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Uppity Wisconsin - Making Wisconsin Progressive Again
Challenges Entered:
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.
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.
WHAT WE NEED:
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.
Location
Menomonie, WI
United States
See map: Google Maps
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Home based business
Comments or articles being contributed freely are very useful and very informative. For some contributing ideas through means of posting article and comments are made home-based business, since you will be just using your PC and Internet. A home-based business is one of the many synonyms for the same thing, which is working out of your place of residence. Some people call it work from home, work at home, home business, cottage business, cottage industry, and some people call it being a sad clown with no money so you can't even get a cash advance for a proper office but those people are Philistines, and you should pay them no mind. One of the things you can do with a home business is to market a website or product. You can farm out work for content to college kids, or other affiliates for cheap. If you do it right, a home business can really pay off. It could be well worth a cash advance to start a home based business.
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.