The following is a comment I added to Tracy Joan’s diary on DailyKos about the Edwards My Vote, My Voice contest.

I’ve been fairly critical of all the Presidential campaigns this time around, including the Edwards campaign, even though I’m supporting Sen. Edwards. I’ve felt that they’ve looked at the tools that contributed to some of the successes of the 2004 election cycle, but have missed what is really important, the invitation to innovate.

I believe this is a step in the right direction. The Edwards campaign is inviting people to, hopefully, come up with some innovative advertisements. However, I would like to push this even further. We are at our best when we work together.

I thought about this as I worked on my submission for the contest. I recorded my daughter asking a bunch of those hard questions that six year olds are likely to ask. No, not where do babies come from. She’s asked questions like “Why can’t some of my classmates afford to go to the doctor?”, “When will Joey’s daddy come home from Iraq?”, or “Do you think I’ll get to go see a glacier when I’m older”? I’ve recorded a bunch of these questions and spliced them together into a video. You can see the video on Blip.TV. You will note that it is tagged with a Creative Commons license, “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” This means that someone more creative than I am is free to take it, work with it, and come up with something even better, if they also share it and acknowledge they got it from me. It is part of the reason I like to use Blip.TV. Videos there can be downloaded in their original format and then edited with programs like Movie Maker of iMovies.

I haven’t added the final part of my ad. I’m hoping to get a clip of Sen. Edwards talking about the Moral Test of Our Generation:

America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.

To give our children a better future than we received.

I know that CarolinaGirl has put great videos up on vSocial, so I’ve contacted her to see if I can use extracts from one of her videos. Hopefully, she’ll get a chance to extract a piece I’m looking for and share it with me.

I think that represents the real challenge. Can we work together, to share ideas, scripts, video clips or anything else so that we can come up with an even stronger message reflecting why we believe John Edwards is the person we need in the White House? I’m up for it. I might even be able to get Fiona make a clip for people if you need it.