What about integrating with FOAF (Friend of a Friend) repositories? If a user was listed, they could elect to contact all their friends about the campaign.

Just a thought, not sure how to implement.

~Nathan

Think about how the DNC and many other groups like moveon.org use! An input box with space for an email address in each of several places.

Yup.  There are some very interesting synergies between FOAF systems and AdvoKit.  Obviously AdvoKit starts to look like a FOAF system in some significant ways.  We are in contact with the IndyVoter project, which is building a FOAF system (www.indyvoter.org/future).  And will be talking to them at length at the upcoming Developers' gathering in SF at the end of this month.  This whole are deserves more attention and would be a very interesting thread to pursue (hint, hint....).

It is great to see such a compelling new site for voter contact, outreach and campaign organization.  There is huge potential here.  And if this is "free" shareware for grassroots campaigns, this will be a tremendous boon to campaigns in light of the excessive costs of professional services.

4 quick questions or suggestions I have, from a campaign organizers point of view:

1.  Will the voter file database have fields such as party affiliation as well as frequency of voting in elections, allowing for weighted scale for contacting particular voters to be developed?

2.  You have an email function in the program that can contact campaign staff, volunteer/activists, and/or the entire email list.  Will this have a mass email function that is cost-effective? (some companies charge for large emailing).  Will it be able to originate from several different campaign email addresses?  (candidate@candidate.com, campaignmanager@candidate.com, fundraiser@candidate.com, etc?)   Finally, will large mass emails be able to avoid the dreaded spam filter or junk email bin?

3.   There never seems to be an easy way to integrate your voting file information with a fundraising database.  You seem to have a great deal of synergy already by having your campaign staff and volunteers in the same program that handles voting info.  Do you forsee developing a fundraiser's database and contact program in this same framework?  This would be a fantastic tool, that would allow the combination of fundraising appeal to the general campaign list, and tracking of donated time and money by anyone on the list.  Further, it would be great to cross-reference strong volunteers by zip code with others in their community.  Any thoughts?

4.  Finally, while there is much more in the way of questions and ideas, I know you have already done a great deal.  My final dream is to have all of this shareware make its way onto a Palm pilot or other handheld device that could be transferable back and forth to computer with the same program, allowing for targeted canvassing operations and easy updates, as well as GOTV improvements in poll-watching on election day.

Thanks for all that your doing!

~ryan (dean delegate candidate from Maryland)

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the complements. FYI AdvoKit is not "shareware". AdvoKit is Free Software - no fees, no license costs, not now, not in the future. In answer to your questions -

1) Yes.
2) The e-mail is function is adequite for basic functionality. It was never our intention to provide a full scale e-mail based contact management system. I would expect to see additional features in the future.
3) Funraising is certainly a big issue. We haven't begun thinking seriously about what comes in version 2.0 - but I'm sure fundraising will get serious consideration.
4) We've given quite a bit of thought to the handheld issues. We decided not to tackle it this time around. We don't think it would be very difficult (as a matter of fact if someone wanted to take this on as a project and had some experience it probably isn't more than a week or so's worth of work).