Our advocacy folks want to have an activism blog for the upcoming campaigning on the Hinchey vote. (The Hinchey Amendment would bar funding the DoJ to prevent the twelve states with medical marijuana laws from implementing their state laws.
One of the nice things about the internet is it can communicate over a distance a sense of unified action. People working in across the country can tell that they are part of a community working to enact change. I have a couple different ideas that I would like to try out to keep people engaged.
For the blog, I am using Wordpress. One of the first things I would like is to give people a little better sense of community by letting them add user pictures. Profile pics by Hannah Gray is pretty close to what I want. I'm saving a copy locally, so I can track it in subversion.
The major thing that I would like to add is the ability for activists to get a sense of their success relative to other activists and also the progress of the campaign as a whole. I was thinking something simple but revealing, like a bar graph:
Doing simple graphs like this dynamically in SVG is easy enough. Then rasterizing them with Batik to feed them to IE. I could do some basic graphs that are rasterized for IE and then allow more configurable graphs for people with SVG support. (Which is Firefox, Opera and IE with a plugin. Safari supports it in the nightly builds.)
So far each metric I want to be able to see:
For overviews, I guess I want to see totals and maybe a line graph by day or month. Perhaps a breakdown by state.
I need to do a little modeling. The issue is I don't know what the metrics are and I don't know exactly how one will make progress toward those metrics. I may go with a generic points system. Something like: (the definition is php because it needs to include the WordPress prefix)
And I'll add in my test users from the graph with some random data:
So a given user can get however many points according to a given metric. They could also describe, say for instance naming the paper that a letter to the editor was submitted to. Seems simple enough. Changes to wordpress would be: