Offering non-partisan "Digital Town Hall" hosting is the only way to go about it. If we offer the same class/quality of hosting service to all candidates of all parties, then it's all good.
However, this only works if we do it in such a way that there's mild profit to be made. If we give it up for free then any hostile campaign could easily organize a movement by a few motivated dirty tricksters to sign up for free accounts and over-utilize system resources to throttle the whole works.
If we keep the costs of providing service tacked to the actual costs of service (which still makes this ridiculously cheap: probably 3 or 4 bucks a month for most users) then when usage goes up we have revenue to expand capacity, whether that usage is earnest or just a ham-fisted politicians idea of a DoS attack. I also see no reason why a few dedicated souls couldn't make this a real job and live comfortably (though probably not richly) off the proceeds.
We need a lawyer to look at this, but I see no substantial difference between what we would offer here and what blogspot does. We would also need any domain suffixes (e.g. *.fordean.net or *.fordean.com) to be handled through a third party.
Also, we would need to think about personnel. If we do this, there's going to need to be a customer service number for people to call as well as a highly competent sysadmin to make sure the box(es) stay sturdy. See my point about jobs above.
This might be something to look into setting up in paralell with the actual code itself if there's actually any interest. It will take time to set up, and we'd want to be ready to go in September methinks.
-j
Why not welcome all campaigns to use the tools: Presidential, congressional, state, etc.? Then we can gold plate the damn thing and still be legal. Here's how I see it (from http://www.blaserco.com/blogs ):
A4D is being built by volunteers using an open source language (PHP) to assemble software components (like Drupal, MySQL, RSS, etc.) to build the toolkit. And their work is open source, so it's freely available for others to re-use and improve by returning their improvements to the code base. Sure, the code will be papered with advisories that it was developed for the Dean campaign beta users–notices that must be left in the code–but all candidates of all stripes are welcome to benefit from this extraordinary body of work.
If we offer it publicly and sincerely, it's just another open source tool, which is required of us by the GPL anyway. Why be afraid of an overwhelming grassroots movement of fundamentalist Internet mavens (is there such a thing?). We should embrace all grassroots organizing that raises the collective dialogue, since that exposes our most candid thinking.
Again, the GPL or any license requires us to re-publish the code, and we assume some republicans/Kerryites will get the code by becoming nodes. We're sharing it anyway, so if we say we're sharing it, the FEC issues disappear, IMHO.
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On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 11:02 AM, CMR wrote:
Yeah, it is a soft money issue. Well you've got a good idea that I willgo check on (if one contributer payed for hosting out of pocket as a
campaign contribution). But i think if this thing works hosting will cost
a bit more than $2K a month and things will get messy. $2000 is not enoughto pay for this thing I think....
Got it; and that's all fine by me (although, if it's just linux hosting,
it's amazing what $2000, even $200, will buy...).
But at least part of my idea on this was, what if (god forbid) Dean flails?
As I've said a couple times before, this project is potentially much bigger
than one cause because it's really all about the future of online
networking/organizing. I'd hate to see things disintergrate if Dean "goes
south", say, when the primaries go south. So having the hosting space might
have given us an tangible "turf" where the organization's code and such
could be sustained and a central "site" could operate if need be.
But, even in this scenario, some hosting space could be always obtained at
that junture and we all could (and will I imagine) talk about what, if
anything, is next. So it's all good. (Besides, DEAN'S GONNA KICK BOODIE!!!)
Cheers CMR
<--enter gratuitous quotation that implies my profundity here-->
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