In 2006, Matt Stoller presented Working Assets with a detailed critique of online voter registration system we had developed for the 2006 election. A year later, we are ready to roll out what we expect to be a game-changing web tool for the 2008 election as a direct response to the challenge Stoller laid out.
This new generation voter registration tool is being developed by Working Assets and deployed in partnership with Rock the Vote.
Working Assets, Rock the Vote, and other groups have been using the web to help people complete voter registration forms for several years. But our methods were centralized, top-down and to a large part didn't harness the power of the netroots or bottom up campaigns. Our new tool is an advancement over previous versions for several reasons - thanks to Stoller for helping us conceive of these improvements and to Zack Exley for helping us understand how to execute them. In a nutshell, we're making it as easy to register voters on your blog or web site as it is to post a YouTube video. And we're providing easy-to-use tools to measure your progress and get in touch with your newly registered voters.
Over the next month or so, we'll be rolling out the full functionality of our voter registration widget - a portable application that anyone can embed in virtually any webpage, allowing users to complete a voter registration application for their state that they can open as a PDF, print, sign, and mail in. (Check out a live version at rockthevote.com; just click `Register to Vote' on the splash page.) Folks hosting the widget on their sites have administrative rights for their campaign, meaning they can view and display counts of their registrations and even download the data for people they've registered.
The advances are significant. First, users never have to go to a foreign site to complete the registration process. The application lives fully inside the site it's embedded in. Second, allowing users to make their counts public will let different individuals and groups take credit for their work and even encourage some healthy competition. Finally, giving widget hosts full control over their data is a powerful incentive to use the tool for list building.
If you care about what happens on November 4, 2008 (or November 6, 2007 for that matter), you're probably wondering where to get the code. The full administrative interface where you can sign up and grab the widget on your own will be up by September 1. If you want to be updated on the status of the program, or have an urgent need to be signed up before then, drop me an email at aklaus@workingassets.com.
If you're curious about more of the back story, read on after the jump.
In 2006, Matt Stoller presented Working Assets with a detailed critique of online voter registration system we had developed for the 2006 election. A year later, we are ready to roll out what we expect to be a game-changing web tool for the 2008 election as a direct response to the challenge Stoller laid out.
This new generation voter registration tool is being developed by Working Assets and deployed in partnership with Rock the Vote.
Working Assets, Rock the Vote, and other groups have been using the web to help people complete voter registration forms for several years. But our methods were centralized, top-down and to a large part didn't harness the power of the netroots or bottom up campaigns. Our new tool is an advancement over previous versions for several reasons - thanks to Stoller for helping us conceive of these improvements and to Zack Exley for helping us understand how to execute them. In a nutshell, we're making it as easy to register voters on your blog or web site as it is to post a YouTube video. And we're providing easy-to-use tools to measure your progress and get in touch with your newly registered voters.
Over the next month or so, we'll be rolling out the full functionality of our voter registration widget - a portable application that anyone can embed in virtually any webpage, allowing users to complete a voter registration application for their state that they can open as a PDF, print, sign, and mail in. (Check out a live version at rockthevote.com; just click `Register to Vote' on the splash page.) Folks hosting the widget on their sites have administrative rights for their campaign, meaning they can view and display counts of their registrations and even download the data for people they've registered.
The advances are significant. First, users never have to go to a foreign site to complete the registration process. The application lives fully inside the site it's embedded in. Second, allowing users to make their counts public will let different individuals and groups take credit for their work and even encourage some healthy competition. Finally, giving widget hosts full control over their data is a powerful incentive to use the tool for list building.
If you care about what happens on November 4, 2008 (or November 6, 2007 for that matter), you're probably wondering where to get the code. The full administrative interface where you can sign up and grab the widget on your own will be up by September 1. If you want to be updated on the status of the program, or have an urgent need to be signed up before then, drop me an email at aklaus@workingassets.com.
If you're curious about more of the back story, read on after the jump.
