The League of Technical Voters, one of the event organizers, wants to build a system that gives the technology community greater influence on the political process. Imagine:
It's a vision that is bold in scope and difficulty, yet achievable -- it is primarily a combination of tools and technologies that already exist today. For a more thorough explanation, you can check out this PowerPoint overview. It is meant to be presented in person, but is still helpful as a standalone doc.
The projects below can serve as components of the League system.
| Project name | Project Lead | Project Team | Description | Codeathon Progress |
| Entity-based social network | Grant Hutchins |
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A social network that is based on "entities" rather than individuals -- i.e. a node in the network might be an individual, or a business, or an organization, etc. In the LoTV context, a social network facilitates communication and collaboration among the community, and the entity-based aspect allows non-profit and advocacy organizations to participate in the League system. |
Engine created with a basic data model that can accomodate multiple types of actors and connections with different behavioral properties.
An XML interface allows for future interoperability into other projects (e.g. "connect the dots" tool and the time bank). |
| Consensus wiki ("C-wiki") | Hunter Ellinger, Ryan Breed | A wiki with an integrated workflow to build consensus on its contents. Useful for drafting formal whitepapers to reflect the combined opinion of a group of authors. In the LoTV context, this is an important format to influence legislators. See the ConsensusWikiDesignSketch for an overview. | A working prototype was completed which allows users to submit documents, solicit comments, and managing voting on their content. | |
| Event calendar | Bill Christensen, Selwyn Polit | An hCalendar-compliant event calendar to facilitate event planning and other means of collaboration among users of the LoTV system. Should accept hCalendar RSS feeds as a form of automated input and/or output. Ideally, visitors should also be able to subscribe to receive an email digest of the day's posts in the categories of their choice. | Research among open source alternatives to use as a foundation. | |
| "Connect the dots" legislation browsing tool | Jason Maltzen, Tess Snider | An interface for intuitive browsing of the connections between pending legislation, sponsoring legislators, budgetary contributions, earmarks, and so forth. Display intelligently aggregated information about the meaning of these connections based on crowdsourced input. | A working prototype that allows users to intuitively browse between a bill, its earmarks, its authors and its funders. Architected to use the entity-based social network architecture for modelling objects and connections. |
| Project name | Project Lead | Project Team | Description | Codeathon Progress |
| TimeExchange (AUSten) |
Rich Vázquez | Greg Foster, Tom Brown, Ben Bradley | A system to manage hours of work exchanged between validated members of a community. (Austin Time Exchange) |
Functionality completed includes user login and creation, context menus, basic rich text blog functionality, group management and integration with the Entity-based social network that was also created tonight. Project will be maintained at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/austen/ and blogged about at http://opensourcecurrency.org. |
| Third-party donation widget | njharman at knoggin.com |
A tool for non-profits which guides webpage visitors through a process to create a PayPal donation button for their NPO. e.g. a blogger visiting the website of their favorite charity can easily add a donation button for the charity to their blog.
Project page: http://code.google.com/p/dwg/ |
Tool completed! Source code available via Google Code. |