Advocacy Dev II

I went to Advocacy Dev II - a conference for activist software developers. Read about it on the Wiki link.

It was good. High energy and good networking with perhaps 60-70(?) people.

I spent most of my time on the database track - talking about how to create standards for nonprofits to share their data (between organizations or even within the same organization), and to create one or more good nonprofit databases (note: Groundspring has stopped working on Ebase - the leading nonprofit database). CivicCRM is one good canidate for becoming this database. Unfortunately, developing standards is hard because you have to convince a critical mass of people to make it useful.

I also had a meeting with Marc Powell who recently rewrote the Flexomatic software that is being run on beta.indyvoter.org. The software is similar to what I'm doing, with a more Friendster-like approach. He uses Perl, whereas I use PHP. He is using RDF, whereas I'm using regular tables (and SOAP to handle web services). Hopefully we'll come up with good ways of having people who are on one network, appear in the other network. For instance, if you have a person on CampusActivism.org they would appear on Indyvoter with a little logo that says the record came from CampusActivism and if you want to see its full details then you should click on a link to CampusActivism (because Marc isn't supporting things like issues, yet -- and I don't support some of the features that he has).

Gradually we can start supporting each other's functions and move towards integration.

If anyone else wants to integrate, email us!

This could turn into, or be a part of an open source friendster-like system of possibly large proportions. Currently all of the major social networking systems are proprietary and could be used by corporations to create a better profile of you to sell you stuff. Just recently Fox bought MySpace as part of a $500 million purchase (it bought other things too for the price). Corporations like the idea of getting a database of 18 million people and are willing to spend serious cash on it.