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...

As you will gather if you've read some of my earlier posts, I'm hard at work at an enhanced version of Advokit that I'm calling version "1x" (i.e. something after version 1.0). You'll also know that you can grab a tarball of this development version from our code repository.

Now you can test drive it without all the fuss of setting up your own site! I've created a 1x sandbox site at http://advokit.net/sandbox. Login as username: chief; password: advokit

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've been messing around with ideas for a new Advokit logo and tagline to grace the upper-left corner of the page in Advokit, as well as anchor a new theme for the Advokit Community site.

Here's what I currently am considering for a logo:

gif:

ping:

For a tagline, I'd particularly like some suggestions. It should be very short (just a couple words), perhaps a little pithy, play on words, and encapsulate the value of Advokit. Here's an utterly unfiltered list of some ideas I've been playing with:

• grassroots fertilizer
• grassroots equipment
• renewable politics
• people powered
• community supported politics
• democratic machinery

Please post your own ideas and comments here, or email the advokit-dev email list.

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!

AdvoKit - Person To Person Politics:

AdvoKit is a Voter ID/GOTV Web application available for free to any organization doing community organizing. The Howard Dean presidential campaign demonstrated that significant political power can result when an online community grows and unites behind a cause. The 2004 Democratic primary proved that people can trump "big" money in our civic lives. In our system of government, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is winning an election. AdvoKit provides the tools to get people out to vote.

Voter ID/GOTV campaigns, when effectively organized, can easily produce a margin of victory for a contested election. The Web, with its ability to facilitate efficient collaboration among large numbers of people, enables, for the first time, volunteer recruitment and Voter ID/GOTV to be performed by thousands, or even tens of thousands of individual political supporters. However, well designed and inexpensive Web tools for managing such an effort have not been available.

AdvoKit

combines manage­ment and tools for the best practices of traditional Voter ID/GOTV campaigning with the power of social networks and friend-to-friend outreach methodology to produce a campaign system with unprecedented political power, that costs almost nothing, and strengthens civil society - indeed, relies on it. Friend to friend outreach has been shown to be five to ten times more effective at identifying supporters, per contact, than targeted phone banking, and twice as effective as neighbor to neighbor outreach. The secret to AdvoKit is its ability to recruit, manage and effectively utilize large numbers of volunteers - all performing high-yield friend to friend outreach within their communities.

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.