I have seen the future and it is in Ohio
By Jan Frel, 07/12/2005 - 6:15pm

There's a lot to recommend the savvy of the recently-launched Grow Ohio site; at its heart, it's the incipient statewide network for online Democratic activism at the grassroots level. It's also likely the House Rep. Sherrod Brown who is backing this project will use Grow Ohio for his 2006 Senate campaign against GOP incumbent Mike DeWine, but it blazes trails in a number of directions. Grow Ohio has a group blog format divided into Ohio's five distinctive regions that lets anyone post their entries on regional news -- and later will allow for group blogging in all 88 of Ohio's counties. It also collects the user membership information into a database, and has a front-page concept that fuses local politics with statewide concerns. Not only this, but the site is developed to soon offer all sorts of directory contacts and links to activists and local officials, breaking down to the most local levels, including a calendar for locals to list their events.

I predict that this site will become the defacto HQ for all Democratic politics in Ohio because it offers a platform for citizen participation without waiting for local county officials to rubber stamp what they do. Tim Tagaris, a Grow Ohio site administrator, who previously worked on Chuck Pennacchio's 2006 Pennsylvania Senate campaign, describes the absence of local Democratic online resources in Ohio:

At the county level in Ohio, the problem is much more acute. Forty of our eighty-eight counties do not even have a website, the most basic and cheapest way to organize and mass communicate with communities in Ohio. As an early recognizer of Grow Ohio, today's readers are no doubt aware of the baseline ways a website and online interactivity can help organize, fundraise, communicate, inform, drive press coverage, and countless other applications useful to candidates and organizations. In fact, if you look closely at the blogs listed in the regional blogrolls, you will find many Ohioans (and early Grow Ohio readers) are picking up the slack at the local level.

Now that this distributed political platform is established -- that is to say, the code has been written, and residual knowledge about how to operate something like this has started to accumulate, there's no reason this can't be copied and pasted 50 times for a national party online infrastructure. Politicians and state parties take note, use this model or ignore it at your peril. What's amazing is that all of this I expect will ultimately roll into Sherrod Brown's 2006 campaign.

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Same Thing in Illinois

Nice site. We're trying to do the same in Illinois -- using much the same technology. Have a look: http://www.IllinoisDemNet.com

There's a ton of things still to implement including a user's forum where we'll have the kind of input you mention in your post.

Our two goals are to be regional and distributive. Our meat and potatoes is news, events and announcements. What we have now is only the first iteration of this concept.

It goes without saying that the whole approach depends on buy-in from various people/groups around the state. People-skills are just as important as good IT (which is why I love it!).

LEO
webmaster
IllinoisDemNet

ILLINOIS DEMOCRATIC NETWORK
http://www.IllinoisDemNet.com

By leo at Fri, 07/15/2005 - 15:18 | email this page

I've completely bootstrapped The Daily Gotham

Which I happened to have announced officially at Personal Democracy Forum, on May 16th.

The Daily Gotham is an open blog for the progressive New York netroots. Almost all the writers at the moment are diarists also from DailyKos who write about New York City politics. The site is set up to include all regions of New York State --and we will be incorporating the syndicated content of other NY political bloggers soon.

I unfortunately do not have the cash for the shnazzy graphics or the PR needed to spread the word; but I can tell you, I probably did it for less than a fraction of what the senator has shelled out for his project.

CivicSpace is the reason why I can bootstrap the site. CivicSpace is the grassroots and campaigning platform once known as DeanSpace. Thanks to the Howard Dean wed development model we have CivicSpace and we have the 50+ state, regional and group sites that make up the Democracy for America network.

CivicSpace is based on Drupal, a "community plumbing" open-source and free web development platform. It is written in PHP and has a modular approach to building sites. Drupal has a base setup that can be expanded by "pluggable" modules. You can literally turn on or off features like e-commerce, project management or petitioning.

It looks like GrowOhio is based, if not on CivicSpace, a modded/forked version of Drupal. To which I say, good choice.

I have two advocacy sites for bloggers, BlogSheroes and BrownBloggers, both also developed with CivcSpace.

I am not only using the software for politics. As a web consultant I am finding more and more arts and culture organizations that want to harness the interest and excitement that they see around politics and focus that for their projects. So there's a project at Drupal and Civicspace to develop a creative community building version of the software.

Community-building platforms for bridging people online and off : It's more than the future; it is what's happening right now at sites like The Daily Gotham.

Best,
Liza Sabater
Writer and Publisher
www.culturekitchen.com
www.dailygotham.com

By Liza Sabater at Fri, 07/15/2005 - 18:12 | email this page

Texas About to Be Added ...

TexasTuesdays.com began as a MovableType blog last cycle, but this time around, we're hoping to be more of a fundraising presence and move to CivicSpace so we can offer more community-building tools to site users. We're already in the process of contacting Texas bloggers who can help us cover races throughout the state.

By gregwythe at Tue, 07/19/2005 - 23:03 | email this page

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