Report - 20060606 - Starting Out
Jennifer...@gmail.com
I'm just writing something that summarizes what I see as the big
picture for Unity Supporters. After posting this same message in all
the various forums I'm hoping to get feedback: errors on my part
corrected, bad ideas reined in, that sort of thing. In the meantime,
people in all the various places get a summary of what's happening in
the other places.
I heard about the Unity Party on June 3rd and within a couple hours
started putting up the site. I spent June 4th and June 5th figuring
out what kinds of things should go up, what "a good implementation of
each idea" was, and adding it to the site. The site was live the
entire time, but no one noticed.
Towards the end of June 5th there were links to the site on the web.
Both the Yahoo group and the Google group have links to the main page.
Two blogs from Google's first page when you search on "unity08" have
comments directing people here. Finally last night I crossed my
fingers and put something on the Unity Party's own page with a links to
the main site and the various pieces of it.
(1) The web forum is by far the biggest hit. As of 11AM June 6th, 12
people other than me had signed on and there were 24 total posts. This
will be the thing to watch most closely and improve in the early days.
(2) The wiki seems not to have received any content additions other
than one from a friend of mine who put in a comment about
anarcho-capitalism obviating the need for traditional politics just to
be snarky.
(3) The Yahoo group has one new person and no posts.
(4) The Google group has one new person and no posts.
The thing I began to realize on the 5th and is becoming more clearly
necessary is an opt-in "broadcasting mailing list". Something that
will make it easy to send something like this very message to everyone
in all the forums and the people who stopped by the main page who don't
have time for anything else but still want to stay "updated".
I'll be looking into my hosts and see if they have off-the-shelf stuff
I can use for the task. On the other hand, if anyone *else* can do
this, rather than hunting for glory I'm more of the lazy sort... I'd
*love* to get some collaborators, so if anyone has something like that
already set up if they could drop me a line at "Jennifer For Unity"
(but no spaces) {AT} "google's mail domain" that would be sweet.
One thing I'm worried about is scaling. In the discussions I've seen
for broadcast mailing lists they talk about a list of people 4000 big
as "small". I'm wondering how long it will take the web forum (for
example) to turn into a laggy nightmare if I've got 4000 users on my
little server...
Moreover, the goal of the Unity Party (if I understand correctly) is to
have 20 *million* people vote online in a bit over a year. So if this
"Unity Supporters" thing I started has any appreciable fraction of them
we're talking about the services scaling up to on the order of a
million people... ulp. And when I think about getting a user an hour
on the web forum *during the middle of the night* and then imagine them
telling people about it and exponential growth kicking in... wow. I
think after that mailing list the next thing to do might be to put up a
donations page and start looking for additional hosting capacity.
So I guess I should end with some uplifting quote, so, uhh... "Viva la
revolucion?!"
-Jennifer