Hi,

In talking to Dan Robinson yesterday, he suggested that the alias might be interested to hear about our Advokit installation. So here goes.

The Grassroots Champions Coalition was organized to promote and establish a network of Democratic Precinct Captains throughout California. To do their voter outreach, each Precinct Captain needs info about the voters in their Precinct. So we picked Advokit to provide this web-based access.

After about a year, we now have 27 of California's 58 Counties on-line. That equates to 7.5 million voter records. Actually we just have a part (275 thousand voters) of one of those Counties. When the rest of that partial County arrives, we'll have over 11 million voter records. By the November election, I expect that we'll have on-line most of the state which has over 16 million voters.

We have arranged each County as a separate Advokit installation on our server. This is convenient since the data is delivered separately by each County Registrar. This means we have a separate MySQL database for each County and so it allows us to load and maintain each County independently. However, all the County Advokit installations share the same code (private directory) and share the images from the public web directory. This means that each County installation just requires 250K of disk space (in addition to its database usage). This sharing also allows us to easily maintain and update the code by just changing a single file.

Around election time we expect that we might have a few hundred simultaneous users banging away on our system. So performance is quite important to us. So we chose to purchase our own server machine.

All these County installations are hosted on our own server machine at PrecinctCaptains.org. This machine is a Sun Microsystems 4100 server which is a 1U (1.75 inches) rack-mounted computer. The machine is configured with two dual-core AMD Opteron 275 processors running at 2.2 GHz with 4Gig of memory. This 4-way machine has 2 very fast SAS (Serial Access SCSI) disk drives spinning at 10,000 RPM which are great for database access.

The machine is co-located in an ISP facility in a building in San Jose. This building, which is called MAE-West, is quite incredible. They advertise it as 40% of the world's Internet traffic passes through this one building every day. So almost every Internet provider is located there and are all cross-connected. So we are located on the backbone of the Internet and we have absolutely amazing net bandwidth (I've measured 50 Mbps) and reliability.

We have made a number of enhancements to Advokit. Many of our users are not very computer familiar, so we (us and Dan inc.) created a stripped down Advokit we call EZ advokit where they are given a UI that can just print out a walklist and record contacts. We have enhanced the printable walk lists to automatically group voters together under a single street sub-heading. We have also added the ability for each precinct captain to print out a map of their precinct.

One of the things still on our wish-list that everyone really wants is a way to represent and search based on voter history.

- thanks, Bruce