sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

Probably the most uninteresting thing I wrote during my first semester at Georgetown was a short review of the Green Party's national website (www.GP.org). The assignment was pretty basic, and so the result was fairly bland... a blow by blow critique of the website, based on a set of criteria provided by the professor.

To summarize briefly... the main strength of the GP website is as an information resource. It provides a ton of details about GP history, positions, etc. The major weaknesses are a lack of rich media, inadequate information about getting involved locally (partly due to very poor ties between the main website and the local and regional branches).

Finally, I ended with a brief recommendation about how to improve the site, generally through a strengthening of ties between local sites and the national site.

I think my paper was fine... the assignement was simple and expectations were low, so I don't know that I'd really bother to write it any differently.

However, it's worth mentioning that I think the Green Party is really failing to take advantage of technology right now. Between Howard Dean and Barack Obama, the grass roots power of the internet should be pretty obvious, but the Green Party really isn't doing much to take advantage of it, at least not in a nationalized or highly visible way.

My work at MEI, and my increasing awareness of the heavy use of open source software at DC non-profits, has convinced me that even a low-budget non-profit should be able to build some pretty damn impressive websites that are nationally scaleable and highly interactive.

In particular, I think some of the new Web 2.0 models are highly suited to the Green Party's decentralized principles. For instance, as a thought experiment, consider what might happen if the Green Party replaced their website with a wiki, and created a subdomain (or some other structure) for each regional branch. This would allow an incredible amount of local control, but also emphasis and strengthen ties between local groups. In addition, a handful of qualified engineers could create shared technologies that far exceed those being produced by what are surely hundreds of independent, disconnected engineers around the country.

Finally, I guess I'll point out, to anybody that doesn't know this, that I registered Green last year. That doesn't mean I'm going to vote straight Green, or even that I entirely support their platform. Rather, I've come to recognize the importance of third party politics at the local level, as a way of adjusting cultural norms. That is, by identifying as Green and discussing certain issues from a Green perspective, I hope to participate in a leftward shift of US cultural views. Democrats and Republicans will continue to do battle for the middle 30% of the electorate, but that middle 30% can slide leftward (just as, some might argue, the middle has slid to the right in recent years).

Here's a more tangible example: I don't think biodiesel or ethanol are particularly viable upgrades to gasoline in the long run, but they might help disrupt our dependence on gasoline, paving the way for other fuel sources of all sorts. This is already evident, as Exxon and BP are being forced to branch out to respond to the threat of biodiesel and ethanol. It also, at the very least, raises the social and political resonance of alternative fuel research, which is a pretty huge accomplishment in itself.