Online Think Tank Project on Election and Campaign Finance Reform

How many times have you seen a slew of good ideas get lost in the flow of forum activity as a thread makes its way toward the archives? How many times have you wished that good ideas could be pulled together, built on, and turned into something?

www.rootstalk.org is a new website that uses shared, member-editable webpages for product-oriented collaboration on think tank projects.

The site has Advocacy Projects on an array of issues, including a "pilot project" on Election and Campaign Finance Reform.

The site has a project are for Developing A Critical Understanding of Conservativism.

The site also has a http://www.rootstalk.org/wiki/PetitionCenter">Petition Center where people can collaborate to write a petition.

If you want to collaborate on developing good ideas, contribute your ideas at www.rootstalk.org.

This site looks very interesting to me, and I think it has significant potential. However, there's nothing I can find on it that tells me who's behind it. Do you know who started the site, who's involved, either people or organizations? I'm looking for some reassurance that the project is worthy of my trust.

It's about as grassroots as it gets. The site emerged from a conversation at the Common Ground Common Sense forum back in November. Two of us got together and started working on a website.

So, the people behind the site are me (Bart) and the user Bootleg (Doug) at the site. We don't have any sort of organizational backing at present, but some folks at True Majority are working on creating a collaborative effort with us.

I attended the Principles Project Conference ( http://www.principlesproject.com/conference ) and met with some folks with 2020 Dems, Music For America, Driving Votes, etc. who are interested in developing tools/formats for online collaboration. I'd say I'm basically on the same page with these folks and Rootstalk is my attempt to develop some of those tools/formats.

Here is the Mission Statement for our think tank projects, which basically says where we're coming from.

Here's a link to my http://www.rootstalk.org/Members/BNW">homepage at the site, which says a bit about me and why I wnated to create the site.

Does that help? If you have any other questions I'd be happy to answer.

Your last homepage link goes to microsoft. And when going around your site, I found some code visible.

zalinda

The homepage link has http twice. It should be http://www.rootstalk.org/Members/BNW

Where did you find code visible?

The pages that people can edit use codes just like the forum posts here, so when you go to edit the pages you see the codes. The history tab includes the codes when it shows what has been added to or removed from the page. Is this what you're seeing?

I've posted some election reform ideas already and will bring this to the attention of e-USE members as a possible collaboration site. Are private forums available and, if so, how would I go about getting one set up (thinking e-USE here)?

We can create a private space for a particular group to have their own forum, wiki, group messaging system, file-sharing capability, etc..

Let me know what you'd like to see and I'd be happy to see what we can do. We would create the workspace and then give permissions to access the workspace to the users who are supposed to be able to access it. This could be done by having people contact the site admin when they join, or by having people put "euse" at the beginning of their username, or by some other means. I can ask the site admin other ways that might be done.

Btw, I like your contributions to the election reform project. Nice work.