So, I built a site for the county Democrats in my hometown, and it was a decent success… they grew their membership, raised money, and generally managed to get some real momentum behind their local liberal community for the first time in recent memory. But, there were problems, primarily with providing the needed functionality and still making something useable with open source or very inexpensive tools.
So, what I want to do is come up with a suite of simple tools(weblog software, a mailing list manager, a file upload script, survey/polling software, and calendaring software seem like the essential pieces) with robust functionality, but not many confusing configuration options for the end-user, for setting up and running a small-to-medium political organizational site on a budget.
I’m not sure how I’m going to do this yet. The most attractive option to me, not being a hardcore codemonkey, is to avoid reinventing the wheel by just gluing together existing free software with a new interface and some authentication code. If I could get a couple of really good PHP or Perl people on board, I could maybe get more ambitious. But, I want it to be self-limiting in some ways. Civicspace and others are already covering groups that need huge amounts of functionality. I’m going more for ease of use and simplicity here.
Once I’ve got something to work with, I’ll try to roll it out to a few other groups or candidates, likely through connections developed in the course of making the original site. After that, who knows? I’d like to make it available and support it for as many groups as possible eventually, but that will take sources of funding and an administrative structure and all that, and thus is way down the road.
