Project Crabgrass: Software for Direct Democracy and Social Organizing
New open source social networking project that fans of both Ruby on Rails and radical politics might be interested in working on — Project Crabgrass: Software for Direct Democracy and Social Organizing.
Personally, I mainly work with PHP and, to a far lesser extent, Perl. As I grow as a programmer, though, I’m anticipating using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach that reportedly makes Rails so great, but still in PHP using frameworks like Cake. Still, that’s just me. If you’re getting into or are already immersed in Rails, Crabgrass definitely sounds like it might be worth lending a hand with.
Excerpt:
GOALS
The social networking phenomenon holds much promise, but it is clear that the revolution will not be hosted by myspace. We are building a web application currently called Crabgrass with these main goals:
Democratic decision-making: Our primary focus is to facilitate directly democratic decision making for groups and networks. This means easy tools for polling, voting and achieving consensus. Since different situations call for different tools, we plan to support up-down-polls, rate-many-polls, vote-for-one, ranked-voting, formal-consensus, informal-consensus, and different forms of modified consensus.
Group relationships: In social networking, the focus is on the individual and their relationship to other individuals. In organizing networks, the questions are very different. The application will make it clear how groups are related to one another and what human roles and responsibilities people have within a group. Rather than social networking, you could call it social organizing.
Security and privacy: It still requires a high degree of tech savvy in order to communicate securely. By keeping communication enclosed on a single, high-security server and by making it clear who the authorized audience is for a particular message, we can achieve a very high degree of privacy and ease of use.
Messaging platform: Dialog is the lifeblood of democratic organizations, but it is very difficult with current tools to track particular discussion threads. By using a closed system and well-defined domain space, we are confident we can combine the better elements of email, chat/im, and bulletin boards. The goal is a single system that allows users to read just what they want, to communicate in real time, and to have many views into their message space
Ease of use: Even the coolest features in the world are totally useless if people don’t use them. The sites that people actually use tend to be clean, simple, and attractive. At each step, our first priority must usability.
Developers interested in helping out should email: crabgrass@riseup.net
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[...] Via the impeccably relevant Brad Spangler, I’ve learned that there is a Rails project to build a web application for social organizing and direct democracy called Crabgrass. If you’re a Rails developer who wants to see the web become a more productive venue for political activism, I strongly urge you to volunteer. And if you’re experienced in web development but haven’t given Rails a try yet, here’s your chance (this video should pique your interest). Social movements have grown more adept at using the web to communicate publicly. However, we could still use a lot of help in communicating amongst ourselves. In particular, we need the ability to communicate securely; the ability to make decisions between groups and networks that are geographically disbursed; and the ability to have a decision process that is easy to understand, transparent, and directly democratic. [...]