to get people to the site, both initially and repeatedly. This will make you effective, but more to the point, will drive the revenue model, which in turn will make you sustainable. There are so many options for web users in this space, that you have to tightly define your audience and create an ongoing buzz that will get them there and keep them coming back. Are there key "connectors", people or orgs whose participation and enthusiasm will bring lots of others along? I like the idea of focusing initially on one or two key issues to get good dialog going, and maybe some media exposure. I'd suggest having some target site traffic metrics and milestones to gauge your success and keep your team focused. If you can get a critical mass of traffic, I see this being a successful project.
Scott
On Wisconsin
Hey Steve-
As a Wisconsinite (expat in NY, at the moment), I congratulate your efforts! While I won't betray my own political leanings, I have always been fascinated with Wisconsin's political history, from Zeidler to LaFollette (and of course, darker spots like Joe McCarthy). Good luck with the site! If I meet any progressive bloggers online, I'll let them know.
On Wisconsin,
Phil
Blogging tool
Sandra Dickinson
I discovered your project because you listed BLOG as a tech tool your project uses. In fact (unlike some others who list the same tool) it looks to me like BLOG a primary tool for your project!
I'm glad I found you because a blog (long with a wiki) are the primary tools of my own project. I'm looking forward to exploring with other like-minded folks how these tools can best be used to promote our different social purposes.
Anyway, it looks your project uses the blogging tool in one of the two ways it was born to be used - for its most pristine journalistic purpose (rather than 'personal diary' type purpose). And you express facing an obstacle that my project also faces = participation.
The two types of participation you expressly mention are: bloggers/writers and readers. But you don't expressly mention "commentors." That was a bit surprising to me, since your project describes itself as a place for DISCUSSION. But clearly, engaging commentors is an implicitly important challenge in your project. And we share that challenge! My project also needs a blog that works as a two-way conversation street.
I'm sure you are as aware as I am that the challenge of engaging commentors is rife thruout the blogosphere. Most blog "participation" is passive readership. For many (most?) bloggers, readers matter more than commentors. For some of us (like your project and mine!) -- the interaction of blog post and comment is vital to accomplishing the social purpose.
There is very little out there as far as either theoretically-based or evidence-based strategies and tactics for engaging blog commentors within the context of serving a social purpose. I would love to explore these issue with you further - now that I have found you in this forum.
I invite you to take a look at my project Selearninggames. My project intends to use a combination of wiki and blog as the primary 'starter tools' to accomplish its social purpose. Please let me know what you think about how I am using the blog tool. Thank you.