Need programmer able to code new kind of forum

[GunnyFreedom]

Another thought/idea. As to the general navigation I am a member of a site for online police scanners that has an amazing way set-up to drill down from a national, state, to county levels. This could maybe be a basis for some of this project. check it out and you can drill around some to get a feel for it.

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/

They also do have a forum and other things that may work to our likings.

One part which is a database using a similar drill down method, one difference is that the color code for updates which could be good for showing what areas have active "legislation/projects" and what level they are at?

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/

Like the format, tho if this is done the way it should be, geog should be mostly invisible. you are already in your geog by virtue of your user registration.

Like the idea of notices for pending legislation too. ppl can weigh in in time for the vote to take place.

by the way, I offered this idea to C4L and was promptly ignored.

 

[newbitech]

first thing is the forum just a temp one while this evoles or will the login be kept over?

Reason i ask is I think rather then just nicknames we should have a format for the goin names that is something like First_LastIntial_State or something like that?

well yeah, the forum is a development forum. really only people who know each other and working on the project ideas will post there.

I agree, real names should be used on the site. We'll get to security, validation, authentication later down the road.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

gotcha, I figure to model maybe 2 cases, like yours obviously and probably mine.

so now the question comes down to what is called granularity. For example, does each precinct need its own space?

Consider each space has its own forum, voting, rules, governing documents, etc etc..

I think it should.

So in my case I am looking at

http://www.231-hillsborough-fl.self-government.us/forum

as the link to where people in my precinct are posting discussions and topics about whatever..

Withing that particular subdomain "231-hillsborough-fl" I could have containers for all the different types of structures that particular precinct is attached to. For instance..

h ttp://www.231-hillsborough-fl.self-government.us/us-congress-11
h ttp://www.231-hillsborough-fl.self-government.us/fl-sentate-18
h ttp://www.231-hillsborough-fl.self-government.us/fl-house-58

here is a lookup function I used to find the details of the structures that my voting precinct is attached to.

http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Secti...alDistrictID=11&LAT=27.985757&LONG=-82.459824

incidentally, I just noticed that district 58 house is vacant and up for special election.

Hmmmmm.......

I would think that top-level domains might be best served as where people will naturally identify themselves. That is county or state. Otherwise you have way way too many TLD's to admin.

Thus my area would be:

h ttp://franklin-nc.self-government.us/19-westyoungsville2/

or even better

h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/

 

[newbitech]

Another thought/idea. As to the general navigation I am a member of a site for online police scanners that has an amazing way set-up to drill down from a national, state, to county levels. This could maybe be a basis for some of this project. check it out and you can drill around some to get a feel for it.

[url]http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/[/URL]

They also do have a forum and other things that may work to our likings.

One part which is a database using a similar drill down method, one difference is that the color code for updates which could be good for showing what areas have active "legislation/projects" and what level they are at?

[url]http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/[/URL]

excellent organizational model.

 

[UtahApocalypse]

I would think that top-level domains might be best served as where people will naturally identify themselves. That is county or state. Otherwise you have way way too many TLD's to admin.

Thus my area would be:

h ttp://franklin-nc.self-government.us/19-westyoungsville2/

or even better

h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/

I think the second option is more manageable.

As to my links before, the reason im thinking of being able to go up to state, and national is so you can have larger regional and nationwide type of projects at times as well.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

for the most part, state house state senate, us Congress ets membership is determined by precinct, with a very few exceptions of split precincts.

Oh and if we had a liberty candidate running for that house seat that would be most spectacular ;-)

 

[GunnyFreedom]

I think the second option is more manageable.

As to my links before, the reason im thinking of being able to go up to state, and national is so you can have larger regional and nationwide type of projects at times as well.

I agree. What I was thinking is that if I am in precinct #19, West Youngsville; then I am necessarily in Congressional District 2, and necessarily in North Carolina. I don't really need to browse around CD12 or Virginia, except maybe to read the "floor statements" produced by the general caucus. So yeah, the structure you pointed to would be great for looking at what others have produced as their "final say."

Now we still need to work the logic for the process as it splits between say state and county. the "floor" should be able to browse up from precinct to county to district to state while keeping the same topic in view.

 

[newbitech]

I would think that top-level domains might be best served as where people will naturally identify themselves. That is county or state. Otherwise you have way way too many TLD's to admin.

Thus my area would be:

h ttp://franklin-nc.self-government.us/19-westyoungsville2/

or even better

h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/

ok lets talk about this for a minute.

we want the structure to be grassroots up right? So I am not going to be the admin for the entire thing. I envision admins for each precinct.

Sure in the start up, it would appear that the granularity is too fine for one person or even several to admin. However, if we model based on the idea that each precinct will go ahead and register their own TLD such as

h ttp://www.231-hillsborough-fl.us

then we can leave it up to the precinct to decide which TLD their people will best identify with.

What I am trying to avoid is nesting folders as to your example like such

h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/forum
h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/documents

this is because the code that we'll need to use to glue the site together is going to need a uniform way to determine locations of files.

Not that it would be hard to build the code to take into account all the potential paths to the collaborative wiki app, but IMO it would introduce a layer of complication that could be avoided without compromising the usability in terms of people identifying with the TLD structure.

Does that make sense?

edit: and by the way, in your example it doesn't really change the need to administer all those different folders.

essentially, all a subdomain is, is a folder under the root of the TLD with DNS changes that tell the web server to serve URLs to that particular folder.

pretty much web hosting semantics LOL!

 

[UtahApocalypse]

I agree. What I was thinking is that if I am in precinct #19, West Youngsville; then I am necessarily in Congressional District 2, and necessarily in North Carolina. I don't really need to browse around CD12 or Virginia, except maybe to read the "floor statements" produced by the general caucus. So yeah, the structure you pointed to would be great for looking at what others have produced as their "final say."

Now we still need to work the logic for the process as it splits between say state and county. the "floor" should be able to browse up from precinct to county to district to state while keeping the same topic in view.

Agreed, another good point is by keeping the "floor" transparent to all you may browse and find something in a complete different area that may work in yours and be able to bring it to your group as well rather then everyone reinventing the wheel.

 

[UtahApocalypse]

ok lets talk about this for a minute.

we want the structure to be grassroots up right? So I am not going to be the admin for the entire thing. I envision admins for each precinct.

Sure in the start up, it would appear that the granularity is too fine for one person or even several to admin. However, if we model based on the idea that each precinct will go ahead and register their own TLD such as

h ttp://www.231-hillsborough-fl.us

then we can leave it up to the precinct to decide which TLD their people will best identify with.

What I am trying to avoid is nesting folders as to your example like such

h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/forum
h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/documents

this is because the code that we'll need to use to glue the site together is going to need a uniform way to determine locations of files.

Not that it would be hard to build the code to take into account all the potential paths to the collaborative wiki app, but IMO it would introduce a layer of complication that could be avoided without compromising the usability in terms of people identifying with the TLD structure.

Does that make sense?

Yes, I think we need to for a list from National>>State>>County etc and then figure out the happy medium. We dont want it to be the lowest as it creates way to many TLD's to manage, and we also dont want it too high as it creates to much centralization.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

ok lets talk about this for a minute.

we want the structure to be grassroots up right? So I am not going to be the admin for the entire thing. I envision admins for each precinct.

Sure in the start up, it would appear that the granularity is too fine for one person or even several to admin. However, if we model based on the idea that each precinct will go ahead and register their own TLD such as

h ttp://www.231-hillsborough-fl.us

then we can leave it up to the precinct to decide which TLD their people will best identify with.

What I am trying to avoid is nesting folders as to your example like such

h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/forum
h ttp://nc.self-government.us/franklin/19-westyoungsville2/documents

this is because the code that we'll need to use to glue the site together is going to need a uniform way to determine locations of files.

Not that it would be hard to build the code to take into account all the potential paths to the collaborative wiki app, but IMO it would introduce a layer of complication that could be avoided without compromising the usability in terms of people identifying with the TLD structure.

Does that make sense?

It does. Certainly as it stands internet use and expertise is not widespread enough to place a server into each district. Honestly it is hard enough just getting a do-almost-nothing precinct chair into every precinct. Perhaps the same thing but on a county-by-county basis?

So Franklin county has a top-level like

h ttp://www.franklinnc-caucus.us/

then you can use subdomains for precinct:

h ttp://19-westyoungsville2.franklinnc-caucus.us/

of which there are only 18 in this county. only one server/admin per county. Will be a lot easier to get an admin per county than per precinct.

That way you can keep one admin per county, and still have your precincts as a subdomain, in order to standardize your uri paths.

 

[Chester Copperpot]

ok folks, I have been drafting some stuff together for a while now, and I have what I believe is a blisteringly hot idea for grassroots > org > party > officeholder communication and interaction.

The ROUGH idea is to model the convention process into cyberspace, and create a cyclic flow of information towards the ultimate goal of developing a consensus of constituents within a given precinct/county/district.

I already have a great deal of the logic process worked, but have no real coding skill.

I intend to run for NC CD 2 GOP chair, and would like to debut the convention/forum for my CD during my run for that position. Once that project climbs out of beta, then, it can be made availabe to ALL C4L district coordinators as a tool to provide their district chair, should that chair or congress critter be one of our guys.

Please let me know if you would like to help with this project. I have much more detail, but am on my phone, and cannot type out a whole novel

So let me know if you find such a project interesting, and we'll hammer out some details.

If your site is going to run off an old Atari 800XL... then Im your man.. I can program a mean Atari 8-Bit..

 

[GunnyFreedom]

If your site is going to run off an old Atari 800XL... then Im your man.. I can program a mean Atari 8-Bit..

LOL Outstanding!

Well the logic is the logic, regardless of the programming language or the syntax. Half the battle here will be laying out the basic logic.

 

[newbitech]

Yes, I think we need to for a list from National>>State>>County etc and then figure out the happy medium. We dont want it to be the lowest as it creates way to many TLD's to manage, and we also dont want it too high as it creates to much centralization.

right but what makes it a TLD is the .us

there is only one TLD and that is

http://self-government.us/

Everything else is just folders under that. As far as the structure itself, we are going to have to teach

http://self-government.us/

all of the different objects and relationships between those objects. The applications we are running need to know about the following self-governing objects:


All States
All Counties
All Precincts
All Congressional Districts
All State House Districts
All State Senate Districts

Once we teach

http://self-government.us/

about these objects, we will need to teach it about the relationships between those objects.

Each of these objects will also have files that are specific to that object. That means all of these objects need a specific place to store those files.

Now think about the management of the different precincts.

I will encourage you to create a website for your precinct and plug in to self-government.us

self-government.us will handle all of the crunching of data, and your precinct admin will handle the appearance of the data as well as the User Interface and the site friendlyness of the presentation of that data.

If your precinct has not yet decided on who is going to handle the admin duties, then a basic interface can be made available by navigating to your precincts sub-domain within the structure of self-government.us

I hope this makes some sense.

We have plenty of latitude in modifying the original app that we will be creating, but we should be careful IMO not to lock our audience into the expectation that WE are going to be in charge of the whole thing. Just in charge of the app that glues it all together.

Am I making sense?

 

[newbitech]

It does. Certainly as it stands internet use and expertise is not widespread enough to place a server into each district. Honestly it is hard enough just getting a do-almost-nothing precinct chair into every precinct. Perhaps the same thing but on a county-by-county basis?

So Franklin county has a top-level like

h ttp://www.franklinnc-caucus.us/

then you can use subdomains for precinct:

h ttp://19-westyoungsville2.franklinnc-caucus.us/

of which there are only 18 in this county. only one server/admin per county. Will be a lot easier to get an admin per county than per precinct.

That way you can keep one admin per county, and still have your precincts as a subdomain, in order to standardize your uri paths.

yes, I agree, but in the end don't we leave that up to the precincts to decide?

So obviously in the start up phase, we are going to have a model of a precinct that has its shit together.

There will be an admin for that precinct and maybe even a domain registered because the people in the precinct have decided who is going to represent them in that way.

In the future, as more precincts are added, the people in that precinct can decide to plug in through their own portal.

And of course, if several precincts in a particular county decide that it is better to administer their portal on a county level, they can certainly form a consensus to do that as well.

I am completely open to modeling the application in any way, but I'd have to start with the principle that whatever model we create has the ability to be run at every level of granularity.

Even down to the individual. So if you wanted to create a website for yourself called

h ttp://gunnyfreedom.com

you'd be able to plug in directly to

h ttp://self-government.us (oops)

and teach the application about your candidacy, your campaign platform, etc etc..

see where I am going with this?

 

[GunnyFreedom]

yes, I agree, but in the end don't we leave that up to the precincts to decide?

So obviously in the start up phase, we are going to have a model of a precinct that has its shit together.

There will be an admin for that precinct and maybe even a domain registered because the people in the precinct have decided who is going to represent them in that way.

In the future, as more precincts are added, the people in that precinct can decide to plug in through their own portal.

And of course, if several precincts in a particular county decide that it is better to administer their portal on a county level, they can certainly form a consensus to do that as well.

I am completely open to modeling the application in any way, but I'd have to start with the principle that whatever model we create has the ability to be run at ever level of granularity.

Even down to the individual. So if you wanted to create a website for yourself called

h ttp://gunnyfreedom.com

you'd be able to plug in directly to

h ttp://self-government.com

and teach the application about your candidacy, your campaign platform, etc etc..

see where I am going with this?

Yeah, it's basically franchising the model open-source so that anybody can replicate the model.

The reason I was leaning towards the counties for admin, is not because I'd want to take the admin out of the precinct level if they wanted it, it's just that I know from experience that for the most part, the lowest level this will be admin'd at will be the county.

The administration of a server isn't going to have a lot of influence on the outcome. It will only matter that the admin can be trusted as a neutral party.

I know from experience that organizing a precinct is a dubious prospect at best.

On the other hand, this folds directly into another idea of mine for using this system on a community level....even smaller than precinct....and using a network supercomputer model (like SETI at home) to create a central virtual computer interface on a community by community basis.

 

[newbitech]

regarding the collaborative documents and the actual voting itself,

I am under the impression that the precincts are currently governed by rules at the county level. In some cases there is also the city level and maybe even the neighborhood level.

I see this as the grassroots heirarchy

individual
precinct (neighborhoods)
city
county
state
country

This lets us model for a myriad of different types of votes, forums, documents, representation, etc etc.

Side note, for whatever reason, it helps me to think of top down organization structures where the top is the most fine grained and the bottom is the most compressed or densely packed.

Thinking of organization structure this way makes the country the foundation rather than the individual. But in terms of self-government, I think thinking of individual as being at the top of the food chain.

Kind of interesting to think about the hierarchy in different ways. I think that will be important for modeling relationships later on.

 

[UtahApocalypse]

Can we get a mod to move this out from the archive over to Grassroots since were dusting the cobwebs off of it?

 

[MsDoodahs]

done.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

Now that the actual heart of the concept has hit at least two more people, I'm gonna let it fester in your minds for a day or two (and only a day or two) before revisiting it, since that seems to be (in my experience) the best way to make it bear fruit.

I'm not walking away, just letting it take root. That way the vision will be more fully-formed and more importantly, unique to you, before we go back to the mashup of coming to a common understanding of the concept.