early draft for a Campaign module for Alaveteli

[Csaba Madarász]

Hi Here.

I have just posted an idea/problem-solution to IACC Hackathon.
Since it is connected to Alaveteli, I am sharing this birthday present with you for feedback and development.


Cheers,

Csaba
(chaba)

Campaign module for Alaveteli software

Many of the FOI (Freedom of Information) websites around the world are run by Alaveteli - an opensource software, designed for online FOI requests.

The community software is a great piece of art, however, the recent experiances in Hungary (and maybe in other countries) are calling for the further development.

I call this the Circular module.

The module's aim is to provide a possibility to select a specific area geographically, for example your town or county, or as a theme like education or health services etc.

The campaign module would help citizens to focus on concentrated FOI requests series - a list of tasks requests, that can help communitites to "purify the information mud" that surrounds many local or government owned public institutions.

The right solution needs a pscycho-technical solution - to make information request - purification -  a community happening!

The module would make the basically the possibility for interested citizens to 

• draft or join campaings (a series of different information management tasks) that members can perform to strenghten the transparency in their local/choosen area. This is like building a healthy database of public data in a reversed way

• gather interested people around themes, topics and geographical areas to concentrate further on improving the world by working together in this context too!. This would also help to find similar requests and provide a place for conversation and knowledge sharing..

• offer activities to build citizen consciousness around data, public data and the role of citizens to work with it.

• help the work of journalists by working on themes with their readers and to  create,store and reuse specific FOI request templates (just like web or presentation templates :)

• initiate (socio-technical-acu) pressure on public bodies to release and make more data public in a structured way:)

An example problem and solution:

The contact database of public bodies, that FOI fighters using is never complete.

It happens, that the state itself does not have a complete contact database about where to turn with the FOI requests - at local level the situation is much worse!  Most of the FOI fighther groups spend with their activists a huge amount of time to get and check the contacts for FOI requests for different public bodies.

For this work it is essential to gather the concentrated work of volunteers to speed up the data purification process!!

Users will be offered basically:

•  to select themes that are in their interests and join other themes easly later by doing some work in it

• recieve campaign messages-offerings on their selected themes

• select tasks, that they can perform

• see how a campaign is rolling- just as they see about the FOI request stages

Possible tasks:

• provide healthy feedback on the work of others (double-check)

• checking email adresses on websites

• phoning a telephone number 

• writing an email

• sending a FOI request or more

• support FOI requests

• draft FOI campaigns

• initiate converstaion - supported expression blocks for helping new community workers to use in comment conversation

• learn and ask for learning package about the selected theme/topic.

• share tasks, 

• embed tasklists of a campaign on other websites

The features could be ideally developed by integrating opensource or other software or with existing solution for task management (like Redmine) and to Mantis that and CRM like functionality and working as Change.org!

Or what coders can imagine to harmonize tasks with feelings:)

 

[Uldis Sprogis]

Looks like a very well thought out system for users and user communications on important ideas and actions. I can't wait to sign up as a user and start making contacts with other users who have our common goals in mind! Sincerely, Uldis Sprogis