Labour, Lib Dems, Tories – how do they stack up?

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Sanford

Last election in England, the three parties tried to use the lessons from the US in their communications. All of the parties revamped their websites, began an email communications campaign, and leveraged databases (to various effects) to get-out-the-vote. A year later, what has changed?

To be truthful, the reason for this post comes more from cleaning my Yahoo! account than a recent article in the NYTimes (“Politics Faces Sweeping Change via the Web“). As I went to clean out the thousands of emails, I took a glance at my emails from the three parties. And what I found is summed up as this: nothing has changed from a year ago. Well, almost nothing.

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More on Boris Weisfeiler

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Sanford

Quick Update: Both Olga and Anna have met are planning on meeting with President Bachelet and have been successful in generating some news coverage (See Centre Daily and Santiago Times). For more information, they have also released a press release clarifying some of the mistakes on the Santiago Artle (including the fact that now 27 lawmakers have signed on, above the original 14). I include the press release for clarification and you can learn more at http://www.findboris.com.

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Free Boris Weisfeiler

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Sanford

Recently, I was at the IPDI Conference (see earlier post)
and met a young lady who is waging a two woman campaign to generate visibility on an American citizen’s kidnapping that occurred in Chile over 20 years ago. Interestingly enough, after twenty years of uncertainty and frustration, the Weisfeiler family might finally get the information they have dearly sought after these many years with a personal meeting with the new President Michelle Bachelet this coming week. But they need our help to get Senators and Representatives to sign on to a letter to show the US Congress’ support for closing out this case.

On Christmas Break in 1985, Professor Boris Weisfeiler from Penn State was on a hiking trip near the Chilean border where he mysteriously disappeared. Chilean authorities (after a cursory investigation) concluded he had drowned and promptly closed the case.

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Civicspace moves to Compumentor

Posted on March 21, 2006 by Sanford

Just got a couple of press releases from Zack Rosen in the past seven days – first, announcing the launch of the alpha version of the hosted version of Civicspace (see them at www.civicspacelabs.org). Then, today, Zack announced the “fiscal sponsorship” of the non-profit arm of Civicspace – working through the auspicies of Compumentor. With Kieron and Andrew leading the for-profit arm and Zack doing what he does well (evangelising) – we shall see how the next phases of Civicspace works out. I, for one, am very interested in seeing how Civicspace (hosted) competes against the likes of Convio, Kintera, GetActive, OrchidForChange, DIA and others in the space.

I am a *big* fan of the open-source/shared building premise that Civicspace offers – sharing the technology across the universe of Drupal developers. But the challenge is how to drive the community of developers toward what will deliver for particular constituencies. It will take time to develop a fully-fleshed product and then to establish the brand (as Kieron and Andrew are working on) but the challenge tends to be the market opportunities – and how things will drive development priorities. I anxiously await the next stages of development…

Tags: Civicspace Zack Rosen

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SXSW – Revenge of the Blogs: Election 2008

Posted on March 12, 2006 by Sanford

Listening in on the SXSW conference with Henry Copeland from blogAds moderating. At the conference, Marcos (from DailyKos), Michael (from redstate.org) and Ruby (from NetCentricCampaigns) are discussing the impact of blogs in the coming elections.

Interesting content – and seems to carry on from the IPDI conference – that the future techs will be: mobile platforms, social networks (my read: detailed databases) and easy publishing will begin to enable others to speak out that are still not part of the conversation as of yet. Michael suggests that politics will still use the techniques they already are comfortable with today – and just use tech to enable it. Essentially – reduce the friction and speed up access and visibility of action through the web and telecoms medium (read: Asterisk and mobile).

Tags: SXSW mobile campaigning

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