Here is a post that I just contributed to the Tools for Online Activism discussion at the Online Social Networks 2005 conference. Comments are greatly appreciated.

During the 2004 election cycle, I set up a website, http://localpols.fordean.net to track good progressive candidates running for office, initially those inspired by Dean but ultimately expanded to cover many progressives. I gathered information about 269 different candidates. The two largest groups were those running for State Representative (111) and those running for State Senate (62).

Every two years there are approximately 8000 State legislative races and these races are extremely important in shaping U.S. politics. Redistricting is done at the state legislative level and most people running for national office run for a state legislative office before running for national office.

As part of my tracking, I also tracked what people had for websites. I was interested in this because of my work with CivicSpace and other Drupal related websites. I was also interested because my wife was running for State Representative and I set up her website.

I am a big proponent of people running for state office. I believe that besides the benefits I raise above, it also gives people a bully pulpit that they otherwise would not have. I know my wife took great advantage of this bully pulpit and I would love to see others do the same.

An advantage of having a website based on a good content management system is that a campaign can rapidly update materials and thus become a better bully pulpit. I started tracking the software that different campaigns used and I was interested in the results. Hopefully they will provide an interesting basis for some of the discussion here.

I started classifying sites based on their technology after my site had been up for a while, so 76 of the sites were unclassified. The majority of the sites that were classified, 119 had what I referred to as static websites. I have often commented that people running for state office rarely have much money to spend on their website, so they typically have what I refer to as a website built by the candidate’s brother-in-law who knows just enough Microsoft Front Page to put up a static site.

The largest category of content management software used ended up being Drupal. This was skewed a bit because three of the sites were sites I had put up and because I also included sites for progressive organizations, which figured heavily in the totals.

The next largest grouping after the static sites and the Drupal sites were those campaigns that had no campaign website. After that came sites based on MovableType and Blogger. There was a category of ‘other’ where sites apparently had some content management system, but it wasn’t clear to me what the system was.

It seems clear to me that there is a strong need to make it easier for campaigns to have good websites, many have no websites or static websites. Those that do make use of some sort of blogging or content management system use Drupal, MovableType and Blogger. This addresses the popularity, which in part will be based on functionality, but is also based, in part, on what other people are doing.