[hackers] Various ideas lifted from blog space: Rideboard and Phonebank
So, I'm up this morning and reading the messages in the "Secret Surprise" blog. RIDEBOARD One person suggested a ride board for Dean events. Is there such a ride board up? Should we get something like that going in DeanSpace? Again, in spite of being a high tech person, I like quick, somewhat low tech solutions at times. For example. Could we have a Rideboard blog? Each public event from the Governor's calendar could be listed as blog entry and people wanting to work our rides could do it through the comments. Granted, it would be really nice to set up a rideboard module that is distributed by location, matches people looking for rides with people offering etc. That might be a nice second step. PHONEBANK Here, I don't know enough of the details, and maybe a little brainstorming would be in order. Here are the things I do know: It is common for campaigns to have a Phonebank during a primaries to get the vote out. I've never organized one, but I am wondering if we could set up tools to create a good distributed phonebank. Many people have lots of free minutes on their phone plans. and would volunteer to be part of a phone bank from their homes. Some sort of database would be needed to organize such volunteers, track their results etc. This has to be very sensitive. I would refer people to the article in the Concord Monitor, http://www.concordmonitor.com/stories/news/politics2003/nh__gop_phonelines_20y12y17_2003.shtmlabout Republicans trying to jam the get out the votes phonelines. It would seem as if having some sort of authenticated CVS style checking out of phonelists to call might be important. This is something with a very real deadline, that personally, I would love to see developed, and tested ahead of any caucus or primary. Comments? Aldon
RE: [hackers] RE: [developers] SignUpGoodAt page obsoleted
I think ?!ng raises an important point, but I don't want to miss Neil's point about redundancy either. I believe that the best solution (yet more work), would be to have a ProfileSummary.module That is, everyone should put the information they did in the SignUpGoodAt page into their profile. Then, a separate module should be available so you can look at a nicely formatted summary of all the profiles on a single page. Comments? Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Zack Rosen Sent: Friday, August 01, 2003 12:21 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [hackers] RE: [developers] SignUpGoodAt page obsoleted Lets put it in the book then :) -Zack -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ka-Ping Yee Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 10:43 PM To: Neil Drumm Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [developers] SignUpGoodAt page obsoleted On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Neil Drumm wrote: http://deanspace.org/node/view/26 This is one of the old wiki pages which no longer needs to exist. Really? I think it's wonderful to have one place to go where you can read and learn about everybody. It was one of the most useful pages for me when i joined. -- ?!ng
[hackers] Assorted
Transparency: I vote for letting lurkers be anonymous. Although it does come back to my earlier question: Is there any nice way to make particular posts only readable by a certain set of users. Personally, I would even allow anonymous people to post. If they post anything unappropriate, the admins/moderators can remove then posts. In a nutshell, I like Neil's four levels of users, including differentiation between authenticated lurkers and developers. Wiki or Book: I started doing things as books. I haven't played with a wiki module for Drupal. Is there one? I will load it and play with it and provide my comments. I do like the idea of Wiki for quickly changing things and books for something more permanent. I also like the idea of Wiki requiring authentication, and books being transparent DeanSpace Theme: The version that Neil sent yesterday is up on http://ahynes1.homeip.net:8180/drupal/ Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Neil Drumm Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 10:43 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [hackers] Transparency Right now we are kinda opaque. People have to sign up to see whats going on. I can do whatever with the Drupal permissions or even use a second instance of Drupal for our internal communicaion. Are we okay with letting our lurkers be anonymous? I plan on letting them have privileges to view most things. -Neil
RE: [hackers] Easing potential conflict between 'homegrown' sites andDeanSpace
And when you have MT modules ready for testing I have an MT sandbox up and running, as I'm sure many other people here do. Please let us know and we'll kick the tires. Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of zachary rosen Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 12:02 PM To: Zephyr Teachout Cc: 'Dave Pentecost'; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [hackers] Easing potential conflict between 'homegrown' sites and DeanSpace MT module is something we have been talking about doing for quite some time. By all means Dave - run with it, it will get a lot of use I am sure. -Zack
RE: [hackers] Question about current drupal news feeds (aggregation)
If there are any Windows users out there that need to know how to set up scheduler (the Windows equivalent of crontab), I've set it up on my machine, and I can help people out with it. Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Lynn Siprelle Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 11:21 PM To: Shannon Little Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] Question about current drupal news feeds (aggregation) On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 08:05 PM, Shannon Little wrote: I'm finding that I have to keep going to the admin panel and manually updating the three feeds I'm currently using. Is there some way to get them to update automatically that I'm missing? I do have cron enabled, and I got the impression when I set how often I want them to update that they would do so automatically...but it's just not happening. You have to set up the crontab (not a part of drupal). Do you know how to do that? If not--and you're on a *nix system, I don't do windows--contact me offlist and I'll walk you through it. Best, Lynn S. lynsa4012 on AIM - Lynn Siprelle * Writer, Mother, Programmer, Fiber Artisan The New Homemaker: http://www.newhomemaker.com/ Siprelle Associates: http://www.siprelle.com/ People-Powered Howard! http://www.deanforamerica.com/
RE: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc
Well, I'm trying to catch up on everything that happened over the weekend while I was off at the folk music festival. So, I'm sorry if I'm covering things that have already been covered, but I would like to throw in my two cents here. Zephyr, I respectfully disagree with you on the importance of public expression in whatever sort of space is created. The public expression is crucial in establishing a sense of a cohesive community and in facilitating different people in connecting. Let me illustrate: On Friendster, I am connected to 157232 people in my Personal Network, through 17 friends. However, friendster doesn't facilitate communicating with others in a manner that develops community. As such, I haven't made any useful new contacts. On the other hand, communities like www.ryze.com and www.ecademy.com do a much better job of promoting community through things like blogging. So, I strongly encourage facilities to promote blogging. Granted, there are other venues, including posting comments on the official blog, having your own blogs, etc., but I believe having blogs, forums, or similar tools as part of Deanspace will make it much more effective. Zephyr raises the issue of moderation. DFA doesn't have the staff to vet who posts or what posts remain if we have a giant network of people posting. However, following the paradigm of self organizing systems, and the example of DMOZ, I don't believe that is important. Every site that gets set up will have its administrators and/or moderators. This is no different than the close to 400 mailing lists that have already been set up. These moderators can be as controlling or free flowing as they feel comfortable with and fits their particular community. Part of the beauty of a truly distributed system like this, is that I can (or should be able to), as moderator of one system decide what content I pick up from other systems. This provides a natural feedback system. Those sites that develop a good sense of community through an appropriate level of moderation will end up producing more valuable content, which will get more widely distributed. So, that's my two cents on the role of blogs, content, moderation and community building within DeanSpace. Comments? Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Zephyr Teachout Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 1:53 PM To: 'Joshua Koenig'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc This is fantastic. Thanks Josh! I believe that if we get this up and running, over 500,000 people will use it. I do -- over 1,000,000 on friendster, and they aren't trying to change the world :) The single biggest request we get from folks in the field is how do I find other Dean supporters. This provides that means. It's a top priority for the campaign, and if we can provide other resources to help make it happen, ask me and I'll do everything I can do provide them. The one thing that I would change in Josh's model is just that we are not thinking of this as a place for public expression (why I support Dean) not because we don't want that expression, but because (1) there are other venues for it, and (2) it drastically (or almost completely) eviscerates the moderation/management needs if we don't provide that space--if there is no enter your own content here but all pick and choose and links to forum, we don't need to vet who enters at ALL which is ideal (this is the big diff between us and friendster -- we don't have staff who can routinely check every new person and we don't have people who want to kill the campaign by posting obscene or harassing posts (that's the big concern, not dissent). I'm thinking that we'll just modify our extensive registration to include all these elements (we're modifying anyway), and then feed the Data to deanster. The tricks then, are (1) how to display the information (2) how to search Right? The critical thing for the search is that people who are currently online show up first, but if we start with a really clumsy search (almost like an excel spreadsheet) we could at least get going. We're a shoot first improve later campaign, in many ways, but esp. for this one -- the basic functionality will be heaven for people. It seems if we can do that and roll it out, we can then add other features like uploading contacts and rating -- but I'm not the programming guru. What do you all think? Zephyr Teachout Internet Organizing Outreach Dean for America [EMAIL PROTECTED] Meetup at http://www.deanforamerica.com/meetup Get local at http://action.deanforamerica.com Contribute at http://www.deanforamerica.com/contribute -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joshua Koenig Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 5:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc Here's a draft of my design doc for Deanster (a.k.a. the talend database, the visible volunteers, the
RE: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc
I was missing the the terminology and the differentiation between 'Deanster' and 'DeanSpace'. Independent of the terminology, I believe it is crucial for any sort of online community building tool to facilitate interaction between the users above and beyond merely listing information. I am concerned from what I am hearing, that such functionality seems to be missing from 'Deanster' and I feel that needs to be addressed. It may be that it is best addressed by avoiding too strong a bifurcation between 'Deanster' and 'DeanSpace'. The question arises how do you establish an impression of other people in the network, how is reputation established, maintained and communicated to others? These, of course, being fundamental building blocks to cohesion which is crucial to people working effectively together. Aldon P.S. Personally, I think the Friendster UI sucks. -Original Message- From: Joshua Koenig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 5:43 PM To: Aldon Hynes Cc: Zephyr Teachout; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc Aldon, I think you're missing part of the picture here. DeanSpace (e.g. volunteer effort, community websites, blogs, etc) and the Deanster application (hosted and operated by the campaign directly) are logically separate. Deanster wouldn't include blogs for users, though it could include a guestbook ala Ryze. Personally, I think there are lessons to be learned from both of these systems. Friendster has a vastly superior user interface to Ryze, but Ryze allows people to join groups of interest in addition to having a network of friends. Your Deanster profile could of course include links back to your blog or personal website. What we're talking about in terms of user content is giving people quick, focused opportunities to offer their opinion or explain what interests them about Dean or what they're working on accomplishing. We actually want to take this a step further in terms of adding xpertweb functionality so that people can use the Deanster network to get things done. Hope that helps -josh p.s. It won't be called Deanster, by the way, but it makes a good codename for now. Well, I'm trying to catch up on everything that happened over the weekend while I was off at the folk music festival. So, I'm sorry if I'm covering things that have already been covered, but I would like to throw in my two cents here. Zephyr, I respectfully disagree with you on the importance of public expression in whatever sort of space is created. The public expression is crucial in establishing a sense of a cohesive community and in facilitating different people in connecting. Let me illustrate: On Friendster, I am connected to 157232 people in my Personal Network, through 17 friends. However, friendster doesn't facilitate communicating with others in a manner that develops community. As such, I haven't made any useful new contacts. On the other hand, communities like www.ryze.com and www.ecademy.com do a much better job of promoting community through things like blogging. So, I strongly encourage facilities to promote blogging. Granted, there are other venues, including posting comments on the official blog, having your own blogs, etc., but I believe having blogs, forums, or similar tools as part of Deanspace will make it much more effective. Zephyr raises the issue of moderation. DFA doesn't have the staff to vet who posts or what posts remain if we have a giant network of people posting. However, following the paradigm of self organizing systems, and the example of DMOZ, I don't believe that is important. Every site that gets set up will have its administrators and/or moderators. This is no different than the close to 400 mailing lists that have already been set up. These moderators can be as controlling or free flowing as they feel comfortable with and fits their particular community. Part of the beauty of a truly distributed system like this, is that I can (or should be able to), as moderator of one system decide what content I pick up from other systems. This provides a natural feedback system. Those sites that develop a good sense of community through an appropriate level of moderation will end up producing more valuable content, which will get more widely distributed. So, that's my two cents on the role of blogs, content, moderation and community building within DeanSpace. Comments? Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Zephyr Teachout Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 1:53 PM To: 'Joshua Koenig'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc This is fantastic. Thanks Josh! I believe that if we get this up and running, over 500,000 people will use it. I do -- over 1,000,000 on friendster, and they aren't trying to change the world :) The single biggest request we get from folks
RE: [hackers] Site name considerations...
Well, I've been off at a folk music festival all weekend. (It was a great time. I'll write more about it later at http://aldon.livejournal.com), so I'm just starting to catch up on the flood of emails. I have to say, Kurt's Map is VERY COOL! I look forward to other neat stuff with it. Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Kurt Cagle Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 5:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [hackers] Site name considerations... Speaking of maps - I've been working on a quick sample map with interactivity associated with it. You'll need to download the Adobe SVG plugin (http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html) (I'll set it up later so that this could be done automatically), and then open up from my own site: http://www.metaphoricalweb.com/usaMap.svg When I'm done with it, you'll be able to upload any information into the map -- Meetup members, dollars received per state, population figures, listings of events by state, and so forth. Let me know what you thin. -- Kurt -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Shannon Little Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 11:36 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [hackers] Site name considerations... It's a good idea to be forward thinking regarding how the name is going to sound and look when referred to on the site and by potential members. This is part of the reason I really like Dean Country. The site could have a nice flash into saying something like Now entering Dean Country and a welcome message: Welcome to Dean Country , A Dean Country Map that could be visual with an image of the US where people could click on their state to find local sites. These are just a few ideas that would fit nicely into a site theme using deancountry.
RE: [hackers] Fwd: User account details for joshk at Indiana for Dean
And Ryze... Who else is on Ryze? I'm ahynes1 there. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Joshua Koenig Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 7:02 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [hackers] Fwd: User account details for joshk at Indiana for Dean snip We then want to implement a mothership node which can track all the multivariate RSS feeds which are produced and be a go-to source for people looking for information on Dean, or who want to get a birds-eye view of what's going on in the Dean online universe. Think Technorati, but specifically tailored for the Dean web. We also want to implement (in close coordination with the campaign) a centralized site to organize active volunteers in a social network ala Friendster or Ryze. snip
[hackers] And now for something completely different...
I'ld like to thank everyone for their work on different themes. I've loaded Dean01 and bluesky into my sandbox, along with my own theme. Feel free to come by and compare the three themes with somewhat live data. I've also set up a poll, http://ahynes1.homeip.net:8180/drupal/index.php?q=node/view/20 in my sandbox. It's purpose is to get a better view of the age distribution of Dean supporters. If you haven't voted, please do and encourage others to do so. Yesterday, I ended up in a chat using a web-irc tool that indianafordean has up. It turns out that indianafordean is using Drupal. You should check out there site at http://indianafordean.org/ and check out their chat at http://indianafordean.org/chat I mentioned Hack4Dean a bit with them in my discussions yesterday. I got the impression that they are watching from a distance. Hopefully we can help them and they can learn from us. As a final note, I will be around this evening, but I am leaving early tomorrow morning for Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, where we will be listening to some good music, and doing some flyering/tabling (depending on how things work out). Because of this, I shall be unavailable for the next several days. Aldon
RE: [hackers] node hosting
Should this go into the Wikki? Should we set up a Wikki page with lists current possible hosting sites? Aldon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of jim sloan Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 8:15 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] node hosting I said it was taking too much energy not wasting it - my point was not to drop it. I suggest that a working group should investigate and define the legal parameters that would apply to any group that would want to provide web presence to a grass roots political campaign. In turn that information can be used by the h4d group to advise groups that want to host it themselves and it will also define how h4d could offer a hosting service for groups that need to leap that technical hurdle with some help. regards jim - Original Message - From: CMR [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 6:15 PM Subject: Re: [hackers] node hosting I've been following this for most of today and I am concerned that this bifurcation is taking too much energy. What I think needs to happen is that the legal issues need to be spelled out for anyone that would want to host a site (regardless of candidate). This information can be used by any interested party to host whatever they want. I don't think that hosting is a problem for the h4d project. But if we have the information that relates to the above then we can help the grass root nodes avoid problems. It would then assist the h4d group in answering these questions from parties interested in using the h4d branded Drupal. If I'm correct, the issue of our hosting turn key solutions was never settled one way or another. Zach revived that topic for discussion with his message this AM. This list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is, at least in part, for discussing issues of project wide scope, both present and future, and discussing project mission. Also, if I am correct, the developers list was created for immediate development issues just so those who didn't want to receive non-directly development related issue related posts don't have to. Whether or not the turn key idea is a waste of energy or not, my offer was to help out if the eventual consensus was that we wanted to offer that feature. I'm fine with it if we decide against that, but I think we ought to be allowed to discuss the merits of the idea, if any, in order to reach that consensus. Thanks CMR --enter gratuitous quotation that implies my profundity here--
RE: [hackers] Names and Domains
There is not a $250 personal max. If you spend more than $250 of your own money on a campaign, independent of the official campaign, there is a special form you need to file with the FEC. Essentially, from what I have read, it boils down to three categories. 1) Official donations. This what gets contributed to Burlington. There is a limit of $2000/individual in the primary. You will be able to contribute another $2000 in the general election. 2) PAC Donations. This is to organizations that are working on behalf of specific issues. I don't know all the details on PAC donations, but if you get together with a bunch of friends and do more than $250 together on something, you may need to register as a PAC. 3) Individual expeditures. This has been discussed a bit over on the DeanMeetupHelp mailing list, which has a bunch of lawyers on it answering campaign finance questions (with the general disclaimer that it is for general guidance only etc) From their FAQ comes the following information: QUESTION 3: If an individual or an X for Dean group makes an independent expenditure (paying for a public communication that expressly advocates election of Dean or defeat of Bush or other candidates) then is there a requirement to make an FEC report? ANSWER: Expenditures that total less than $250 during a calendar year can be made without requiring a report. If the expenditures of an individual or group exceed $250 then an independent expenditure report (FEC Form 5) must be filed with the FEC. Any individual who has contributed more than than $200 in support of another individual or group's independent expenditure must be identified within the FEC Form 5. (See 2 U.S.C. ~ 434(c)(1), (c)(2)(C); 11 CFR 109.10(b), (e)(1)(vi)). Example 1: Volunteer Jane spends $250 for Dean for President posters. Because the total does not exceed $250, no report is required. Example 2: After spending $250 for Dean for President posters in June, Jane pays $100 for Defeat Bush posters in December. Because the calendar year total exceeds $250, Jane must file FEC Form 5. Example 3: Same facts as Example 2, except Bill gives Jane $225 in August to support Jane's poster efforts. Jane must fill out FEC form 5 since the $250 limit has been exceeded and Jane must identify Bill in the FEC Form 5 because Bill's contribution exceeds $200. and QUESTION 12: If in supporting Dean a volunteer uses his or own personal property, such as a home computer, software, e-mail account or fax machine, all previously acquired for purposes other than this campaign, is the volunteer making either an in-kind contribution to the Dean committee or an independent expenditure? ANSWER: A volunteer's use at home of his or her personal equipment, software, Internet access, e-mail accounts, etc. is covered by a home use exception. These activities are not in-kind contributions or independent expenditures. A volunteer's costs to register a domain name for a home-run website to support Dean is covered by this exception, as is a volunteer's downloading and use of Dean committee materials, even when the Dean committee gives the volunteer permission to do so. (See FEC Advisory Opinion No. 1999-17-- issued to none other than the Governor George W. Bush for President Exploratory Committee, Inc.!) There is a lot more to this subject and I would be willing to talk to whomever on more details if necessary. Aldon
