Getting civiVoter and civiCanvasser back on the road

[peterd]

Hi - I am looking at what would be involved in getting civiVoter and civiCanvasser out of the garage before rust sets in. Have had an initial discussion with Rob Thorne about what would be involved. Clearly such a project would be of value to several civiCRM users.

[fyi CV and CC were built for the Canadian Greens and used for the Ontario? MMP campaign - see here for more info http://civicrm.org/node/169]

So I suppose I have two key questions
- are you, or do you have a client, that would benefit from being able to manage phone canvassing and walk-lists (and the volunteer management side of this)
- do you want to contribute to what might become a wish-list for what CV and CC could deliver if it can be brought up to 2.0 integration
- are you in a position to consider funding (or contributing in kind) to the work involved.

It seems a no-brainer to me to try and have Rob do the initial work as he knows best what he built (we hope ;-) - and may have a window of opportunity coming up.

There may be elements of the work that could get shared/farmed out.

I have a declared interest in seeing this back up and running, but my client won't be able to carry the costs by themselves and it will be too early for some other political clients I know of.

The alternative/default is we do some minimal work arounds to deliver a small portion of CV and CC functionality in some other form - and they unfortunately stay in the garage.

What say you? And are any of you on networks that you could do some sounding on for other organisations that might be interested?

[Donald Lobo]

If we do adapt CV and CC to 2.x, i'd like to ensure that we can do so without any hacks or changes to core. We've made quite a few improvements with regard to this in 2.0 and are doing a few more pieces in 2.1. We will try to migrate some client components to ensure that this can happen, but would be good to also test the theory with CV and CC

lobo

[johnzbesko]

As the chief technology advocate of the Democratic Party of Evanston, Illinois, I have a keen interest in CiviVoter and CiviCanvassor. Specifically, we would like to maintain our membership data using the Cook County Board of Elections data. Frankly, people are more likely to keep their voting information up to date than their info with us (especially those less comfortable with computers.) Each registered voter also has a unique voter id, useful as a database index.

Historically, we have found couples with different last names to be troublesome- hard to determine if a couple is a couple at a same address or are unrelated in separate apartments. Properly addressing a letter can also be a problem.  Maybe someway of cross-linking voters could be devised.

As for canvassing, if someway could be devised to combine property description data, e.g. number of units at an address, with our membership or volunteer lists, we could use our "connection" to canvass behind the locked door of a condo building.

I hope these needs/ideas generate some interest. Unfortunately, like most local volunteer organizations, we don't have much of a budget and the people we have relied on for technology "stuff" get burned out.

[peterd]

Hi John - welcome aboard. Good to hear about your interest. It will be a struggle pulling together enough interested parties to bankroll this given that most political parties will only show interest when they have an election looming ;-)
IN terms of the canvassing in condos, won't your voter register provide the details you need for how many units there are in each building?

[TrvlFox]

I'm not sure how I can help, but i would be very interested in CiviVoter.

[peterd]

I think the core issue at this stage is that Rob Thorne gave a very rough estimate of 100 hours to get it up to 2.0

I need to build a coalition of interested customers to fund the development.

Expressions of interest in the outcome are welcomed  , expressions of interest in the funding are necessary  .

[JoeMurray]

I can contribute time to spec and possibly info architecture. I have clients whom I would like to migrate to this kind of a module, but are currently wedded to other in-house software.

[peterd]

Thanks for posting this Joe - I am having to let go of this as I deal with the final crunch stage of our major implementation, but am meeting with Lobo, Dave etc this week so will be canvassing how we might progress this then.

Unfortunately it looks like my client may be less likely to be able to part-fund now than I had hoped for but not giving up on it.

[gg66]

I'm interested in this. I could contribute some time towards testing

[rogerco]

I'm very interested in this (CC and CV) on a Joomla CMS if at all possible

Not sure how much of the canvassing and voter stuff was available on the fron end through profiles but I'm trying to avoid giving people backend access

If there is any way I can help with testing or Joomla integration please PM me

RogerCO
(location UK, application Green political)

[peterd]

hi roger - civivoter and civicanvasser were all done on the drupal side. i would hope the next effort will get more of it in to core but this is a reasonable size task. i will send you a message direct to compare interests in this.

[tom0063]

We are a volunteer effort for Obama in Omaha Nebraska.

This functionality will be critical to many in our crucial election year 2008.

Any idea when it might be available?  We'd be happy to help test.

[peterd]

Hi Tom - well maybe the snowball is beginning to grow. There is no 'it' at the moment. My hopes that we could get this out of the garage for our client has probably gone past the point of no return for the NZ upcoming election. We also had a fall back of a comprehensive canvassing system that we can run separately, just using the unique electoral id to make the match when we gain some info from a potential voter. not ideal but affordable and fast.

however, i am seriously interested in trying to get this back on the road, preferably so it can be both a left- and right-hand drive model (Drupal and Joomla). I will be in Europe for next couple of months and want to do some pitches to some Euro parties. Hopefully we can build some specs that would meet a wide range of needs and then pass around the hat.

[cap10morgan]

The organizations I work with (Environment America, U.S. PIRG, and others) would potentially be interested in this (potentially even at a funding level). But it would have to work with Standalone (i.e. no CMS). It's fine if that means Civi presents the "admin" back-end and exposes the front-end functionality via a web service API (which we can call from our CMS, WebGUI).

[peterd]

Hey Cap'n - I will have to brush up on implications of 'standalone' before I can digest your suggestion/request/offer. But it certainly ties in with the goal of moving this towards core and away from the drupal/joomla fork.

One thought I have had for our current situation, but suspect the window may have slipped away on us, it to set up a second civiCRM installation, try and get the entire 2 million voters in there (didn't someone ask that civi be tested with a big data set?) and see if we can use that for just generating our work/phone lists (as print outs). Then whenever we get a 'hit' we simply need to enter the UID from the ElRoll in to our first civiCRM, which will then pull in the data from the electoral roll, and update that record directly with the information gathered during the canvassing.

Not as neat as Voter and Canvasser, but potentially delivers us the core data we need.