During 2004, I ran a couple websites that attempted to organize what I considered to be important information online. Continue reading to share some current thoughts on this.

People

localpols.fordean.net was initially setup as a listing of candidates inspired to run for local office by Gov. Dean or their involvement with the Dean campaign. Over time, it expanded to have discussions as well as list other good progressive candidates.

Likewise, http://connecticut.smartcampaigns.com was set up to list Democratic candidates specific to Connecticut, even if they weren’t particularly progressive.

I also created http://platform.smartcampaigns.com as a place where people could discuss the 2004 Democratic National Platform

What all of these have in common is people sharing public information about other people. The other day, I spoke with a friend who wanted to do similar things for business acquaintances. In addition, he wanted this information to be easily updated and easily accessed. Based on this, I set up http://contacts.smartcampaigns.com. Contacts is based on Media Wiki, and set up so that anyone can add any contact they wish. So far, I’ve just added a couple, but I’m thinking about adding moving my various listings from above over to this site.

It is worth noting that business.com is building something similar from a business perspective. They have gone out and scraped webpages to build their initial pages, and then individuals can sign up and change their own listings. There are plenty of other groups like this, including many of the social network sites. What makes contacts different is that it is wiki based so anyone can write anything about anyone.

(Yes, I recognize the concerns about this. I have a disclaimer, and if things get out of hand, pages can get locked.)

One of the interesting places where I hope to see this going is tying into Identity Commons. My contact page has a link to my Identity Commons page and I’m kicking around other ways to integrate this.

I’m also thinking about ways to incorporate Gravatars. (FYI, my gravatar is . Has anyone done anything with gravatars in Media Wiki?

Website listings

While I was at the Progressive Democrats of America summit, I started thinking more about getting bloggers organized on a state by state, or even finer granulation basis. Using http://del.icio.us, I started tagging different blogs that I know on this basis, so, for example, check out http://del.icio.us/ahynes1/Connecticut It isn’t completely blogs, but there is a heavy emphasis on progressive blogs from Connecticut.

I mentioned this at pbahq.smartcampaigns.com. I tweaked the aggregator so that you can get an aggregated view of Connecticut Blogs..

Michael Hussey mentioned Kevin Hayden’s listing of progressive bloggers. I dropped Kevin a note and we discussed the issue of keeping such a list up to date. It rapidly becomes a task that is too big for one person, and I wondered if it makes more sense to do it on a system like Civicspace or Media Wiki. I’ll kick this around a little bit, but any comments would be appreciated.

Letters to Elected Officials

My other recent project is http://opengov.smartcampaigns.com. The idea behind Open Gov is that we need a place where people can post publicly messages that they have sent to their elected officials as well as any replies, or, ideally, having the elected officials post their replies directly to the site. I’ve posted a recent letter I sent to my U.S. Representative and my wife posted a letter she sent to our Governor. It would be really great if others could post letters that they’ve recently sent to elected officials.

So, what do you all think about these various projects?