Technology in Politics

It was the Republicans that first really introduced a way to win elections with better technology

Now I'm not talking about Ron Paul's supporters with their multiple of Facebook Groups, and websites raising Millions without even asking the Ron Paul Campaign about it.

No I'm talking about back in 1996-1998 when the republicans sat down with their database of voters records and with the help of local and state representatives slowly re-drew the districts to make sure they could get ahead in a country where there are more registered democrats than there are republicans.

So now it's the Democrats turn.

How. Well that's what some of these "technology in Politics" meetings that we have in this group every so often are all about.

In the last meeting we discussed these sites that are helping people know more about their politicians, or giving different people with political motivations some tools to achieve their goals.


http://www.house.gov... - House of Representative's official site
http://www.senate.gov... - Senator's Official Site

http://thomas.loc.gov... - The Government's host of all bills, and laws, their status, and information. It has committee information and representative's information

http://GovTrack.us... - This is one of the best USES of technology in politics. It's run by a college student that is going into medicine (seriously) called Joshua Tauberer.This site downloads most of the information from the official sites (mainly the thomas one above) and gives you an XML representation of this information that can now be more easily processed by a computer, or program. It's the basic building block of most of the other sites out there that do anything with Bills, or Representatives.
His about me explains more: http://www.govtrack.u...
And here's the Yahoo Discussion group on how to use it: http://groups.yahoo.c...

I will add more interesting sites that are using GovTrack's information and other places in the next couple of posts.

So what would YOU do if you had this kind of access and access to unlimited programmers and designers?

Here's a couple of other interesting sites:

http://congress.org... - Not officially affiliated with congress itself, but if you provide them with your email they'll send you (no...not spam) but a weekly report of what your state representative, and senators are voting for, and which bills are coming up.

http://washingtonwatc... - Interesting site that looks at different blogs and informations to see which bills are being talked about and are "popular"

http://opensecrets.or... - Who is funding who? Find out who each top politician is being "funded" by.

More coming soon.

Interesting Talk about Spending in the Elections to the Presidency, and Who started the "attack ads" in political circles:

http://votesmart.org/...

Speaking of Ron Paul and speaking of technology, I saw an article in a Reno, NV paper about the way Ron Paul's supporters used text messaging to coordinate their efforts during a convention. They were able to gain super majorities at the convention before the convention organizers shut down the convention to cut the Ron Paul supporters off.

Here is a link to the story.
Reno Gazette Journal

My question is how do you have large numbers of people sending text messages in the middle of a convention without creatung a blizzard of messages that overwhelms everybody's ability to read them? Anybody have any answers? Anybody have any teenagers who have any answers?

Part of Technology in Politics is getting your message out.

Last night, I went to a Ruby on Rails meetup. For those of you who are not engineers, Ruby on Rails allows you to write 10 or 20 lines of text and get a full blown web site. You can run this thing on a cheap computer that you store under your bed.

That has obvious implications for every campaign. It has implications for the Broward community as well.

It turns out there is a lively Rails community in Miami and they are dying for programmers. One of the things we could do that would help the community would be to encourage our young people to learn Ruby on Rails. There are people in this meetup who could help with that. I am not one of them. Ruby on Rails is not part of my skill set. At least not yet.

But there are some folks who do know Ruby and I can use this meetup to help you meet them.