CivicSpace Labs: Better politics through open source (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge looks at the CivicSpace Labs project. "CivicSpace is picking up where the technical arms of the Dean and Clark campaigns left off. Mostly, this means developing a set of GPLed tools to help progressive political groups build and publish Web sites, blogs, forums, and photo galleries, create polls and surveys, organize events, create mailing lists, and more. Rosen, co-founder and director of CivicSpace, says that while his organization's software is designed with political organizing in mind, it's in use by other kinds of civic groups as well, including groups of poets, churches, and even a fox-hunting information portal."

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CivicSpace Labs: Better politics through open source (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 24, 2005 19:26 UTC (Fri) by rriggs (subscriber, #11598) [Link]

developing a set of GPLed tools to help progressive political groups

What is it about the tools that are uniqurely useful to progressive political groups that would not be useful non-progressive (regressive? congressive?) political sgroup? Auto-filtering of non-PC speech? Lacking a wire-transfer feature for Global-50 corporate donors?

Just curious...

CivicSpace Labs: Better politics through open source (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 24, 2005 23:11 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

You pose an interesting question, and I believe it has already been answered. Most "progressive", that is left-wing, liberal websites allow community participation. They allow posting of comments, articles, diaries, and so forth. Most right-wing, conservative websites do not allow participation. This is why you see things like MediaWiki and Scoop being pitched as tools for the progressives. The customers are self-selecting.

This is not scientific research, but see "Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere" for more information.

CivicSpace Labs: Better politics through open source (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 27, 2005 16:01 UTC (Mon) by ahoppin (guest, #30697) [Link]

To be clear, CivicSpace Labs is non-partisan. While "Progressive" (capitalized) has come to be
equated with "Liberal" and sometimes "Democrat" during the last US election cycle, "progressive"
(not capitalized) is the sense in which CivicSpace Labs uses the word; its definition as we mean it
is:

"Promoting or favoring progress toward better conditions or new policies, ideas, or methods: a
progressive politician; progressive business leadership" (from The American Heritage® Dictionary
of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2004, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.)

While it is true that many Progressive groups use CivicSpace software, so do Conservative and
Libertarian groups, as well as many non-partisan and apolitical groups. All of these groups can
lay claim to working on progressive (little 'p') projects.

Cheers,
Andrew Hoppin
CivicSpace Labs