Draft Lessig Grassroots Campaign Communication Platform

The core platform is being built upon the 3rd&Urban open source decentralized messaging and communication platform which in and of itself is built upon the open source Nuxleus XML Web Application & Messaging platform. This platform is a mature messaging platform, having been under development for the past four years, helping to make the task of building the various necessary features and functionality that much faster and easier.

Initial Focus

Similar to the functionality found @ http://my.barackobama.com/, the primary and initial focus will be to build a communication platform that enables the ability for folks to communicate and collaborate with one another, form focus groups, develop mini-campaigns built upon the various issues of any given election, and so forth.

While this is just a simple start, http://dev.4lessig.org/ provides the bootstrap starting point for this platform. The code for this platform is checked into the trunk of this projects repository @ http://draftlessig.googlecode.com/svn/trunk.

Top Level Categories

This is a literal copy of the top-level categories from my.barackobama.com. These will be modified and adapted where and as needed as we go along.

• Dashboard
• Neighborhood
• Friends
• Events
• Messages
• Groups
• Fundraising
• Blog

Ongoing high-level focus of this platform

While this initial push is focused on the CA-12 special election in April, the ongoing focus is to build a platform in which anyone, anywhere, can utilize to create and run a grassroots campaign to run for office.

• The ability for anyone, anywhere to quickly and easily launch a new political campaign to run for office.
• The ability for anyone, anywhere to get involved with that campaign.
• The ability for anyone, anywhere to efficiently and directly communicate with the candidate and their representatives and vice-versa (comments,forums, etc.)
• The ability to aggregate the blogs of those people interested in the topics related to this campaign such that the existing blogosphere can participate directly via their existing blogs.
• A simple and efficient "Digg"-style voting system in which issues can be discussed, voted upon, and so forth. (NOTE: There's been some concern as to whether this type of feature would really provide as much benefit to the overall democratic process as might initially seem, so this may or may not become a part of this platform dependent upon the outcome of that debate.)
• The ability to invoke an efficient campaign contribution system in which no amount could be seen as to little. This system would adhere to any and all campaign contribution laws related to the jurisdiction of the candidate.
• An efficient reporting system that would take the pain and burden of reporting all that needs to be reported off the candidate such that they can focus their time on the politics of the people, not on the politics of the election system laws.
• The ability to instantly deploy a fully contained grassroots campaign communication appliance at the click of a button, whether that be on a server hosted in their home or on a virtual server farm such as EC2.