Call and raise: let’s make it a facebook app and put 10K in scholarship money behind it for the winner.

After adamantly refusing to participate in any form of “social networking”, mainly because I’m a grumpy old guy and it seemed silly, I caved about 3 weeks ago and I’m not a twitter person.

However, I’m not a mobile twitterer - maybe in the future. But, I can see the advantages of it in the future, and we really should try to get folks like me into it and proficient by the next election.

Now it’s good for generally sharing information and engaging in some debates. In the end game of an election, it’s value can increase. Imagine a church’s prayer tree. One person calls two, and so forth. Now think how that prayer tree could work with all the prayer tree people on twitter. Same with it’s usefulness at election time with all of us connected on twitter. Rally at; plea for volunteers; asking for campaign contributions; reminders of registration deadlines; don’t forget to vote; GOTV prompts. All much faster and efficient than phone calls and emails - I would imagine.

So, hope we all can find the time and inclination to try to integrate the twitter craze into our political lives. I think it could really make a difference.

@slugger41

Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder – Michael Savage

So… I don’t think 95 is the problem. Any place that isn’t a lefty echo chamber like DC for structural reasons like the ones identified above would be a perfectly fine place to do what you’re talking about. Delaware has no state tax and no sales tax. It is close to DC and structurally favors free marketers like us.

Fantasy Politics — figure out some kind of way to make a highly involving game out of following politics the same way that fantasy baseball makes a game out of following the baseball box scores.

Political and Statesmanship Box Scores — develop the best way of scoring politics in a box, so the format can get picked up by big media. Make it favor conservatives by emphasizing long term solutions and results instead of the horse race. Include national, all states, and the ten biggest cities. Needs overnight, weekly, monthly, and annual reports with five, ten, twenty, and fifty year sliding rollups.

Email->Fax — it isn’t fair but media and politicians value faxes more than emails. Have some publicized way for conservatives to turn emails and online petitions into faxes for politicians to carry onto the floor of congress. Also useful for states, not just national matters.

Conservative Phone Banks — In the Amnesty battle conservatives had to call in and subvert phone banks that the pro-Amnesty crowd set up to create the impression that the grass roots were in favor of amnesty for illegal immigration.

Make Issues of Fiscal Conservatism — Ballot issues for social conservative positions against gay marriage and flag burning are all well and good. They bring out the socons and so on. How about starting some populist drives for fiscally conservative positions like a big set of anti-tax and anti-spending proposals on the 2009 and 2010 ballots?

Solicit Participation by friendly foreigners — Red State and other conservative sites are primarily for American citizens. There are a lot of people all over the world who love America for the very same conservative principles we love it for. We need to break the media stereotype that all foreigners want the US to be more socialist, more like the EU.

Have we identified the problems we want to solve? I identified one: we’re flying blind without good micro-targeting, voter ID, and decision support. There are others mentioned, such as demographic-centric adaptation of technology. I for one am not prepared to just accept that we’ve lost 18-25. What do we do to capture some of this audience? Frankly, we should be going lower - targeting our efforts at high school aged voters eligible in 2012. True, our activist demographic is different today, but how do we change that? Those are the questions I’m interested in.

So I see a lot of “business” problems already identified from an architect’s perspective. It seems that we just need to crystallize the list and get to work on a functional specification.

is PRECISELY where the discussion needs to begin. Dead, spot on. Those are the questions I am interested in as well.

Post ideas here on RS with the category Whiteboard and once a week or so, “Recommend This” to the ones we like and want to see passed on up the foodchain.

Just a thought.

As a user, I have to ask myself, “What do I need?”

I need the SMS capability, to be notified when local legislators need to be called on pressing issues for example. Politicians panic when the phones flood and I’ve seen it make a difference in California, as recently when Gov. Ah-nold was possibly swayed from signing a notoriously bad and possibly illegal tax increase. Temporarily I’m sure, but I don’t doubt he was swayed by phones ringing. The call to action was from a local radio station, but it could just as easily have been statewide with an effective “Reverse 911” type of campaign.

Good times.

You don’t even need that much money to get a good site started. So many have built huge castles in the sky, thinking they will be attracted to the shiny castle, only to have no one show up.

However then the front page of KDE’s website was defaced to protest the idea of EU software patents. So I restored the line to my app’s about box.

I had my change reverted but the website defacement was left. So I pulled out my apps and quit.

Here in Georgia, Phil Gingrey does a regular bridge conference call with people from all over Georgia. It gives an amazing feel of involvement and empowerment when you are actually on the phone with your representative/senator and have the ability to ask questions. The call is set up in such a way that if you want to address the host you press some keys and are queued up. They announce you and you’re on. So simple and so empowering (or feels like it anyway).

WebEx goes a step further using computers so presentations can be seen while allowing a side pannel for chats to be used as well. We do troubleshooting, trianing, and other presentations with this service all the time and it’s very effective.