George Soros has a blog! (http://georgesoros.com:80/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Home) He is asking for comments, and I sent the following:

Mr. Soros,

We met at your house at a fundraiser for Howard Dean last year, and I am glad to see your involvement in the Blogosphere. I look forward to reading your comments online.

When Gov. Dean ended his bid for the Presidency, he challenged his supporters to run for local office, and my wife is running for State Representative in Stamford and Greenwich. (http://kimhynes.smartcampaigns.com). The August 30th issue of ‘The Nation’ (http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040830&s=rogers) spoke about the importance of getting involved with state politics.

There are 7,382 state legislators in America. Most people do not know who their state legislators are, most people have never considered running for state legislator, and most state legislative candidates do not have effective websites. Yet the state legislature is the training ground for future members of congress, governors, and presidents.

One of my passions is to lower the barrier of entry for citizens wishing to become involved local politics through promoting open source software aimed at enabling campaigns. CivicSpace (http://www.civicspacelabs.org), Advokit (http://www.advokit.net), and the Organizer's Database (http://www.organizenow.net/odb/odb.php) are great examples of such software.

I am using CivicSpace for my wife’s campaign and I hope that the work I do for her, and for other worthy campaigns can be a framework for helping more candidates run in the future.

It isn’t just the software, Meetups are another great tool for revitalizing democracy. However as Jock Gill, who also writes for Greater Democracy notes, there are currently less than 500 Democratic Party Meetups, when there most be close to 15,000 local Democratic committees and clubs around the country. We need to get people out to meet one another and share the enthusiasm for revitalized democracy.

I write about these topics for the Greater Democracy blog (http://www.greaterdemocracy.org) and was credentialed by the Democratic Party to blog their national convention. I also write about this on my personal blog, Orient Lodge. (http://www.orient-lodge.com) both of which I hope you will visit.

I do hope that you comment in your blog about how we all need to keep the energy from this election alive in the coming years at the local political level so that we can help revitalize democracy around the country and around the world.

Aldon Hynes