With politics becoming more and more focused on financial privilege and spending, my plan is to create an open political platform that allows anyone to run and promotes interaction with constituents and specifying solid reasoning for political positions.
Due to school, work, and politics I have yet to roll out any sort of a prototype. My thoughts on the technical standpoints of the website are around the lines of:
- Written on a PHP/MySQL backend using a custom build of Yii Framework
- Using Twitter Bootstrap to present a friendly and responsive User Interface
The features that would be in the first version would include
- Account creation and management
- Campaigning for a position
- Posting your positions with detailed analysis of why you take that position
- A generic rating system similar to Karma with a politiquette system based around telling the truth and whether or not they doing what they propose to do
It is my understanding that many believe we need more representatives in the house and senate. Volunteers and staff who are elected by the people. This does not appear away from the Articles of the Confederation. Is this a helpful consideration. They once elected are never there as long as some have been and can not consume tax money for office and staff, for expenses. House themselves off the hill but innocent and clear from corruptions gleam. They will vote more perfectly.
Navarr, we should talk sometime. I'd like to create a political app that may have some overlap. I'd like to give people the ability to directly weigh in on issues in their local, regional, and national areas directly from the app. Then I'd like to compare how they'd vote with how the governance has voted. Comparative data may show that elected officials may or may not hold the same values as you after all. The League of Women voters has done this in the past but not to this level.
It would be ideal, I think, for a system like this to put non-partisan political pressure on elected officials to actually vote and create laws that the majority of people in a specific area (if app had buy-in) we in favor of.
Will this be a non-profit operation in order to stay nonpartisan? For profit or not, have you thought about how you will support the operation financially?
I'm looking at a couple different ideas for generating finances with the project. Ads could be possible, with a ban on ads for specific political candidates (to discourage political monetary influence on the website).
On that note, i've been thinking it may (or may not) be possible to sell demographic statistics.
One possibility is to charge the candidate a small fee. While some candidates may not have strong financial backing, they should expect to paid a reasonable fee for the service. Free sites often attract low quality contents.
what happened to campaign reform? Who wins if there is never 51% of the vote in this many candidate reality?
Election laws and how they work are out of the scope of this project. This project's sole purpose is a means of communication and learning with potential candidates.