• The Voter Project

last modified July 15 by tomlowenhaupt

An informed and engaged public is a hallmark of a strong society. Here we present the sketch for The Voter Project, a civic networking effort centered on developing the voter.nyc domain name. The Project would provide each register voter with a personal civic website, for example FirstName-LastName.voter.nyc.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

An Engaged (Enraged?) Voting Machine
organic-voting-machine.jpg

(Commons photo courtesy of ihorner.) 


UK's Gordon Brown Mimics
The Voter Project -
It's a Bandwagon!

Headline from the March 21, 2010 Telegraph.co.uk

Every citizen to have personal webpage

"Everyone in the country is to be given a personalised webpage for accessing Government services within a year as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online, Gordon Brown is to announce.­"

New York City can do better!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The .nyc TLD will arrive in 2011 and transform the Internet's capacity to focus on the local. It will empower voters, neighborhoods, and civic organizations to identify issue and organize for their resolution.

The Voter Project's focus is on empowering New York City's 8,200,000 residents. It acknowledges that we are but 1/10th of 1% of the world's population living on 400 square miles of the good old earth. And while good domain names, identity ("made in New York"), and tourist portals are the obvious features the .nyc TLD offers, the real advantages, the great hope, is that its arrival will bring improved local communication, through what's today called social networking, but within the context of voters, we think of a civic networking.

With Connecting.nyc Inc. having originated at a community board, and with the sorry state of local communication in the city, we hope to guide .nyc to fill local communication gaps using social networking technology and techniques. One of our favorite projects expressing some of these social networking concepts is the Voter Project.

The Voter Project begins by setting aside the "voters.nyc" domain name-set for use by the city's registered voters. Using the protocol www.firstname-lastname.voter.nyc, a "virtual page" would be created for each registered voter with various local civic ­resources readied based on the voter's address.

Secure Registration

A secure registration method will assure that only active voters sign in to their voter page. For example: registered voters will be able to request, via a web page, that an activation code be sent to their home address (in the real world). Upon activation, the virtual page would be populated with various civic resources and the voter provided secure access to her/his private civic page. Voters could choose to make all or part of their Civic Page publicly visible.

My Civic Page

Items on this civic page will include:

  • Contact information of local, state, and federal elected representatives
  • Location of local voting site
  • Candidate information
  • Identity and contact information for local civic groups
  • Tools for submitting and tracking 311 complaints and 211 inquiries.
  • GIS providing identification of important civic resources
  • Matching tools to locate like mined residents to address opportunities and problems that face the community
  • Discussion, decision making, and collaboration tools

Beyond individual and civic enrichment, the Voter Project might provide other dividends:

  • The basis for an empowering Civic Network
  • The potential for advertising and other revenue
  • A means for residents to participate in Connecting.nyc's governance process.

See our Community Identity, Trust, Justice, and Civic Pride, Issue-Communities, and dotNeighborhoods  pages for related civic networking efforts.


  

Key .nyc Pages