The energy choices our nation makes, and the consequences of those, such as global warming, affect all Americans and our collective future. Elections should be an opportunity for a national discussion about these issues, but as any voter knows, we mostly just get stump speeches and soundbites.

The tools on this website were designed to give voters some help in changing this dynamic. Sending the questionnaire to candidates is the first step. The questionnaire makes the substantive case that important issues are at stake, and that they are relevant to a broad cross-section of Americans.

Candidates don’t just drop everything and write answers to questionnaires, though. Voters need to make clear that they want answers, and that’s the second step: reminding candidates to respond. You can send reminders by e-mail, or use the event calendar to find upcoming events where a candidate can be reminded in person. You can also add events to the calendar to help others personally engage candidates.

Questions for Candidates is a great way to jump-start political participation and involve individuals and groups. Hopefully site participants won’t stop asking questions. In fact, someone suggested that politicians probably won’t respond because they won’t want their responses on record; I think failure to respond, when it occurs, speaks volumes about the candidate. This process will demonstrate that voters are wondering, and caring, and will wonder even more if their questions are ignored.

Thank you Dana Blankenhorn!

http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/

Also any of Jon Lebkowsky's panels too… though I don't remember the titles off the top of my head!

Assistorg's mission is to help NonProfits implement open source solutions. Several of our clients will be at the event helping the programmers design new tools that the entire community can use.

Please check out the wiki at http://lotv-lockin.pbwiki.com password is "transparency"

The League's site is http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org There goal is to get more techies involved in the political process and yea I am very involved in that organization as well.

The event is going to be awesome. We are going to have events every 4 hours to keep the programmers pumped. We have a videographer that is gonig to be doing live video blogging of the event. We have a martini rampage and fire spinners and hulahoop dancers and Djs' spinning for us. I have heard humors of zombies?

http://www.knowbility.org will be bringing accessiblity experts help us write compliant code.

We need programmers of all ranges to come out. On friday we will have drupal tutorials and php intros for programmers of different flavors. And there is some simple implementations that need to be done as well. And volunteers to keep the programmers entertained and fed are also very welcome!

So drop on by http://www.tekrepublik.com at 5310 Burnet in Austin Texas Oct 13-15 6pm to 6pm and show some love!

Technorati Profile

a statistical phenomenon that says that the niche players in any Internet-driven market, become, in aggregate, a larger market force than the “brand names” of that market. For us non-profit types, that means all those little mom-and-pop non-profits are actually a bigger force in toto than the Red Crosses, United Ways and Salvation Armies of this world. In a sense, your average donor is now going to be confronted with a Netflix-like selection of charities he or she can donate to. Sure, they might want to donate to the Red Cross but then there’s the indie non-profit just trying to help out literally in the neighborhood of that donor.

All this “2.0” stuff basically says that paradigms are changing as the web experiences a mainstreaming effect and becomes part of the social fabric. And the long-tail thinking says that when the world is at everybody’s fingertips, they’ll make more nuanced or niche choices from an exponentially broader set of possibilities. When our choices were limited by what we could buy at our local bookstores, the more limited universe of book selections would get most of the sales. With the Internet, we can by any book in print; as a result, the online sales of books that sell few copies far outnumber the sales from bestsellers.

This is relevant to the nonprofit world, because potential donors have far more choices. Every nonprofit, however small, can have a web presence with an engine for processing donations. In fact, facilitated by the increased ability to limit overhead by organizing virtually, more and more small nonprofits are appearing. This is going to be reflected in revenues from small donors - all nonprofits will be effected. All will find it harder to attract donations, but large nonprofits with established large overheads will be especially vulnerable. This will also affect large companies that provide relatively expensive support services to nonprofits (e.g. Convio, Kintera).

The survivors will be smaller, lighter nonprofits (who will establish networks and partnerships to extend their capabilities). They’ll be even more successful if they innovate in the kinds of value they provide to their supporters, and how they provide it.

This is happening now, and it’s an exciting and sometimes difficult time to be operating an NPO. But I think this diversification is ultimately very healthy, and I think there are advantages in evolving away from monolithic organizations to networks of small orgs. Mammals did pretty well compared to dinosaurs, and dinosaurs had to shrink and sprout wings to survive.

• Missions are serviced only by engaging constituents to action
• Engagement activities aren’t unique to nonprofits, so the tools aren’t either
• The best way to build software for nonprofits is to find tools that successfully addresses most of your needs and then add the nonprofit-specific functionality
• Software targeted at a larger market than nonprofits will improve faster than software specifically for the nonprofit market
• Software that has open Application Programming Interfaces makes the “build-on-top” model work
• There is a market for nonprofit-specific software that serves a defined function and is accessible via robust APIs