build software that people want to use

<p><a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html" target="_blanl">If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.</a></p> <p>This quote is from a little post I found, and it struck me as apt. As we think about how to make the web relavent to local campaigning, we can't set out with tools that are used for big national campaigns and expect that they are going to work.</p> <p>We need to use tools that people (voters) will use in the context of a local campaign. Can we expect that a local city council candidate's website will bring in a flood of low dollar donations? I don't think so, not when you have perhaps 300k people in a district, 150k voters, how can a candidate reach a critical mass on the web? </p> <p>The local candidate website cannot be looked at as a fundraising tool at this point, but should be considered a communication a tool. A tool that allows the campaign to communicate with its supporters and in turn the supporter to communicate with their friends and...

On "IT is from Mars; Web Content from Venus"

<p><a target="_blank">Many IT departments have indeed done a great job in introducing their organizations to the importance of the Web. However, the Web should no longer be managed by IT. The public website should be managed by marketing, and the intranet should be managed by communications.</a></p> <p>It may well be that certain IT people who have championed the Web will move over to marketing/communications. It may in fact be necessary for a new type of department to emerge. <b>Whatever happens, a web team is required that is focused on the power of words to drive action.</b> Because, let's face it, when you take away the words from a webpage or from a web application, what is left? </p> <p>This has not happened in most political campaigns on the local level. A major theme for me this year is going to be the successful use of web technologies for local elections. We are at a crossroads where campaigns have this gut feeling that they need to be on the web, but have not figured out how to integrate it. There is a shortage of people who understand how to use it to move a campaign forward. </p> <p>Local Campaign budgets don't have room to hire a tech person and a web specific person, so tech people do double duty or non experts wind up in charge of the web, and no one really strategizes on how to deploy it. Unfortunately it seems like this year, many candidates will plunk down heft sums to ASPs and not really get their value...

Podcasts and Me

<p>This evening i recorded my first podcast. I am not sure that i am particularly pleased with the results, but it was fun. There is a bit of a learning curve, not just with the format; coming up with a topic, making the show compelling, but i am also using a new computer, and Apple Power Book that my friend Noel has loaned me in an attempt to get me to switch. I am learning new software to record my show, etc, etc. I the show is a rambling 24 minutes on campaign uses of technology, specifically about iStand For building websites for competing candidates and also about technology for distributed phone banking.</p> <p>A caveat: I sound a little pompous, i promise to tone my pomposity down a little bit. I am going to shoot for 15 to 20 minute "shows" and make them a bit funnier, and also include some guests. So please, come back and listen to future installments.</p> <p><a href="/files/TheHook1LOW.mp3">Listen to the Hook</a></p> <table id="attachments" class="sticky-enabled"> <thead><tr><th>Attachment</th><th>Size</th> </tr></thead> <tbody> <tr class="odd"><td><a href="http://home.gregoryheller.com/sites/gregoryheller.com/files/TheHook1LOW.mp3">TheHook1LOW.mp3</a></td><td>2.75 MB</td> </tr> </tbody>...

Open Standards – A Call To Action

<a href="http://nten.typepad.com/forecast/2005/02/open_standards_.html">Open Standards – A Call To Action</a> – <em>By Nick Gleason, CitySoft, Inc. and Zack Rosen, CivicSpace Labs Despite recent innovations, technology in politics and the social sector too often limits rather than enables people and organizations to collaborate, share information, and solve problems. The software development organizations…</em> [<a href="http://nten.typepad.com/forecast/">nTEN Forecast</a>] As someone who has spent mane late nights trying to make to data sets play nice (member lists and a voter files) I can fully appreciate the importance of achieving some open standards for contact data. It was really a nice surprise to see this article from Nick and Zack (I've talked to both of you and looked at both products). I am reminded of this article by Tom Adelstein in the Consulting Times http://consultingtimes.com/osgov.html on the open standards in government databases issue. This quote is a good teaser: <block quote>"So, add all the separate naming schemes of local government databases together and you get 16,000 variations. Create a standard and it goes down to 2,000. Put those into categories of reusable components and you wind up with 300 database elements. That's why they call it a standard. It allows disparate systems to work together. It starts to open the window of a manageable task when the interoperable elements number 300 instead of 16,000." </block> If the nTen article was a call to action, how do we get started? Are there and ANSI http://www.ansi.org/ standards to start from? or ISO? Maybe the Open Government Interoperability Project? http://www.ogip.org/ would be interested in this. We really can't afford to...

del.icio.us

<p>I have been reading here and there about <a href="http://del.icio.us" title="http://del.icio.us">http://del.icio.us</a> but couldn't really get my head around it from the little i had read–until today, that is. <a href="Http://del.icio.us" title="Http://del.icio.us">Http://del.icio.us</a> is social networking software for links. You add your inkls or bookmarks to your account at del.icio.us and you "tag" them. Your l;inks becmoe organized by these tags, and you can share them with others. you can subscribe to other users links pages, etc, etc…</p> <p>I feel that you need to really use it to understand it, but it has a tremendous utility for organizations to share bookmarks within the organization, and even with their members.</p> <p>Gideon Rosenblatt has been writing a bit about it here <a href="http://blogs.onenw.org/gideon/archives/001817.html" title="http://blogs.onenw.org/gideon/archives/001817.html">http://blogs.onenw.org/gideon/archives/001817.html</a></p> <p>my del.icio.us page (bookmarks) can be viewed here<br /> <a href="http://del.icio.us/GregoryHeller"...