Month: August 2005

If you’re not sure where to donate, or whether an organization is legitimate, these sites may help:

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm/bay/content.view/catid/68/cpid/310.htm

http://www.guidestar.org/reports/partners/guidestar/hurricane.jsp

http://www.networkforgood.org/topics/animal_environ/hurricanes/?source=CN&cmpgn=\
CRS

I’ll state from the start – this is a draft-train-of-thought-blog entry with lots of parts of ideas.

Joe Trippi today led off a blogger’s call to meet with my friend and candidate for Public Advocate for the City of New York, Andrew Rasiej.
Andrew has been unwavering in his vision to not only be the advocate for the people of New York, but also to empower the people of New York to be advocates for each other. Encouraging local civic action is what the Democrats need to do to effect change and be more effective as a party.
In 4 months he’s shown the potential of the office, and raised a great deal of money.
He discussed We Fix NYC – New Yorkers post photos of potholes and other urban problems to show and report in real-time issues to which the city can respond. It has a google map to show exactly where each issue is. Great use of technology to empower people to talk to government.

It is great to hear a politician discussing use of Peer-to-peer communication as a tool for constituents to communicate their needs.

Andrew: “Access to information is a civil right” as to why the technology initiatives he proposes are important.
If during this primary he can bring 10% of extra to the expected election turn out – 40-50k in an expected primary turn out of 4-500K – demonstrates that he’s made an impact.

I want to ask:

Howard Greenstein, speaking for myself and not my employer, I want to propose a metaphor.

Government people are a network – they typically interact with each other, and get limited inputs from their constituents even though that is where they are supposed to get their info. THey tend to communicate with each other, and with those that go and talk to them directly.
Communication via phone, email, etc doesn’t rise above the din of many requests.

people often have a problem finding, if you’ll allow me to use a computer metaphor, finding an interface to their
government. this makes them apatehtic, or they leave the process.

We Fix NYC is a perfect example of how people can take action to communicate and results can be transparent and public. It increases public accountability and improves communities down to the block level – right to the asphalt, in fact.

Continues….

Sounds like they have a powerful mapping tool that allows them to track previous turn out by address for elections.

Building a smart mob of progressivly engaged Democrats to help them contact their New York based friends to get them to take action to vote for Andrew on September 13th in the primary.

MoveOn isn’t getting involved – they’re too top-down.
But members may need to send in info to suggest to them to support the campaign.