[Campaigns-l] Any Minnesotans out there?

[Steven Clift]

It would be great to connect.  If volunteers here are interested 
perhaps we can kill to birds with one stone.

Since 1994 we've been doing election information directories like:

    http://e-democracy.org/wiki/Minnesota_elections

Last year, we introduced MediaWiki to Minneapolis elections with some 
great success:

    http://e-democracy.org/wiki/Minneapolis_elections

Ideally, the page content/links on our site could also be lifted to 
Campaigns Wikia and to Wikipedia (as appropriate) and vice versa if 
we share some Minnesota volunteers.

Where we need the most help is here:

http://e-
democracy.org/wiki/Minnesota_State_House_and_Senate_candidates

Luckily our state includes web addresses on the candidate forms, so 
many (not all fill it out right) are in hear to transfer over:
http://candidates.sos.state.mn.us/

As a lesson to Campaigns Wikia more broadly no volunteer effort other 
than E-Democracy's has ever developed a comprehensive link list of 
state legislative candidates (example - http://www.e-
democracy.org/2002/leg.html )  And at the local level, we've only 
been able to cover a few cities. So this might be an area where your 
volunteer capacity would provide some an extremely useful public 
service.  We can't expect campaigns to drop out of broadcast mode if 
most of them can't be easily found online where they at least have 
the option of being more interactive on their web sites.

Cheers,
Steven Clift
http://e-democracy.org
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