Technology
Entries related to technology.
Creating Political Maps, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/30/2004 - 11:53Over the past several months, I have been running a website, http://localpols.fordean.net which lists various progressive candidates. As the list has grown, I’ve been looking for ways to improve the navigation of the site. I set up a simple clickable map so you could click on a state to find specific candidates. I have expanded this to be able to click on the district level, for example, http://localpols.fordean.net/CTStateSenate
I wrote about my initial attempts at this here. As I mentioned then, people had suggested that I check out Mapserver. In theory, it is supposed to work with IIS. However, when I tried using it with IIS on my server, no matter what I did, I kept getting, “CGI Error
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:”
Random Links
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/28/2004 - 14:58As I dig through my emails and messages of the day, I am finding a few interesting things.
I received an email from Intelliseek. They have two interesting sites. http://campaignradar.com provides an interesting snapshot of what is being discussed in the blogosphere with regards to the upcoming election.
If you go to http://www.blogpulse.com/index.html, you can do your own searches on the blogosphere. It looks like a nice tool.
In blogland, my article Herding free-range cats is on CivicSpace.
Herding free-range cats
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/24/2004 - 10:58Herding free-range cats: An exploration into the organizational dynamics of an open software project
On a mid-September weekend in 2004, about two dozen people sat around a table on the fifth floor of an ecologically friendly building in San Francisco. Almost everyone there was under twenty-five, almost everyone there was male, almost everyone there had a laptop fired up and connected to the internet over WiFi, and everyone there was interested in finding ways to better use technology to bring about social change.
It was the first CivicSpace Summit. A year and a half earlier, a couple college kids who had become excited about electoral politics through Howard Dean’s presidential campaign had started talking together. They wanted to build the ultimate open source campaign tool. It would use some sort of content management, syndication of articles, maybe some sort of buddy list, etc. All the sites would be connected together.
Reflections – Part 3
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/16/2004 - 16:23(Originally published in Greater Democracy)
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on my experiences blogging the national conventions. My thoughts have meandered, but I think I’ve finally arrived at the crux of my reflections. Bloggers are not the new media’s journalists. Bloggers are the new media’s op-ed writers.
Politics, Local and National
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/16/2004 - 13:54Yesterday, I spent a bit of time updating LocalPols, my site listing good local politicians around the country, including a clickable map of the State Senate races.
Today, I received an email from the DCCC pointing to an article in The Stakeholder about my local congressman. It presents some good review of how close Shays has really been to Tom Delay.
I've been doing what I can to help the Diane Farrell for Congress campaign, including making turf maps.
