I think I have - finally - completed the list of enhancements that I wanted to include in Advokit 2.0. I hope to officially tag Advokit 2.0 beta 1 next week. From here on out, there will be no significant changes - just bug fixes and easy usability improvements. I will now be turning my focus to compiling documentation and fixing bugs.

The documentation plan is as follows:

• Update the existing help screens and add many new ones.
• Create a comprehensive "Advokit 2.0 Guide" for campaign leaders (I've started this at http://advokit.net/node/162 ).
• Create several printable use-case-specific guides for activists and leaders.
• Edit existing documentation on advokit.net to bring up to date with Advokit 2.0

If you would be interested in helping test or write documentation, please let me know!!!!

Watch here for further announcements...

I've been very busy the past several weeks going down our long wish list of improvements and adding them to the "1x" branch of Advokit. The main difference between this work and the improvements I made for the version 1.0 release is that now I am now letting myself muck around with the underlying data model of Advokit: adding new tables and adding new fields to existing tables. For example, I added an "interests" table for keeping track of activist interests so that when we want to fill a job, we can search for activists who, for example, have indicated that they are interested in tabling.

You will not be able to use your existing Advokit database in the next version without updating it. I have avoided any changes that might cause data to be lost in an upgrade however, and it should be pretty easy and safe, once we have an official release, to run an upgrade option in the installer to upgrade both the code and the database of any existing installation.

I have fairly extensively revised and updated a user's guide originally created by Dan Robinson for voter-contact activists, and published it as a PDF file. Look in the Tutorials and Guides section of the documentation page. It's pretty comprehensive with lots of screen shots.

I've also started a documentation roadmap so that you can comment on what documentation is need, and hopefully, contribute to the documentation available!

Thanks, Pat

I'm proud to announce that as of June 8th, 2006, Advokit 1.0 is ready to help your campaign. It took a lot longer to get to the point of having something that I felt comfortable labeling "1.0" than I expected. Since we began talking about releasing 1.0 about three months ago, there have been some 160 revisions made to the code base. And though there remain a few things in the Advokit application that I want to improve in the 1.0.x version, we will soon be able to start thinking about what's next!

A couple people I'd like to single out for big thank-you's:

• David Donachie - You started asking lots of questions and throwing code at me, giving me no choice but to get back into Advokit after more than a year away from it. You haven't stopped - and I'm very grateful!
• Dan Robinson - My original Advokit amigo! This wouldn't have happened without you the first time around, and you have been incredibly supportive when I needed it the most as I slogged towards 1.0. With Fen, and with Henri's support at CivicActions, you set up all the new infrastructure for supporting this as an open source project. I can't thank you guys enough.

-Pat

We're pretty happy with where Advokit's code is right now. It's quite stable, I recently consulted for a US Senate primary campaign where not a single code bug was encountered. We're just trying to nail down a few loose threads before announcing it as version 1.0.0:

• We're moving this site up to Drupal 4.7 and making significant modifications.
• We're switching to a Subversion code repository, which will be nicer than CVS in a number of ways. I really like that it will make and provide access installer tarballs in ways much more elegant than our current system.
• We're also moving everything to new servers hosted (and paid for) by CivicActions. Thanks Henri, Dan, Fen and everyone else - you are the greatest!

Even as we've been working to tie down loose ends for the upcoming 1.0 release, I've been playing around with integrating some of David Donachie's awsome improvements for post-1.0 Advokit. I managed to get his "prefiltering" scheme working pretty nicely. Prefiltering adds a new "prefilter" table, plus some fields to the team and teamjob tables, so it's not "1.0 compatible". It works by creating a list of all voter ids that match each unique combination of voter filters. The result is that voter searches, random contact list generation and team reporting speeds are not impacted by the complexity of your voter filters, and in fact when your voter pool is significantly restricted by these filters, these operations are very fast.

It has been about a year and a half since the most recent "official" release of AdvoKit - 0.9.9 - was tagged and announced. Frankly, I had largely given up hope of seeing any further development. The original development team had largely disbanded and were pursuing other interests, myself included.
Recently though, there has been a resurgence of interest in AdvoKit.

Thanks in large part to a flurry of development activity by David Donachie, working for the Scottish National Party to adapt and improve AdvoKit for their own purposes, I have had the chance to incorporate many bug fixes and enhancements into AdvoKit over the past several weeks.

Advokit works with many tables and fields of data within those tables. The Advokit system is highly structured. Unfortunately, local voter files come in all shapes, sizes, and qualities. So, you will first use your own computer to put that information into shape before it can be imported into Advokit. The process involves getting your local data and then your conversion of that data into a "comma separated values" (CSV) file that is usable by Advokit. The county data must be cleaned up and often parsed in order for Advokit to be able to convert and import it without error into the Advokit system data file which is a MySQL file. You upload your "cleaned up" CSV file to the proper location on the web server where it can be acted upon. The actual importation of data from the CSV file to the MySQL file is done on the web server using a perl script called "import.pl" which is part of the Advokit utilities.

The basic steps in the process are as follows:

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