The best networking tools around

Back in 2004, when Meetup.com decided that they would start charging for their services, DFA launched DFA Link to help our members connect with each other and organize at the grassroots level. When Howard Dean moved from DFA to the DNC, he had a new set of these networking tools developed and launched. Senator Barack Obama grabbed the same set of tools, literally from the same vendor, and built My.BarackObama.com to help his supporters organize in order to win the Primary. Now we're going to use them to win the General Election, and we're going to keep organizing after November to continue to build our movement. No more pendulum swings back and forth. We're headed into the future, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!

What I had not seen yet is a way to bring these tools together. There is a wall between DFA and the other two groups because we are a PAC, but there is nothing preventing links to all tools coming from a single page. Now there is.

Find more Democrats!

The links on this page will take you to all of the websites around the Web that have been designed to help Democrats and Progressives self-organize.

Each of the services give registered users the ability to search for people who live close to them, form groups of people for a specific area or issue, and organize events to bring people together. We encourage everyone to join one or more of these services and start having a conversation with your neighbors on what direction we want the country to go, and more importantly WHY. This is what the grassroots is all about.

The table on that page came from a work in progress that I'm building. You may have seen some posts from me about Wikia, which is a for-profit advertising funded website launched by Jimmy Wales using the same technology as Wikipedia and Dkosopedia. In July of 2006, Wales launched Campaigns.Wikia, a site set up for people to collaborate on campaigns around the country, and actually globally. I signed on as a volunteer admin. I also found that someone had launched Left.Wikia, and had let it lapse. I've been using it ever since.

One of the things that I am using it for is to keep track of the infrastructure of the Democratic Party and Progressives around the country. I built a list of how each and every county in the country, over 3,000 of them, did in the 2004 election for John Kerry. Bush won most of the counties. Whether McCain will follow in his footsteps is up to us.

Each county page being built on Left.Wikia is a place to provide us with information about how the Party infrastructure is organized, who the candidates are up and down the ticket, and how we can find each other and do the campaign work to get those candidates into office. But just like Wikipedia, this resource is being built one edit, one page at a time. I need help. If you would like to help, please create an account on Wikia and start adding information. It's as easy as Edit, Type, Save, and I can answer any questions on what the plans are in the forums. This is not my personal project. If I wanted this to be under my control, I'd be using PHP on my own server. This is a community project, and I'm asking for help.

If we focus our efforts and resources, not just in a 50 state strategy, but in a 3,000 county strategy, we can win the 2008 election in a landslide not seen since 1932. It's not just about getting enough to win 270 electoral votes. It's about winning a supermajority in the House, the Senate, state legislatures, county government and city government. It's about moving into the future, and never looking back, except to learn the lessons of the past when making plans for a future that we can be proud to give to our kids and grandkids.