I'm Taking Charge. Ideas for the New Site

[dreicher]

I think this is a great method to generating income for ron paul, might look through this thread for inspiration....

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=101030

This isn't about fundraising, specifically. Everybody has 100 different fundraising ideas. There is no mechanism in place to qualify them, score them, market them and coordinate the efforts of a disconnected group.

You have to remember the day you "discovered" Ron Paul. Your immediate thoughts were "this is fantastic! what can I do?". Meetup groups are not for everybody. Some people want to be passive supporters. Others want to go full-hog. You need to be able to keep the "die hards" energized and focus and move the "passives" through a process of becoming "die hards". Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

With our abilities - we can begin to model that online, creating a "virtual political party" and gradually building that into a physical manifestation of the same.

 

[Rhys]

seriously, every single feature you mentioned is in the opensource http://www.tikiwiki.org

it has Wikis (like Mediawiki)
Forums (like phpBB)
Blogs (like WordPress)
Articles (like Digg)
Image Gallery (like Flickr)
Map Server (like Google Maps)
Link Directory (like DMOZ)
Translation and i18n (like Babel Fish)
Bug tracker (like Bugzilla)
Free (LGPL)

and it's open source

either that, or we should use Microsoft Silverlight and .NET

 

[LandonCook]

This isn't about fundraising, specifically. Everybody has 100 different fundraising ideas. There is no mechanism in place to qualify them, score them, market them and coordinate the efforts of a disconnected group.

You have to remember the day you "discovered" Ron Paul. Your immediate thoughts were "this is fantastic! what can I do?". Meetup groups are not for everybody. Some people want to be passive supporters. Others want to go full-hog. You need to be able to keep the "die hards" energized and focus and move the "passives" through a process of becoming "die hards". Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

With our abilities - we can begin to model that online, creating a "virtual political party" and gradually building that into a physical manifestation of the same.

Wow, I couldn't of said that better myself... lol, good job...

 

[DFF]

Meetup groups are not for everybody. Some people want to be passive supporters

I fall into this category. I've never been to a meetup group -- but I've donated repeatedly and told everyone I know - and sometimes strangers - about Ron Paul.

 

[LandonCook]

seriously, every single feature you mentioned is in the opensource http://www.tikiwiki.org

it has Wikis (like Mediawiki)
Forums (like phpBB)
Blogs (like WordPress)
Articles (like Digg)
Image Gallery (like Flickr)
Map Server (like Google Maps)
Link Directory (like DMOZ)
Translation and i18n (like Babel Fish)
Bug tracker (like Bugzilla)
Free (LGPL)

and it's open source

either that, or we should use Microsoft Silverlight and .NET

All of these are good sites but we cant use them the way we need to use them.

 

[newyearsrevolution08]

I take it you didn't read it then....

We have a headquarters ITS RIGHT HERE.
We need an idea - I gave you the link and they are doing it

Why would we need to take the time, qualifying, scoring instead of just getting money to ron paul?

I know we need to get the passive and die hards together. Everyone should be in a meetup group and have a solid local base one way or the other whether passive or not. Die hards should be precinct captains already and have a few passive and newbie recruits so to speak and they can of course show them the ropes both with donations and with local canvassing.

I see your point and understand it but remember we need to implement it and get it active. I just see this place as a main hot spot for rp supports and maybe if we just had a "sub forum" for this and just gave someone mod status to it. We can put a poll up about the different things to vote on if needed and then people will know which thing we will ALL go after.

I know the idea is great but there are always more sides then one......

This isn't about fundraising, specifically. Everybody has 100 different fundraising ideas. There is no mechanism in place to qualify them, score them, market them and coordinate the efforts of a disconnected group.

You have to remember the day you "discovered" Ron Paul. Your immediate thoughts were "this is fantastic! what can I do?". Meetup groups are not for everybody. Some people want to be passive supporters. Others want to go full-hog. You need to be able to keep the "die hards" energized and focus and move the "passives" through a process of becoming "die hards". Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

With our abilities - we can begin to model that online, creating a "virtual political party" and gradually building that into a physical manifestation of the same.

 

[Rhys]

All of these are good sites but we cant use them the way we need to use them.

don't see why not. it's all integrated.

Tiki is free, opensource software, licensed as LGPL. The project's philosphy is detailed in our social contract.
Tiki has all the features you want — wiki, news articles, blogs, polls, forums, trackers (database), image and file galleries, and much more — in a tightly bundled system.
Tiki has fine-grained user and group permissions. This allows you to easily give users access to exactly what they need.
Because Tiki uses a powerful templating engine (Smarty) you can easily customize a Tiki site to make it your own. Tiki's Site Identity and Theme Control features make it easy.
Tiki use of database abstraction (ADOdb) enables compatibility with many environments, including MySQL.
The Tiki project partners with Open Source Software actors. We leverage existing technologies and partner with field leaders whenever possible.
As a leading CMS application, Tiki has been nominated for, and received, several awards by the software community.
Tiki's active community includes nearly 300 developers and contributors to the code base and more than 12,000 registered users.
There is continuing, active development. On average, developers update the code (with new features and fixes) every two hours.
The official Tiki documentation, maintained by the Tiki community) contains more than 1,500 wiki pages and includes a fully illustrated PDF.

 

[newyearsrevolution08]

Either way, I hope you get it going and it works out. I am not trying to argue a point just trying to point out the obvious but it doesn't seem to sink in. I hope it does get built, setup and works out amazingly.

nuff said on my part and cant wait to check it out!

 

[JoBurke]

That is sick! do it!!!

 

[LandonCook]

Well Rhys, you can join the team if you want or think you can do something, we will get this all worked our once we get enough team members.

 

[Mckarnin]

Awesome idea!

 

[Kotin]

awesome!

 

[dreicher]

I think there is probably a small disconnect between what is being proposed and what is being discussed...

I'll take a look at TikiWiki; however, I'm not sure LGPL is in our best interest here. There may be legal implications and depending on the level of extending this to fit the particular needs of organizing a political movement - I'm not entirely sure that I would want that to be available for "anyone" to co-opt for any purpose they choose. (I wanted to clarify this is my opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect that of Landon - the organizer. Just weighing in with my $.02)

Regarding getting the money to RP. My point was there are a great many ways to get money to the campaign if that is your goal. It is very necessary. However, the entire campaign is being carried on the shoulders of a relative few supporters. We need NEW money to continue to grow and support RP (and beyond).

Think of a church. You essentially have three "groups" of people. Seekers, believers and fanatics. Seekers may give something out of compulsion or simply because the amount they give is inconsequential to them. Believers will give out of a sense of belonging and support, but it will be out of their discretionary budget. Fanatics will pay the government, then the church and then their bills - in that order.

Obviously, the largest group is the seekers - so you've got a large group of people that will give you a chance to court them and little else. Believers will be your largest money source simply because they are so much bigger than fanatics. The "trick" is to devise a winning strategy for taking a seeker and making them a believer and taking believers and making them fanatics.

If you've ever made a post on this forum you are at the very least a "believer". And, just like a church setting (and to be rather frank) fanatics scare the hell out of believers and believers scare the hell out of seekers - so you have some forces working contrarily to overcome.

We need a mechanism for making that happen with RP's campaign (and beyond). I believe it can be "modeled" successfully online to get rapid short-term growth, but at some point would need to be realized in actuality to make any impact on policy.

Consider these additional points...

We talk about how HQ has too many people on the payroll, but where is the grassroots method for opposition research? If you're familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, think of a system where (for instance) believers could methodically divvy up John McCain's speeches of the last 15 years looking for areas where he was completely wrong on economic matters. Instead of half-a-dozen fanatics reading all the same stuff in redundancy, we can give a larger group a smaller share and pull the information together centrally.

The reason for qualifying and scoring an idea is so that there can be a concerted marketing effort to go with any initiative. A large percentage of reporters will simply copy-paste a press release into a story. PR-minded guys can take an initiative and with enough notice get good press (say what you want about the $ amount, but I believe a large part of the money bomb "story" was the personal story re: Trevor).

There are areas that a disconnected grassroots is beneficial and should be left to its own devices. There are, however, many areas where a more centralized resource is beneficial.

 

[LandonCook]

The trick is getting it all in and maintaining balance.

 

[defcreative]

Anyone with technical expertise please join up on the project.

We can have more than one doing the same thing, please join up if you can do something!

Make sure you send me your name, skill, and contact info.
After I get a number of you on the project I will set all of us up to work together.


I will post those on the Project here:



Landon Walsh(cook) - Organizer

dreicher - Software Engineer / Web Design / Graphic Design

gyrmnix - software development / Server space (thankyou!)


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Already on this project, set to launch within a week or so.

TheBonFire.com - Grassroots Organizational Project.

 

[LandonCook]

Already on this project, set to launch within a week or so.

TheBonFire.com - Grassroots Organizational Project.

Are you working on this on your own?

 

[defcreative]

Are you working on this on your own?

Yep, I've been at it for a little while.

I've got a lot of web development and programming experience with PHP, AJAX, Javascript, CSS, MySQL, etc.

I'm actually programming the google maps API application as we speak.

 

[LandonCook]

Yep, I've been at it for a little while.

I've got a lot of web development and programming experience with PHP, AJAX, Javascript, CSS, MySQL, etc.

I'm actually programming the google maps API application as we speak.

Good, but have you seen the huck's user interface... I want that! It is top noch http://www.hucksarmy.com/


and can you show a picture of what your working with... I'm good in marketing and design and would love to help out. Can you take constructive criticism?

 

[defcreative]

It looks as though great minds think alike huh?

I took a look at TikiWiki right now and it is interesting as well, but I'm not so sure it is worth using that versus my original plan which was to pretty much integrate separate components (blog, vbulletin, RSS Ron Paul Forums ticker, and of course the custom News article / Activity planning code based around google map's API with article/activity rating ala Digg.

 

[Rhys]

It looks as though great minds think alike huh?

I took a look at TikiWiki right now and it is interesting as well, but I'm not so sure it is worth using that versus my original plan which was to pretty much integrate separate components (blog, vbulletin, RSS Ron Paul Forums ticker, and of course the custom News article / Activity planning code based around google map's API with article/activity rating ala Digg.

that sounds real cool. i don't want to sound like i need a room with tiki, but it has a map server and I don't think it would be hard to link the other features to it. Digg, rss, blogs, forums... seriously everything including member profiles i think would be easy.

it really depends on how far along you are