While I dont have a single well edited version of it, I have a scattered collection of rants from signal conversations and etc, of the tool of democracy idea.

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I would like to build a tool of democracy which builds a network of people for the green party. I think its worth considering a level where we do that without their permission, with their public information that we can find, as long we have the right disclaimers in place. For the states/chapters/ (various progressive organizations?) who want to participate in greenmaps, I think we should offer a system of modules which accomplish nationbuilder type things, as well as other things like the neighbor-zipcode thing that NB doesnt do. I wouldnt mind if there was a way for greenmaps to have a slick interface for doing webdesign, but unless and until we can figure out how to do that, I think it makes sense to use WP or let all the other webmasters out there make websites on the platform of the… Read more

Id like to see the tool grow into something that becomes a green party project if possible, and if we can trust it to go forward in a reasonable way.

I think we need to do the news too, combined with issues, which lead to in person meetings and protests and petitions and ballot signatures.

its not that I want to neglect local news

lets say for example that we were to turn up a news site with no news to start

that the thing would only grow off what the users began posting and talking about

I suspect most of the interest would be on national / international issues

I picture an area where all the issues are at least mentioned, if not covered, within a year.

and the issues grouped into an outline of blogs, where there is a (##) number after the blog title showing how many total comments, perhaps another number and a color / highlight change on whats new since the user last logged in , giving option to mark all articles / comments having been read, or to mute a blog, or maybe even a group of blogs. (catagory?)

there would also be petitions with links to the petition info / signing, that would be listed in the outline, in the appropriate area.

that outline of blogs would be a sub page in the users dashboard when he logs in. Another subpage would be the neighbor-zip meet tool. The main dashboard page for the user would indicate if either of these subpages were caught up, or needed attention.

ideally something would be tracking whether the petitions had been signed, and indicate so.

perhaps petitions on their own subpage, with an indication on the dashboard whether all caught up

one subpage would be for controlling notification methods and frequency.

one would either be a sign up form for purchasing membership, or a link to an existing web page to do that.

and that page would allow the user to control recurring frequency and amounts.

one subpage would be a tech support ticket system type thing, which would be an online project commenting area, with ways to place projects in ‘agents’ laps (to-do lists), and reassign whos responsible for which steps.

could use the existing tech support ticket plugin I put on midmogreens.org, or use a different plugin like that, or write our own someday

I dont know if nation builder gets down into the weeds enough on project step tracking to produce a report showing where the bottlenecks are in a team, but I think using the ticket system would probably show that pretty quick.

one subpage function will need to be calendars / meeting announcements, state, chapter, committee.

with the main dashboard page showing the next 2 or 3 meetings only

one subpage a user profile page, allowing them to tag themselves as being interested in whatever issues they want. (being able to create new tags too) The petitions, polls, and blogs could also be tagged from the same tag pool list. and a tagged area of the dashboard created to make it easier for each user to customize their dashboard.

for a half baked idea, in MO we have a major efficiency problem in meetings. Each chapter representative gets 5 mins for a report, most turn it into 10 or 15 droning on about shit only they care about. Im thinking we need to require chapter reports, perhaps all reports, in a general state CC meeting to be prerecorded with some desktop screen recorder, I use one called screenpal, but Im sure there are many affordable ones. Then, they upload their reports to the website with a brief written description of what they are covering, in advance of the CC meeting, then CC officers can either watch their reports or not, and either ask questions, or just move the meeting on.

would also serve the side purpose of documenting meeting content / reports. like video minutes.

and yes, we have people in the meeting who are tasked with timing thoee reports and getting people to shut up, but people wont shut up..

another option the cc could decide on, is whether to play those recorded reports live thru a shared desktop zoom meeting during the meeting. wouldnt make much difference to the website, it could still archive video reports.

another subpage is webinars. STL does a ton of them. Also sortable into an issues outline.

btw, I wasnt really advocating opening a news section without news, just saying I think national/international would get the most interest, but I could easily be wrong. Wont matter if its all covered in the issues outline

it would be nice if the issues outline had an interface like the rockauto dot com website

just simple expanding tree structure