Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of bcbp

Timestamp:

May 22, 2008, 5:15:53 PM (17 years ago)

Author:

Jamie McClelland

Comment:

--

bcbp

@@ +1 @@
+= Building Capacity, Building Power =
+
+The Praxis Project has received funding to make voter registration data
+accessible online.
+
+This wiki page is being created to shape a proposal for how to do that.
+
+== Vision ==
+
+Voter registration data is public data that should be made freely available to
+everyone equally. At the moment, even where the data is free, it is in widely
+disparate formats and extremely difficult to query or import into an existing
+database.
+
+The goal of the project is to support grassroots organizing by providing
+address information of registered voters to groups that can use that
+information to help strategically plan organizing campaigns.
+
+In addition, the ''implementation'' of the project is itself an organizing
+project. Getting, parsing, importing and maintaining voter registration data
+for the entire country is an enormous task.
+
+Efforts have been made to approach this problem in a traditional/capitalist
+way (Jouse: please fill in!), however, that approach has done little to
+realize the bigger vision of truly publicly accessible data.
+
+An alternate approach to the logistical problem is to build the project from
+the ground up as an open, participatory process. By building the project in
+this manner, we can build a team of volunteers to maintain it, much like
+popular free software projects are maintained.
+
+== Implementations ==
+
+The key to implementing the project in an organizing fashion is to make it
+completely free and open:
+
+ * No access restrictions to the data - full read access to everyone
+ * Separation the project into inter-changing pieces to help keep it
+ decentralized:
+  * Database: one database the holds all the information. Direct read-only
+  access is available to anyone on the Internet. We would encourage anyone
+  with a server that can handle the load and size of data to mirror the data
+  to help reduce load
+  * User interface: we would write one web-based user interface, but not
+  enforce it as the only user interface. We would encourage others to write
+  alternative user interfaces and allow them to access the database.
+  * Import scripts: until the law passes enforcing a standard data format for
+  voter data (Josue: please fill in!) we will need scripts for each region to
+  import data into our standard data format
+ * Open source software: all software used to drive the project is freely
+ released
+ * Organize a series of national trainings and coding sprints
+
+== Steps ==
+
+Here are some proposed broad steps:
+
+ * Setup the infrastructure. It's important that the project start from the
+ ground up in an open, web-published environment. Starting with a wiki, ticket
+ tracking system, and publicly archived email list would be a good start.
+
+ * Initial public meeting: Draw a national group of organizers and
+ technologists to a face-to-face meeting to set a common political agenda for
+ the group and the initial technical specifications for the project. All
+ participants (regardless of tech level) will participate in both processes.
+
+ * Research: getting the right data model will save a lot of time in the long
+ run. Based on the vision and technical requirements, make decisions on how
+ the first implementation will look.
+
+ * Initial implementation: Build out the database with a single source of
+ data. Create the first user-interface. Test. Debug.
+
+ * Develop documentation on using the system and instructions to developers on
+ how to import their data.
+
+ * Organizing series of workshops nationally - the draw will be organizers and
+ technologists - with a focus on: * building the team supporting the project,
+ getting new users of the system, and encouraging techies to import data from
+ un-represented regions and commit to updating data over the years.