By Justin Oberman, 09/15/2008 - 8:43pm
While I usually cover only the mobile stuff for Personal Democracy and TechPresident I happened to be one of the few PDF/TechPresident bloggers at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco last week. While I was there launching my own company, I came across Politics4All.com while walking around the Demo Pit area on day two of the event.
If you have not heard of the website that is because they just launched at the TechCrunch 50. And whether it was the climate of election season mixed with the fact that they were the only political technology in the demo pit area or not, the Politics4All booth was constantly abuzz with inquiring minds and conversation.
I do not normally cover these kinds of things and my bandwidth is a little taken up by mobile related stories but I will try to cover the basics. Luckily, I made a Qik video of our discussion which you can view for more information (the sound is a bit spotty, sorry).
If I were to explain Politics4All using already existing examples, I would say its a combination of Essembly, Connect2Elect and Facebook. Politics4All boldly attempts to brings together the power to navigate through the oftentimes confusing process of selecting candidates with connecting politically interested individuals and providing them a place to engage in discussions and organize to take action.
"Politics4All is a little bit different then any political website you have been to," boasts Stephen Morris, the websites President who founded the website a little over a year ago in Montgomery Alabama. The goal of the site is to, as Morris puts it, "combine citizens with the candidates and various political groups into one social platform."
While personal profiles are available so that anyone can build a profile around their political ideologies, the real power is in the candidate profiles which come equipped with press kits, volunteer mechanism and the works.
The groups section of the website allows everything from a national to local organization to present their information on a neutral website that matches users up based on a users profile. One feature that stuck out here was legislative tracking abilities.
The meeting and debate functions are very robust, allowing groups or candidates to create online meeting in either an interview style, a public forum style or even in a moderated or unmoderated debate style.
While Morris hopes he gets traction from the Presidential election he says that site was really engineered to help the 420,000 smaller campaigns and the people in general take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies.
Please leave comments to tell readers what you think :-)
To see the demo click here or find it bellow :-)
Technorati Tags: mcain, obama, politics4all, tc50, techcrunch50
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