[revision history][blog for feedback][jump to indyvoter document home]How would you use IndyVoter? Do you need tools to organize around a political campaign? Got an issue that you want to rally people around? Usage scenarios are how YOU would use IndyVoter to mobilize your democratic rights. Read some of these and add your own below.
Ann logs onto indyvoter.org and creates an account for herself complete with personal profile providing background information on herself. She searches for a political campaign community dealing with Proposition J and finds the SF: No On J community.
She joins and fills out a form describing what skills and resources she brings to the cause. She adds her skillset to the community's resource list : she is interested in doing statistical analyses, policy research, hosting fundraising events, and precinct walking. She also has access to a free copy machine through her work. She posts a personal introduction on the community's bulletin board , uses the community calendar to RSVP for the next real-world organizing event at a local restaurant, and checks out what causes other members of the community are into. She joins a few local political issue communities that she is interested in ( Homelessness, Housing, and Police Brutality ) as well as global activism tactics communities ( Electoral Reform, Absentee Voter Registration, Direct Action ). Local San Francisco community listings can be propagated globally so that all regions can keep informed of recent campaigns and events.
As Ann invites her friends to this network and makes new friends within her communities , she learns more about the issues and tactics her friends are working on- and how she can help them out. Periodically crossposting community listings she finds significant to her personal blog allows Ann's friends to keep up on her involvements.
As the campaign against Proposition J continues, Ann and her community use indyvoter's decision support tool to quickly achieve consensus on how to utilize pooled resources , use indyvoter's voter guide tool to put together a voter guide distributable in paper and electronic forms, and visually arrange voterfile and community-supplied data over a map of San Francisco divided into precincts using the map visualization tool .
Several fund-raising parties and miles of precinct walking later, Proposition J is defeated by a heavy margin thanks to a well-informed voting population and an effective activist community comprised of individuals who are well-equipped to take on the next electoral challenge.
Avram is an anti-police brutality activist living in Cleveland, Ohio. He uses the internet for organization and activism, maintaining a website called nocopviolence.com and a calendar of events on upcoming.org , a free internet calendar.
Signing In: He wants to set up a mailing list, so logs on to indyvoter.org and creates a local community called Anti-Police Brutality: Cleveland, Ohio . He sees that other regional anti-brutality groups in Philadelphia, Oakland, and Chicago are already on indyvoter.org, so his new community creates links to these existing communities.
Exporting to a Community's Existing Website: Setting up his mailing list using indyvoter.org, he specifies that he would like a total archive of all mailing list messages displayed on his nocopviolence.com website through a syndicating tool such as RSS/Atom. This way, non-indyvoter.org users can check out the community mailing list's latest chatter directly on the nocopviolence.com website.
Importing from an Existing Website: Avram's current calendar setup on upcoming.org has some shortcomings. He'd like to still use the upcoming.org calendar, but would like to integrate those events into indyvoter.org so he can take advantage of indyvoter's rich community tools such as media albums, blogs, and resource pooling. He merges the two calendars together on indyvoter.org using a syndicating tool such as RSS/Atom. This allows his community to use either indyvoter.org or any free internet calendar to plan events while still realizing the benefits of indyvoter.org's diverse toolset.
Building a new Community Tool: Avram uses his trunking police scanner to listen to the police radio channels in Cleveland. He uses an internet streaming audio server and some free bandwidth at his friend's work to broadcast the police scanner feed over the internet to anyone who would like to listen to it.
He has some experience writing computer software, so he would like to build a tool for his indyvoter.org community that allows users to listen to the police scanner feed and bring important snippets of police chatter to the community's attention.
This is the kind of activist tactic that requires a network of people with similar interests to pull off , so it's perfect for indyvoter.org. He writes an open source tool, accessible through his community's profile page, that allows indyvoter.org users to listen to the streaming police scanner feed and click a button whenever something interesting happens that other people should know about.
The audio snippet is marked and the user's comments get posted to his community's mailing list. Once he has completed building this tool, he makes a general purpose version of it available on indyvoter.org that allows any community to do group audio tagging of any internet broadcast .
There is a progressive San Francisco neighborhood organization called the "Bernal Heights Democratic Club". They have formed an indyvoter.org community, which they rely upon to quickly make organizational decisions and pool resources. All decisions for their particular online community require a majority vote in favor to be affirmed. Any member of the community may propose a decision.
Whom Shall We Endorse? With the upcoming mayoral contest between incumbent Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez, the Bernal Heights Democratic Club must make an endorsement. A decision is introduced: Should the Club endorse Matt Gonzalez or Gavin Newsom? Community members have a deadline of one month before the election to cast their vote. The community votes overwhelmingly to endorse Matt Gonzalez. They issue a press release for their endorsement, extend their virtual endorsement to the "Matt for Mayor" indyvoter.org community , and now must decide how to further use the community's resources to endorse Matt's candidacy.
How can we use our resources to help the candidate? The community uses indyvoter.org's voter guide tool to instantly create an online endorsement slate, viewable by anyone on the internet. The voter guide contains the community's endorsement of Matt and other endorsements for the upcoming election.
The community would like to print copies of this voter guide and mail them out to neighborhood residents. The community has the following resources: cheap printing facilities, a mailing address list, and some cash. A decision is introduced: Should the community use these resources towards printing the voter guide and distributing them to neighborhood residents? As the election is drawing close, a shorter timeline is declared on this decision. Again, a majority of community members vote to distribute the voter guide, moving their voter guide across the digital divide into voters' houses.
Why Did We Do This? Indyvoter.org provides all communities with a full timeline of decisions that were made and resources that were used, allowing full transparency and subsequent insight into the decision making process of that community.
A pro-life organization called “Families First” wants to understand and utilize the many benefits of online organizing. The group signs up for indyvoter.com and sends emails to all of its members asking that they go to the site and fill out the profile, invite their friends, etc.
George, the president of Families First, searches indyvoter.org for other communities working on pro-life issues to see if his organization can learn from the successes and failures of his counterparts’ activities. He finds quite a few organizations online and signs up to become part of their communities. He passes on interesting tactics, articles, events, and other tidbits to members of his Families First.
George sets up a decision-making scheme on indyvoter.org for Families First. The decision-making structure essentially provides for the final say to be his. He likes that he can gather feedback from members easily, while not having to actually allow them to make decisions.
George decides that it might be a good idea if he understands the tactics of his “opponents.” He signs up for the local NOW community and begins to read posts from the list about strategy, upcoming actions, and other items of interest. George passes some along to his organization’s members (mostly those that show NOW in the poorest light), but he is a little worried about what could happen if his members decided to sign up for community, as well. Many might see that the way NOW is depicted by the pro-life movement is not entirely the same as the way the organization seems to work online. George worries that Families First members, if signed up through indyvoter.org to non-pro-life communities, might start to have their opinions swayed. In addition, George notices that the majority of communities on indyvoter.org have a decisively left/progressive leaning. He is wary of being a part of such a larger community and the potential “tainting” of his organization’s membership.
In the end, George can’t tell if indyvoter.org is a good idea for Families First or not. On one hand, it facilitates many functions of the organization and allows members to cross-pollinate with other pro-life groups. On the other hand, the website opens up a Pandora’s box by granting easy and democratic access to any number of politically-minded communities.
In the end, George decides that indyvoter.org is not good for Families First. He emails his organization’s membership, tells them that Families First will no longer be using the website’s tools because they are “corrupt” and “flawed,” and asks them to stop visiting the website altogether. George continues to monitor the website, though, because he has found some tools (such as mapping and networking) to be useful to his strategizing. He is a little worried, though, that some of his members might continue to log on to indyvoter.com and have their beliefs tainted by the progressive tone…
Cat recently moved to Austin, Texas. She was actively involved in electoral campaigns and the direct action community in Boston, where she had lived for several years during graduate school. Now, as a new resident of Austin, where she has few friends and acquaintances who are politically involved, she doesn’t really know where to plug-in yet.
Alex, a friend she worked together with on a local Boston campaign, sends her an email invitation to indyvoter.org. Cat logs on to the website, somewhat wary of becoming involved in another time-consuming friend-of-a-friend network. She is also skeptical about the benefits of such an organization. But she trusts the judgment of Alex, so she decides to fill out her profile and see what happens.
Cat fills out her profile. The profile includes information such as her interests, location, political experience and skills, and voting status. She can fill in as little or as much as she wishes and can return to update her profile at any time. After filling out the profile, indyvoter.org suggests a number of communities located in her area that Cat might be interested in checking out. Cat signs up for several of the communities that were suggested. Indyvoter.org also allows her to search for communities on her own. She finds some of the “tactic” oriented communities—specifically one related to absentee voter registration--to be of interest, so she signs up for these, too.
Within minutes, Cat has set the groundwork for her political participation in Austin. Every few days, she monitors the communities she signed up for. Eventually Cat drops her affiliation with a few of the communities she finds uninteresting or not particularly useful. She finds herself particularly drawn to the activities of two communities: the Austin wing of the Kucinich for President campaign and an environmental campaign called Save Our Springs. As Cat becomes more involved with these two communities, she shares more of her personal information with the groups, including her volunteer availability and skill sets. As a result, the groups are able to easily utilize the skills and availability of Cat.
Bob Smith is a Green Party candidate for state representative in Rhode Island. He has formulated some positions on certain issues, but he has yet to develop coherent, fleshed-out policy platforms. The election is only four months away, and Bob realizes that he needs to act quickly to get them done. His opponents have attacked him on several occasions for “not being a serious candidate” because he has not published platforms on key Rhode Island issues. The main problem is that Bob has little money to spend paying others to develop such time-consuming documents.
Bob’s campaign is already signed-up for indyvoter.org and is reaping many benefits from the site. A campaign staffer tells him there is a user-friendly campaign platform tool on the website, a policy “mad lib” of sorts that he should check out.
Bob logs on to the website and begins to answer questions about his beliefs related key issues: the economy, housing, elderly, health care, environment, women, etc. The tool generates a simple template for Bob’s platforms, with general statements of policy beliefs (“Women should have the right to reproductive freedom.” “Crimes against the environment should be punished with more regularity and severity.” etc). The general statements will need to be augmented with specifics about how they can be actualized in Rhode Island and his district. The platform template prompts Bob for these specific positions.
Bob can also peruse other policy documents (of both organizations and individual candidates) that have been posted on indyvoter.org and other websites. Indyvoter.com allows him to search policy platforms by issue, party affiliation, location, and other parameters. Bob finds this platform library to be quite useful in the drafting of his own. After their completion, Bob’s position papers will be available to others if he wishes, as well.
In addition to assisting in a difficult task, indyvoter.org is helping to spread the word about the positions taken by individuals and organizations. Several Rhode Island members of the indyvoter.org online community end up voting for Bob because they read his articulate positions on the website. Bob unfortunately doesn’t win his election, but the campaign generates energy around third party politics and progressive movements in Rhode Island.
The Matt Gonzalez for Mayor campaign energized the city of San Francisco, drawing thousands of volunteers together from all over the city, many of whom had never actively participated in politics before. The San Francisco chapter of the Sierra Club joined with the campaign to handle its canvassing operation, and hopes to maintain good relations with the burgeoning progressive community now that the election is over. The Sierra Club is planning a membership drive to raise funds and issue awareness, and would like to invite Matt's supporters, knowing that many of them are likely to be sympathetic to their cause.
Logging onto indyvoter.org, the Sierra Club's fundraising coordinator makes a request of the "MattForMayor.indyvoter.org" community- can we use your volunteer address book? Within the next day, the steering committe for the Matt For Mayor community votes to allow the Sierra Club access to their volunteer mailing list, but with some restrictions: The Sierra Club cannot directly view the email addresses within their volunteer database- the indyvoter system will simply mail out the call for funds. Also, the Matt For Mayor community must be able to review each email before it gets sent out to their volunteer list.
The Sierra Club fundraising coordinator, informed of this decision by the Matt For Mayor community, uses the indyvoter email blast tool to type up her fundraising message. She selects the Matt For Mayor volunteer address book as the recipient list for her email. She clicks "send" and is informed that her email will be sent to the Matt For Mayor volunteer email list pending review by the Matt For Mayor community. As soon as the message is reviewed and approved, the email is sent out to volunteers.
Because the Matt for Mayor community maintains control over access to the list, they are able to regulate the amount of spam its members recieve, so they don't feel turned off. In fact, many are interested in supporting the Sierra club financially, and many join its online community, thus furthering the cross-pollination of ideas. Throughout, the privacy of Matt's individual supporters is maintained. Each supporter's anti-spam preference ("please don't share my email address with anyone else") is also respected seamlessly by the indyvoter system.
Usage scenarios are the pipeline to the reality.
2004.01.21 - marc powell - added address book sharing
2004.01.20 - eddie codel - seminal version