From: http://groups.nten.org/vb/showthread.php?p=677#post677 Make History! Seeking a Developer to Build the E-Democracy Time Capsule #1 Old Yesterday, 08:04 AM Do you believe in the power of the Web to give ordinary people better access to the political process? Can you develop a smart-looking blog using WordPress? Would you like to make some history? If so, please read on... The DC OneWebDay Planning Committee is seeking a savvy developer to build and launch a new initiative -- the E-Democracy Time Capsule. OneWebDay OWD) is a global event held September 22 celebrating the Web and highlighting key issues about the future of the Internet. The theme for this year’s event is online political participation with a focus on what we have called a new “town square.” In line with this theme, the DC OWD Planning Committee is creating an E-Democracy Time Capsule that will go live online on August 22, one month before OWD. We envision a site where anyone, from all corners of the United States and the world, can make history by contributing text, images, sound, and video to a WordPress blog describing their favorite E-Democracy tools, letters to the future about their hopes for Web-powered politics, and profiles of E-Democracy Heroes. On One Web Day, we will "close" the virtual Time Capsule. We are working to find a partner, such as the National Archives, who will receive and archive the Capsule until it is opened again on OWD 2020. If all goes according to plan, thousands of people will visit the site while it is open, hundreds will make deposits, and the closing ceremony will draw wide local and national press and blog coverage. We stand at a crossroad in the history of online political participation. The future is uncertain. Policy decisions concerning digital inclusion, net neutrality, and online privacy and security will be made in the coming months and years. We would like to ensure that when the virtual Time Capsule is reopened on OWD in 2020, the new town square delivers on its promise to become a thriving marketplace of ideas where anyone can participate unhindered by a lack of access to the tools and skills they need to add their voice to the political dialog. What we need to make this happen: 1-2 WordPress developers to build the Time Capsule by August 22. We believe this will take less than 20 hours. Currently, we have a modest but growing budget to compensate our developers, who will enjoy wide exposure as we promote the initiative, including a full page on the Time Capsule site to showcase their work. What we have: a domain and server space; a fully developed marketing and outreach plan, requirements list, and wireframe; and a dedicated planning committee of 14 individuals representing organizations including BroadbanCensus.com, Center for Democracy and Technology, COmmon Cause, Media and Democracy Coalition, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Sunlight Foundation, dedicated to making OWD a big event, supporting and promoting our developer. To learn more, contact Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein at 301 404-8570 or <email obscured>.
Help Redesign Democracy - Join E-Democracy.Org's Design Sprint July 29th, 2008 Over the coming months I hope to engage designers in an effort to vastly improve the look and feel of E-Democracy.Org starting with our forums - http://forums.e-democracy.org . E-Democracy.Org has a small grant that we using to support new features on GroupServer - http://groupserver.org , the awesome GPL open source platform we use for our Issues Forums. Some of that budget will be used to implement a new look and feel that will then spread across our site. However, the more we engage our supporters and volunteers to articulate a design vision, create some story boards and actual art/design templates the more we can do with our limited resources (like make it easy to embed YouTube videos in GroupServer! - Example - http://forums.e-democracy.org/r/post/eL1LKPDptZl2eIfHUJFzo ). To this end, we propose a design sprint (in-person in Minneapolis and virtual) sometime in the next few months to see what kind of talent we can bring to bear. Indicate you interest, RSVP via our wiki and drop us an e-mail: <email obscured> http://pages.e-democracy.org/design_sprint We won’t consider a meeting until at least five people agree to get involved. To assist, or perhaps confuse :-) the process, I’ve created two video screencasts that share some of my hopes and dreams for the new site. One of my main goals is to ensure that our forums remain competitive in the “minds eye” with citizen media and blog sites in terms of first impressions without losing the barebone usability that people really need. The screencasts are available from: http://pages.e-democracy.org/design_sprint As a “virtual” participant, you can feel free to see what you can whip up anytime or ask us questions now to guide your contribution. Feel free to leave comments on the blog about the site redesign. Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org P.S. If you are a developer, check our GroupServer's Development online group and chip in some code: http://groupserver.org/groups/development
Our friends with GroupServer/Online Groups.Net have released an alpha version of GroupServer for download. This is the tool used to host this exchange as well as forums.e-democracy.org. I'd like the more technical among us to kick the tires and offer me very frank feedback. E-Democracy.Org has stuck with GroupServer in the face of the giant Drupal sucking sound. Key to our decision is our absolute insistence on a tool that provide equitable and robust e-mail participation. E-Democracy.Org is about to invest in an updated look and feel and a some features including integrating photos and YouTube videos into posts when viewed on the web. Users only need to know how to attach a photo to an e-mail or paste in a link to a YouTube video and GroupServer will do the rest. Very simple. Strategically, we want to connect with others willing to shape open source tools for democratic civic engagement purposes. We also want to encourage more developers to add code to a tool which works very well (if you've wanted to host your own Google/YahooGroup style groups on your own domain without ads and include some basic social networking this tool is for you ... if you do not imagine hosting this oun your own box, see the hosting options from http://onlinegroups.net ) for two-way online participation and community building. Anyway, read on below and pass this on to the more technical in your organization. Send any feedback to my request to: <email obscured> OR http://e-democracy.org/contact Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org
http://www.alwayswebhosting.com/ has been very good to me the past year and a half. They are *very* responsive to my technical support requests, and the performance is very good too.
E-Democracy.Org is looking for a good webhost for our http://www.e-democracy.org where we run our wiki and blog and archives of older static pages. We really like the CPanel package for e-mail accts, short referring urls, e-mail aliases etc., but our current host isn't that great when things go wrong. Note: We run our forums.e-democracy.org completely separately at the current time. Any suggestions? Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org
I was going to mention the Flip. I played with one at Christmas but we dropped it in the ocean. not so waterproof... dave On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 9:51 AM, Steven Clift <<email obscured>> wrote: > Thanks Graham. > > We are definitely for a new projector that does well in all sorts of lighting situations. One with decent speakers would be useful as well. Any suggestions? > > Two interesting items that we've picked up to hopefully more systematically record decent audio at events is a Pyle Pro PDWM4300 or a four mic wireless system (two lapel mics for presenters and two regular mics for the audience/panels) (we managed to find it for around $100 ... haven't tested it yet. I could see us connecting the audio to one our personal Video Camcorders with the right adapters. We also pick up for $50 a LightSnake which allows you to connect a XLR microphone to USB. So even if we don't us a public address system we should be able to grab podcastable audio from our events. > > Because we are zooming around rural Minnesota we are trying to figure out which mobile provider provides higher bandwidth across the state at the right price. Unfortunately, it looks like datacards require a 2 year contract - BOO! While I always assume with presentations that the Net connection just won't work and put everything in PowerPoint, we'd like the ability to bring in a remote guest via video Skype or Sightspeed (or others two video services you might recommend) as well as the demo some stuff in real-time when we use a workshop format. > > It would also be fun to webcast some discussions live around the state and far beyond. Has anyone tried http://www.mogulus.com or http://www.flixwagon.com or http://operator11.com or http://www.ustream.tv ? > > Cheers, > Steven Clift > > P.S. We so have 6 month old FlipVideo recorder. It works great in lower light compared to other tools. Now all we need is David Wilcox's short interview style talent! http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2006/03/for_collaborati.html
Thanks Graham. We are definitely for a new projector that does well in all sorts of lighting situations. One with decent speakers would be useful as well. Any suggestions? Two interesting items that we've picked up to hopefully more systematically record decent audio at events is a Pyle Pro PDWM4300 or a four mic wireless system (two lapel mics for presenters and two regular mics for the audience/panels) (we managed to find it for around $100 ... haven't tested it yet. I could see us connecting the audio to one our personal Video Camcorders with the right adapters. We also pick up for $50 a LightSnake which allows you to connect a XLR microphone to USB. So even if we don't us a public address system we should be able to grab podcastable audio from our events. Because we are zooming around rural Minnesota we are trying to figure out which mobile provider provides higher bandwidth across the state at the right price. Unfortunately, it looks like datacards require a 2 year contract - BOO! While I always assume with presentations that the Net connection just won't work and put everything in PowerPoint, we'd like the ability to bring in a remote guest via video Skype or Sightspeed (or others two video services you might recommend) as well as the demo some stuff in real-time when we use a workshop format. It would also be fun to webcast some discussions live around the state and far beyond. Has anyone tried http://www.mogulus.com or http://www.flixwagon.com or http://operator11.com or http://www.ustream.tv ? Cheers, Steven Clift P.S. We so have 6 month old FlipVideo recorder. It works great in lower light compared to other tools. Now all we need is David Wilcox's short interview style talent! http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2006/03/for_collaborati.html
I'm afraid I don't have any experience in this except for media consumption, but it might help to get the ball rolling anyway. I guess it depends on the context (i.e. citizens' technical abilities, indoors or outdoors coverage, who's going to be consuming the media, etc), but Laughing Squid (http://laughingsquid.com/) springs to mind for its recent video coverage of the Olympic Torch in San Francisco (see http://flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/sets/72157604458841560/). This was mostly done with just one of these Flip Video Ultras (http://www.theflip.com/products_flip_ultra.shtml) and Flickr's new Video service (http://www.flickr.com/help/video/). The Flip Ultra looks very smooth and usable (and I'm wishing they were available over here in the UK too now), while Flickr's 90-second limit on video length keeps things short and sweet - although this is probably only useful if you want to limit yourself to "snippets" (edited or otherwise). Again, I think this depends partly on the audience, and partly on how much effort citizens want to put into editing and the like. For streaming, you might want to take a look at Qik (http://qik.com/) - I've not used it, but it seems fairly popular with people. Hope that helps, sorry it's not more specific :) - Graham
E-Democracy.Org will be hosting 5 citizen media and online engagement outreach events across rural Minnesota. We have a modest budget for gear. I am interested in what we can demonstrate that makes citizen media production highly accessible as well as what we need to capture decent quality video/audio for on-demand or even live webcast access. What would you put together for $2,000 US (assuming you already have a laptop)? Assume the location used has electricity. :-) Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org
I've opened the "Code" group on DoWire.Org to posting. Do you remember joining? I've broadened the scope a bit to feed my selfish need to a place to talk about using gadgets in e-democracy projects as well open source code. See: http://groups.dowire.org/groups/code Democracy Code - The Open Source and Technology Exchange is an Online Group for those building e-democracy, e-participation, e-community, e-advocacy and e-government projects using open source technology as well as "politech" geeks who like to trade tips on gadgets and gear. There are roughly 50 of us here. Cheers, Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org and DoWire.Org