CEA signup/sponsor kickstarter

[Bruce Skarin]

Greetings,

I've been talking with Larry about doing a signup/membership kickstarter for the CEA and I'd like to hear people's thoughts on A) the concept and B) implementing what I'm hoping is a fairly simple site to track signups and sponsorships, given our past kickstarters.

There could be two goals. The first would be to collect a reasonable, but significant number of citizen co-sponsors of the CEA. That is, people that want to see the CEA made real and passed. There were 70K people that supported Mayday, but so far only around 10K support this campaign. Is 50K a reasonable number, especially since people wouldn't be required to give?

The second goal would be to get a reasonable number of sponsors (1K?). These would be recurring donations similar to what people pay monthly for spotify/netflix/pandora, etc, which could also be part of the case for crowdfunding the CEA. E.g. ask people to switch to the free version of Pandora for year and select a 4.99/month CEA sponsorship to help fix our democracy.

An ideal goal date with significance would be November 8th, one year from elections, but we are already less than a month away already. If we hit our two goals though, then we will fully launch the effort to crowdsource the CEA.

The purpose of crowdsourcing the CEA is twofold, first we want to make sure we get the best possible legislation, the second is to address all the questions and concerns that people have about being citizen co-sponsors. None of the funds dedicated to this effort would go towards running or advertising Lessig's campaign, but would instead go towards having a dedicated operation with messaging that is non-partisan and thus available to candidates for Congress.

This would give the CEA wider appeal, but still direct people back to Larry since he is the only candidate (currently) that is running on it.

What do you think? Can we do this?

Thanks,

-Bruce

[Kipchoge S]

Hi Bruce,

I work at a small non-profit startup that's building a kickstarter-like tool where backers pledge minutes (or votes) rather than money (though financial backing will be possible, too). Like Kickstarter, people only get asked to follow through on pledges once/if the threshold is met where the organizer thinks there's a better than even chance of success. Similarly, backers can choose different pledge levels to match their available time and skills. 

We think the platform will elicit much higher levels of voluntarism and contributor satisfaction. It has lots of applications for the Lessig campaign (e.g., could have been used to get him in this debate, could definitely help him in the primaries), and we've been working hard to get it ready and available. In your example, instead of just getting people to commit to "support" the CEA, we'd be asking them to pledge to specific actions, for example:

- 8 minutes, I will write an email to 3 friends who I think would be interested

- 10 minutes, I will have one conversation with a friend about the CEA

- 15 minutes, I will write a letter to the editor of my local paper about the CEA

- 20 minutes, I will participate in the crowdsourcing exercise

- 2 hours, I will do two phone bank shifts

- 4 hours, I will do four phone bank shifts 

- 8 hours, I will help code the crowdsourcing application

- 10 hours, I can plan and host a local get together

- 40 hours, I will help code the crowdsourcing application

+ yes, I'd like to make a recurring donation (only if the threshold is met!)

etc

Let me know if this seems interesting to you. Also, if any tech/design folks are interested in helping, it could help us be ready faster.

-Kipchoge

[Bruce Skarin]

Hi Kipchoge,

Where considering options now. I do like the idea of letting people specify the level of engagement. In talking with Furf yesterday, we are also considering keeping track of co-sponsors by district, so that we can link people to campaigns for their representatives in Congress. We need to get something up as soon as possible, ideally early November. Is that possible within your current development? If so, can we schedule a hangout/skype session to get a preview of what you've got?

Thanks,

-Bruce

[Tim Huegerich]

Bruce,

Just want to say I am excited about this idea and I think the targets you suggest sound reasonable, given a month timeframe.

Tim

[Kipchoge Spencer]

Hi Tim, 

If anyone here wants to help, please get in touch. Here's the message I sent Bruce: 

We are hoping to have something that works by early November. We could go a little faster if we had help from another Clojure coder or two. We don't have anything except code to show you right now, but happy to talk if you're interested. 

Yours,

Kipchoge

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