politics

RedBlueAmerica is a news-and-debate website we designed and developed for The E. W. Scripps Company. From the press release:

The site will serve as an ongoing public forum for a full array of user- generated content, including blogs, personal profiles, videos and more. While focusing at the outset on the 2008 election campaigns, RedBlueAmerica intends to provide the public with an open forum for a wide range of cultural and political views long after the votes have been counted….

The Free State Project is an effort to recruit 20,000 liberty-loving people to move to New Hampshire. They are looking for “neighborly, productive, tolerant folks from all walks of life, of all ages, creeds, and colors who agree” to the political philosophy expressed in the Statement of Intent, that government exists at most to protect people’s rights, and should neither provide for people nor punish them for activities that interfere with no one else, and support the creation of a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and property.

In essence, this includes everyone who wants to cut the size and scope of government by about two-thirds or more. Put in a positive way, most FSP members support policies such as abolition of all income taxes, elimination of regulatory bureaucracies, repeal of most gun control laws, repeal of most drug prohibition laws, complete free trade, decentralization of government, and widescale privatization. People of this disposition may go by many names: “classical liberals” (not the same as modern liberals at all, but followers of Thomas Jefferson and similar thinkers), libertarians, paleoconservatives, constitutionalists, voluntarists, etc., etc. Most recently, this would include a majority of Ron Paul supporters.

Drupal-wise, the site was migrated from mostly handbuilt static content maintained by a single webmaster for a few years, with over 1000 pages, and some java based backend signup code for the membership tracking and statistics. At this point, it’s all done with Drupal, including more complex signup options allowing different membership conditions depending on the member’s own preferences. Development is tracking using source control, and the IT team consists of about 5-6 volunteers.

Machsomwatch is an established Israeli political organization which is made up of mainly mature (50+) women.
They create massive amounts of content which is fed into “daily reports” which are the by-products of physically traveling to the much discussed Israeli checkpoints and documenting the outcome of their “shift”.
By their physical presence they reduce the amount of violence or harm of human rights.