I've been talking a bit about the need for a good, inexpensive web platform for political campaigns. The way I see it, there are two stumbling blocks for widespread adoption of this idea: the first is a lack of knowledge amongst campaign staffers about what kind of web platform they should purchase. The second is that there really isn't a platform that does everything it needs to do. I'll address the knowledge issue in a later post, but for now, here's an idea for the technology:
it totally perplexes me why the Democratic National Committee can spend several million dollars on a voterfile solution, which by most accounts doesn't really do field voterfile management (genius), and apparently just gloss over the need for a decent web platform for its political candidates.
There, I've said it. I'm also hoping that Zack talks about this need soon.
I think that if the DNC was smart--and lord knows that's a big if--they'd talk with people doing cool and important things on the web, like CivicSpace or with ActBlue and hey, for good measure, what about these guys? I figure the DNC has access to quite a bit of cash, so why not use it to catch the current web platforms that are on the market up to, let's say, current technology (folks, I'm sorry, ColdFusion is out) and hand it out like candy? Hey, maybe I'm naive, and no democratic political candidate will ever trust a DNC-sponsored web platform (they might steal the data), or that the powers that be might lose out tons of money on a communist idea like this one...
I guess maybe this is not in the interest of the powers that be.
