yo fitz

Will you be live-blogging the party, Jane?

rootz !

I lead a sheltered life — I dont think I know anybody in Connecticut!

Ever-so-slightly off-topic:

Just got a notice from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that on the evening of August 16th they’re going to be showing at the Academy theater here in Los Angeles a new restoration of the original full-length roadshow version of “Chicago” — the first version of Maurine Watkins’ play, based on her articles for the Chicago Tribune. It was directed by Frank Urson, identified by the Academy as “a frequent collaborator of Cecil B. DeMille.” Phyliss Haver stars as Roxie Hart. Eugene Pallette plays the lover she kills in a fit of pique.

In 1942 William Wellman adapted the same paly as “Roxie Hart” with Ginger Rogers. it was a much tamer rendition of Watkins’ play. In 1975 Bob Fosse famously made it into a musical very much in keeping with watkins. Rob Marshall filmed it (with mixed results) in 2002.

Johnny Crawford and his orchestra will provide live accompaniment with period jazz. (Some of you may rememeber Crawford as Chuck Connors son on the 50’s TV series “The Rifleman.”)

While Hecht and MacArthur ripped Watkins off to create “The Front Page,” neither that famous play, nor its equally famous Hawksian reconfiguration as “His Girl Friday” are qute as heart-attack serious as Watkins’ original OR Fosse’s musical.

No idea of what this silent version might be like but I’m greatly looking forward to it.

Everything you need to know about journalism was first discovered by Maurine Watkins.

I agree, it works pretty well. Only thing I feel is a little off-putting is asking for email address at the start-up screen. I like a little foreplay.

yup – ask for the email at the end… asking for email first stopped me cold…

A more useful tool, than, say, the NSA warrantless spying program, Bob Woodward or Judy Miller . Healthier, more effective and less stressful, too, I would submit.

But tell us, Jane. How ’bout dem polls? I bet y’all are a lot more revved up than even those purty race cars in the picture. Am I right or am I right?

SteveAudio@6– that cracked me up, the way you phrased that!

yup – ask for the email at the end… asking for email first stopped me cold…

I stopped when it asked me for my phone number without telling me what it would be used for. I really don’t like to give that out blind.

Stopped me too.

Jane: Where is the Kiss truck now?

ummm…I already donated to Ned and he has been sending me Emails … why am I not in the database already?

I like the idea but agree that it needs a privacy statement and info on how the info will be used. I input everything asked for and then tried 5 names of people I know in CT and none showed up – I know for certain that at least 3 of them are registered dem voters (prob all but being careful here) and yet I got no response to the “find” query. Perhaps overload as we all play with it?

I do like the idea of being able to use a tool like this though.

I got email from some folks asking blogger’s help to lobby for Phil Angelides to spif up his website, I will suggest to them they take a look at this part of Lamont’s site, because the basic idea, as Jane points out, is good.

Running dial-up now, so I can’t play with it…but I’m betting it’s rather like the tool that Deval Patrick is using in MA. This kind of tool has gotten the attention of many IT folks crunching away backend behind campaigns across the country because it can unleash the grassroots’ power. Unfortunately, we are rather thin on IT folks or rather, IT folks are unevenly distributed and must rely on netroots folks with varying degrees of capability to help.

We need to find a way to roll this out to every single county/parish in the U.S., using open source tools like a standardized, push-the-button-dummy (no offense, gang, must be VERY simple) website not unlike Civicspace. This also means we need hosting that is rapidly scalable, databases for each county/parish to which we can attach this tool, and cooperative folks in the grassroots who will assume responsibility for rolling this out to both the party and to any other progressives in their precinct/county/parish.

We’ve been trying to do the door-to-door thing for canvassing, trying to validate voter data while doing literature drops and other tasks at the same time. Unfortunately, it’s always the same handful of folks who do it even though we know there are more folks who’d like to help but are limited by scheduling or physical issues. This kind of tool would help us scale up the effort on the kinds of terms that more folks can use — flexible, on their time and schedule, with folks they know.

So what’s the next step?

Good story in the Wash Post which starts out as

HARTFORD, Conn. — Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman is enlisting help in his re-election campaign from former President Clinton, the man he criticized in 1998 for “disgraceful behavior” in a sex scandal with a White House intern.

Clinton and Lieberman are scheduled to campaign together in Connecticut on Monday as the three-term lawmaker struggles against challenger Ned Lamont, a multimillionaire businessman who has questioned his rival’s Democratic credentials and assailed his support for the Iraq war.

A new poll released Thursday showed that Lieberman has lost ground to Lamont and is narrowly trailing him for the first time in their race. Lamont had support from 51 percent and Lieberman from 47 percent of likely Democratic voters in the latest Quinnipiac University poll _ a slight Lamont lead given the survey’s error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The lead sentence confirms what people cautioned earlier today about Lamont supporters not needing to bring up the Monica issue. Reporters will do that themselves. Just show up respectfully, and in respectable numbers, where Clinton and Lieberman are speaking on Monday. The press will do the rest.

Rayne — yes, yes!

I also don’t know anyone in Connecticut — well, I know someone whose father lives in Connecticut, but he’s already going to vote for Ned. But this looks like a fabu tool for my guy Charlie Brown in our seemingly ruby red district that nevertheless has enough Dems, Indies and disgusted Republicans to get him elected — if we can just reach them!!

Same reaction re: the email addy request from the getgo. Why do they need this, and what is it going to be used for anyway? I didn’t click through, because for me that request w/o explanation is a huge turn-off. Seems kinda “unfriendly” as a first encounter.

New Thread, The General Himself, patriot boy!

I gave all of my information to the site and could not get in. What the heck have I done? Never again!

Unfortunately, I can’t give this the time I’d like, under deadline and need to pull an all-nighter, also on this fricking dial-up in Great White North where DSL is unavailable. (I want to scream…gah…need to read beaucoup webpages and all of them at 56Kbps.)

The email addy thing is a user-interface issue that needs further attention before we would actually go too far with development of a better mousetrap. Question for you folks who don’t like the email addy issue: would you feel better if there was an explainer on the page that told you what the email addy was doing for you and why?

On what limited info I have, I believe the email addy serves as your unique identifier — even if you end up with a userid in the end, the addy is what differentiates you from everyone else. Most of us already use our addy as an identifier for other banal tasks like establishing a free email account (like Yahoo or Gmail, must have another email account for them to contact you). The challenge is that this database to which users would be given access is not the same or identical database to which users may subscribe for newsletters or donations; there should be a synch-ing process to clone records across these databases.

I’ll check back later after I make some headway on this report that’s due in the a.m.

Just want you to know Jane, I signed up and I don’t even know anyone in Connecticut.

They need to add a NOSCRIPT section to their page that explains you need to enable Javascript. I’d have left that little tip there, but I wasn’t willing to use Javascript just to do that.

Hint to webmasters everywhere. If you’re going to require Javascript, be sure to say so on your site.

Hi folks, thanks for the kind words. I wrote the ff&n software to replace a really awful attempt by the voter file vendor. Mave Gibson (.com) did all the graphic design. Would it be appropriate for me to respond to the issues raised and ask for suggestions?
Thanks,
Dave

I don’t know what anyone else thinks, Dave, but I would love it if you would do so.

They need to explain how it works up front. Like a few others here, I am out of it, and know no one in CT. Doesn’t help that the post above this one by General Christian says that you use it to contact strangers… which is it? Do you need to know some one in CT? I checked some Congressional candidates running where I do know people, but none of them have it. Another post on this with some more background and info. I like the idea and would like to use it.

One question: Is there a website we can go to to find out how to use this tool with other candidates?

Rayne, yes re: the email addy- It does need to be explained up front why this is asked for, and what the info is going to be used for. My inbox is so overwhelmed that I don’t need extra stuff. If, in the case of the Lamont campaign, they’re going to start sending me campaign updates and requests for donations, I don’t need that extra burden- I already know how to do that via other means. So, my first reaction to the request for the email addy was oh, they want to know “are you a real person, and can we treat you as a cash cow?” Now I know perfectly well that this is NOT what the Lamont campaign is about, and NOT what the friends and neighbors idea is about. But, Jane asked for an evaluation, a test-drive, so that is my honest reaction.

Do you all know that you are double-EPU’d?

Dave Markman- thanks- yes- of course respond and ask for suggestions- I’m here, anyway, and long ago decided that the Lamont challenge was going to turn out to be one of the most important, if not the most important, election events. So, I am a total supporter of Ned’s efforts. I hope you don’t take any of my previous comments as contrary to that.

That site scares the pants off me and is unimpressive. It’s a privacy nightmare. I won’t give details here. The end result is something not very valuable, namely form postcards to strangers. Howard Dean had the right idea, send actual HANDWRITTEN LETTERS that are written and sent one by one. Actual human contact like that breaks through psychological barriers. These postcards are just more junk mail coming out of a computer.

Re Civicspace and the desire for something like it: what’s wrong with Civicspace itself? It was developed during the Dean presidential campaign to do exactly what we’re talking about (it used to be called Deanspace).

I think one can get too wrapped up in this high tech stuff and lose sight of the bottomline requirement, which is feet on the ground and a way to organize them. Dean in Iowa had the feet, but maybe not enough tech to stop multiple volunteers from hitting up the same houses, etc. Having more tech and fewer feet is just as bad.

And why are we having this conversation TWO AND A HALF WEEKS from the primary? If any important tech stuff is not completely in order and fully operational by now, the campaign is in a world of trouble. And if it’s unimportant stuff that we’re talking about, then chuck it, concentrate on the important stuff.

I’ve been feeling very pessimistic about the Ned campaign over the past few days. I’m a software developer so if there’s something I can help with, let me know (here, I guess–I don’t post a real email) but it’s really way too late in the game to be thinking about any significant new software deployment. This should have been done 3 months ago if not earlier.

Google civicspace and the first hit is a warning.

As I mentioned earlier I gave all info upon request and could not get in. Just got this e-mail and cannot get in until manana. hmmm

Michael,

This message confirms that you have successfully registered to use the
Ned Lamont For US Senate Campaign’s Family, Friends and Neighbors program.

We’ll be contacting you soon to provide further instructions on additional
ways our program can assist you in your volunteer efforts on behalf of
Ned and the campaign.

Please be patient as we get all get used to the new software, and if
you have any questions or comments, please use the ‘Feedback’ feature
at our website.

A few soon-to-be-released features:

- Review, edit or delete postcards within 24 hours of their entry.
- Reminders and suggestions on how to follow up with your FF&N.
- Notify the staff for help with lawn signs, rides to the polls,
absentee ballots, etc.

Thanks for helping us to take back the heart and soul of the Democratic party!

PS: If you registered today (Thursday, 7-13) and finished your cards, you
may not yet have the option to ‘Log in’ again until tomorrow.

Your account information:

The warning when you google civicspace is an advertisement. Yes, in theory when you set up stuff like this its easy to make security holes – your average Linux newbie just LOVES to open permissions wide open at the first sign of trouble – 777 = stupid – but I’m no newbie, and I’ve installed Civicspace and it’s no less secure than any other PHP app.

I agree about asking for the e-mail first. If you are going to do that, you need a prominent link to a privacy notice and a link that will at least tell you about what you will see after you enter personal info – it can be just a few medium-res screenshots even.

none is correct Lamont should drop this like a hot potato for now. It probably has potential for the younger crowd. I am intrigued and will watch this thread for more input. ROOTS!

Eureka Springs AR & none — understand the reluctance for adoption so late in the game, as well as a dual-track beta/production approach (i.e., testing and tweaking a new application while actively using it at the same time).

What I think this application could do is provide us with another tool for folks who might not otherwise either get out on the street, or for accessing folks who might listen to friends before they listened to strangers.
1) Can folks who don’t have the time or ability to go canvassing and lit dropping find the time to contact their friends and neighbors using a tool like this? I think the odds are good.
2) Can the system encourage improved voter record gathering while allowing voters to be contacted by people they trust – friends and neighbors?
This is where I think late and rapid adoption could be an enormous help.

Dave Markman — glad to see you dropped in, hope you acquired some helpful info while you were here. I can’t place enough emphasis on transparency on this kind of system, with the exception of the voters’ and users’ personal information. Thanks for your efforts.

none — I think Civicspace is a GREAT tool, but it is NOT currently PTBD easy for most users. It has to be as easy or easier than Blogger or MySpace before we can successfully disseminate it. Remember that many small campaigns (if not most small campaigns) have no IT skills on staff — if they even have a staff.

OK, I just can’t resist. Let me give some background first. I walked into the HQ about 4 weeks ago and asked My friends Tom Swan and John Murphy if there was anything I could do to help…

They had asked their voterfile vendor to make this tool, and the vendor failed really badly. I’ll spare the deets, but after a week of trying to fix it, I told them we’d need to start from scratch. Think “legacy app with html front end, no field-level smarts, and bad data”. No From:, no To:, no Personal Message:, make ‘em cough up the contact’s email & phone – you get the picture.

Part of the disconnect was that the field folks (I consider myself one) wanted to replicate the sit-em-down-with-index-cards-and-stamps thing we’d always done, and the online community folks wanted to engage the online universe. Both are important goals and both groups are sincerely trying to make the world a better place, but in the end, we all really just need to make voters vote. FF&N is a field tool that lives online to provide access.

Sorry for the ramble – not alot of human contact for the past few weeks and I’m blown away by the fact that somebody cares to listen.

So two weeks later, here we are. I agree with most of the comments – keep in mind the timeframe and that PHP & mySQL are new to me. Also that you’re a sophisticated user and I wrote this for your grandmother. If you know 10 ‘postcards’, she knows 100.

1) Privacy: everybody’s right. With the pressure to get this up & running, most of the ‘words’ are placeholders. I’ve always planned to have a t-o-s style clickon with links to eff, etc, but haven’t yet had time. Also details about the voters’ privacy – there’s not a clear law in CT, but there should be. If anybody has language to throw out, please do. If I could, though, time’s pretty short, and if you’re trying to get my attention here, specifics would be great.

2) email & phone: We do have a policy but haven’t stated it. (language help?) We’re part of the campaign, but will not share your email address with the campaign-at-large for event-spamming. It’s only for the purpose of communicating with you on ff&n, and there are lots of reasons to do so. Review and (planned) edit your cards. Ask you to come back and call ‘em up, id, lawnsign, rides, party change… Also want to let you know that we can’t send your postcard as written for various reasons and ask if we should let you edit or delete it. We expect some malicious behavior (none yet) and may need to confirm that you’re you. Remind you about GOTV stuff. You’re really signing up to manage your own GOTV universe, and we need to communicate.

3) field order: Strictly a usability issue. I chose the conversational approach (hi, mabel, what’s your email…), as this ajaxey environment lets me do lots of cool things I’ve always done in legacy apps, only this time for the world instead of a small group of users. If I know your email (aka unique username) up front, I can branch to new user/old user paths right away. v2.0 (last thurs – mon) cut this corner with an input-field / submit model x2 and we had lots of user problems, especially since people were confused as to whether they’d already registered. How many times have you clicked submit, got yelled at for a bad validation, then come back to an empty form? This approach also lets me avoid the tab vs enter nightmare. Put down your mouse, focus on a single spot at the top of the screen, and count the keystrokes. Sorry that sounded preachy – I’d love to hear feedback on this issue.

4) To the person who got stuck: sorry, you have what we call ‘the safari problem’ if anybody knows why this doesn’t work, please let me know:

browsername=navigator.appName;
if (browsername.indexOf(”Netscape”)!=-1) {browsername=”NS”}
if (browsername.indexOf(”Microsoft”)!=-1) {browsername=”MSIE”}
if (browsername.indexOf(”Safari”)!=-1) {browsername=”Safari”}

if (browsername == “Safari”) {…firefox link…}

I did Safari last without an else in case the log entry said both.

real tech support call…

senior citizen: I’d like to report a problem with my AOL.

me: ok, ma’am, what’s your first name?

her: Buz…

Buz is Ned’s lovely 80 y.o. mom, and I safaried her.

Anyhow,

I really am excited to hear what you have to say, but I’m going to get back to work for a bit. I’m working with translators on the postcards – they’re party-sensitive (Try J Rell, the R-Gov) – and the U message talks about party-switching. Thanks in advance for any help, and If you’re interested, I’ll write more when I can.

Dave

Dave Markman, re privacy, the program has a big problem that you’re not addressing at all. The problem is bad enough that I don’t even want to post it here. Post a PGP key if you have one, for details.

Suppose there are no problems and the thing works perfectly. The result? Junk mail postcards, ineffectual given the amount of junk mail everyone already gets. It’s just spam on paper.

Dean’s handwritten letters really made an impact. I wrote several myself. Anything that comes out of a computer is nowhere near as effective.

This program is well intended but is way too late in the game and doesn’t do the right stuff. GOTV needs people physically pounding the pavement, not tapping a keyboard. IT can help coordinate that but I don’t have a sense that this is being done.

Lamont’s campaign is messing up in several other ways too. I’m not even sure he really wants to win. Certainly he’s approaching this like a newbie–we can’t hold that against him too much because he IS one. But he should have studied the Dean campaign very closely, repeated the successes and avoided the errors. And the successes with voters all involved human to human contact (meetups, door to door canvassing, handwritten letters) unmediated by computers. The IT was all behind the scenes. Of course people already involved used the net extensively for communication, but for someone uninvolved, anything that comes out of a machine is spam.

In response to none I agree about the personal touch. I think an e-mail from a friend or family member will get a read at least.
This whole idea has roots project written all over it.

GOTV needs people physically pounding the pavement, not tapping a keyboard.

none, what if there simply aren’t enough bodies to go around to beat on the doors? Is something better than nothing in contacting voters?

I’m not talking about individual campaigns, but an aggregated coordinated campaign approach post-primary. There are only so many activists to go around. I figure in my state of 10 million residents, we can’t count on an average of more than 25 activists per county (83 counties) to do the GOTV leg work.

none: why the all-or-nothing thinking? this tool might not appeal to you, but it’s certainly appealed to many others, and surely that’s a “good thing.” after all, in a political campaign there can never be too many ways to get productively involved. no, this tool doesn’t replace the personal touch, but it does complement it, and it’s not as though when this thing was created, the other approaches were thrown out. this is being done in addition to other initiatives in the campaign.

and a clarification: this tool has existed for quite some time – it’s not “newly launched.” the first version, however, was incredibly poorly put together, and the one you see now is the result of efforts to redesign it. it works, it’s being used, and despite the obvious tweaks still needed, satisfies the key purposes required of it.

Rayne, there is only a need for an aggragated post-primary effort if Lamont actually WINS THE PRIMARY. And that’s very much in question given the state of things. The GOTV effort is needed the most intensely RIGHT NOW, not after the primary. The primary is going to be ENTIRELY about GOTV.

OK – I thought I’d take a look. I’ve worked in IT as a systems analyst or whatever we call it these days for over 20 years. The following are notes I took during the 5 minutes I spent with it.

1. Sign up process

This is not secure. Either a password and registration, or ‘reenter your password’

Decide on the level of security and stick to it. This is two levels, not one. If I sign up without
a password anyone can put words in my mouth later.

If you’re going to use my name and address you need a round-trip validation process to make sure it’s
really me. Something like the “we’ll send you an email with a confirmation code” that many sites
use.

2. … and it doesn’t work anyway. Retyping password does nothing. Fix this, or fix the text.

3. Getting Started (name, address etc)

Should be a form, not a field by field dialog. This is very primitive coding.

4. ‘Find a Friend’

This is displayed immediately after registration. Why???? At this point I want some interaction/display
from the system. I want it to give me something, not just decide that it knows what I want to do
(find a friend) and then force me to do it.

‘Finding a friend’ is a search function that has *nothing* to do with why I (as the
stand-in-for-the-normal-user) has come to this site.

If I want to ‘find a friend’ I look in my phone book. On the other hand, if I want to know if they’re
part of the campaign I’ll either already know or I’ll ask them myself.

5. Then I get a list of names and addresses which kind of match my search criteria, but none of whom are
the person I entered.

At this point, those other people have no privacy and – even though I don’t know them – I know their
names and addresses. Writing a bot to harvest identities out of this will be a doddle.

6. Then ‘Send a Postcard’

At this point I’m asked to send a postcard to someone who has already registered.

What is the point? The other person has already declared their support. Are we supposed to send
self-congratjulatory messages to the already converted?

7. Again, the last 3 steps are very primitive design. I’m given a dialog with no intimation of
it’s purpose, and I’m being spoon fed it field by field.

8. And I’m being led through a script. This is system design at it’s worst. This is worse than the
old green-screen days (pre Mac).

C’mon you guys run web sites, you know how to build them. Rule #1: Let the user drive.

9. Question: what do I do if I don’t want to find a friend? I can’t get to the main site unless
I figure out that clicking on the main logo will get me there.

In summary, this seems not to have been conceived well. It’s difficult to figure out what it’s trying
to do. Find a friend? But only if they’re already a supporter? Send them a postcard? But only
if they’re already signed up?

Maybe a blog format, with forums (and more collaborative, networky type stuff where people don’t
necessarily have to communicate via the server) might be better.

Good morning all. Dave, if you check back in:

Suggested language for opening contact with user:

Your email address is your unique username for the Friends, Family & Neighbors program. We won’t give it to anyone for any purpose, not even the campaign. We will use it to communicate with you about using Friends, Family & Neighbors.

Will this tool be available for other campaigns? I see it as potentially quite powerful in a district like mine, CA-04, that is geographically huge and physically hard-to-cover. Plus, the independents and Democrats traditionally fly under the radar here.

james – you misunderstand the entire purpose of this tool. it exists only to find friends and send them postcards. the friends you search through are people who exist in the voter file, NOT people who have signed up previously. it is accessed only through the nedlamont.com home page, and is not promoted as a “free-standing” site.

although this would all be clear with better text and a different way of talking to the user.

Linda, We love you. Your suggested text or something very close will be there in v2.3, hopefully in the am (sat). We can talk about other races when Senator Lamont says we can go home.

Hi James,
Thanks for taking the time to review the software. I can see that you’re really unhappy about our approach, somehow really mad at us (the designers), and I hear what you’re saying. At this point, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong on all counts, and as the site is doing its job, don’t see anything in your comments that’s more important than the other things I’m working on. But if you want to pick your favorite -one- and send it on by, be glad to respond. Be sure you know that even though you think we’re incompetent, we HAVE thought very carefully about the issues you raise and just came to different conclusions. I may be apologizing for things that are MISSING, but I’d be happy to defend any decision we made about what’s not. We’re planning a v3.0 soon after we win the primary, and hope to have lots more input from folks like y’all before then.