User:Cholten99

Email : dave@bowsy.co.uk

Projects:

1) Large jacob's ladder - needing a lot of love

2) Steampunk "time travel" project, just starting

3) "Stand Up" website, lots of ideas - now just need to do it...

4) Creating a set of script libraries (PHP, Python, Ruby) to be able to use the JSON output from Google Refine (http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/)

See XLS in my Google Documents See archived email with subject "Geographic/ceremonial county lookup" I recently asked Katie if she knew of any hackers who currently have some free cycles that they might like to put into an interesting project. Not unreasonably she said that people would want to know what it was before commiting themselves - so here's a brief over-view of what I would love to achieve.

What I'm really looking for at the moment is 1 or 2 other coders who could get motivated about this and help to motivate each other to make it happen!

It's called "Stand up!" from one of my all time favourite quotes "Heaven save us from the poltroons who fear to make a choice. Let us stand up and be counted!" (Robert Heinlein).

The site is intended to help the worthy campaigns who urge people to email or otherwise contact their MPs / MEPs / councilors. The 'net makes such campaigns very easy and MPs get 100s of often boilerplate emails that they don't read.

There would be six parts to the site:

1) Joining / profile : Members can sign up by OAuth (Twiter, FB, etc), OpenID or create an account. They can then enter some basic details and upload a photo (or choose to always use their Twitter or FB current user pics).

2) Verifying their identity : This is the key part - associating the account with a specific person at a specific real-world address. My best way of coming up with this is to ask the person to make a £1 donation to one of a list of charities, using PayPal / Experian to supply the name and address of that the credit-card info / PayPal inputted data and then linking that to the account. Obviously this is highly sensitive data and we would need to be very careful how it is stored, transferred, etc.

3) Creating campaigns : Groups such as Amnesty, 38 Degrees and local campaigns can apply to create campaigns on the site. This would be manually moderated. Campaigns could be flagged as "local" (and then limited to a sub-set of post-codes) or national.

4) Users express interest in campaigns : Once a user is verified they can see the list of all campaigns that effect them (all ones that cover their post code and all national ones). They can then select to support (or remove previously given support) from any campaign. Optionally they can opt to support annonymously.

5) MPs and other officials : Of particular interest to MPs but can be seen by anyone. For any given constituency list the local and national campaigns with the most signed up people in that area. Show statistics like "3083 named people and 71 anonymous people out of 10,293 registered voters in the borough of Enfield have Stood Up to support keeping Chase Farm A&E open". Optionally show micro-pictures of people who have expressed support for the campaign in that area (blanks for anonymous).

6) Public campaign pages : Each campaign would have it's own generated page with text and artwork and the ability to list the names (and numbers of anonymous but verified people) who have pledged support for that cause - broken down by constituency.

Obviously this is a fair bit of work and would probably need a few iterations before being opened to the public. Ideally I would love to have some groups like Amnesty, ORG and Oxfam agree to promote it their campign emails before making it available.

There's also some more thinking about use-cases that need to go into this that might involve using the electorial register in some way (what happens when a person has more than one credit-card registered at one address in different names?).

Also, this site excludes anyone who doesn't have access to an online address verification mechanism but I can't see a way around that currently.

While I'd be very interested in people's thoughts about such a project I'm really looking for people who might want to help me run with it!

-)