BBV: Well, sort of - read this and you'll see - maybe you can offer advice

[GregD]

Hey folks - many of you know that I'm running www.VerifiedVoting.org along with a small team. A few of us found out about the BBV issue earlier this year, gravitated towards Dill, and volunteered to run the site and related activities.

Clearly, we are making progress, but are discovering that "physical distance" and "the freaking amazing amount of stuff we have to track" is making things somewhat challenging. Everyone involved in the site, including the core team and key volunteers, are located all over the country. We receive email at an unbelievable pace, are trying to keep track of volunteers and their respective efforts from all over the nation, and each of us has effectively become an "island of knowledge" so to speak. Trying to effectively share knowledge and status data with each other is overwhelming.

Does anyone work with some sort of "online collobaration" tools that you feel is really good? Is it something that we can get our hands on (assuming we have zero funding)?

We need an EASY means of indexing emails and stuff (and being able to locate them later), the ability to keep notes associated with people and events, and to share all this information with the rest of the team.

I'm hoping that by throwing this out to ya'all, we can get some ideas going. Heck, it's only democracy at stake!

[nostamj]

1. Bev has 'members only' forums/message boards

on the BBV.org site. specifically for coordinating volunteer projects. that might solve some of your problems (posting to threads rather than sending emails) and you'd be able to archive/index.

i'm not sure who's doing the webmaster gig there but... bpilgrim also knows this stuff (with angka he put the elements of the ?W site together--including a forum/message board) and i have NO doubt that DU will come through on the tech end.

good luck!

nost

[GregD]

2. I know about that

Needless to say, I have access to some of the private sections of their board, and work closely with their web team. I can create private sections on our message board as well. But I'm looking for something more robust - stuff that a corporation (or at least a medium-sized company) would use - something running on a SQL database or such.

Thanks nost.

Anyone?

[tkmorris]

5. MySQL is available

You can download it for free with no license required, depending on how you use it. Have a look here. http://www.mysql.com/downloads/index.html

[GregD]

6. Yup

Already go it going on our server. Premiumsoft Navicat is a good interface to it too.

Thanks

[nostamj]

3. p.s. i found a graphic

Greg,

I was cleaning up directories this afternoon and found a "Verified Vote" graphic that I had forgotten about. (it goes back to the BBV graphics threads that ended up in Bev's book)

anyway, the text of this version is:

Verified Votes
Got a problem with that?

and then it adds the BBV URL. could easily change that to yours if you like it. just need an address where i can send a jpg or gif as an attachment.

[JohnGideon]

7. BBV.org is a little different from verifiedvoting.org

There are two of us doing admin duties, to assist Bev, on blackboxvoting.org right now. We do have a bit of a different situation though. vv.org does a lot via email; whereas we do very little via email and use the forums for communications.

[ConsAreLiars]

4. Some software packages are listed here:

I don't know enough to make any reccomendations; hopefully some here can be more useful, but thse are some search results that might help.

http://www.systems-management-1st.com/project-management/online-project-management.htm

http://www.google.com/search?q=project+management+shareware&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Narrowing it down a bit more:
http://download.com.com/sort/3150-2076-0-1-3.html
Maybe this?
http://download.com.com/3000-2074-10137107.html?tag=lst-3-1

http://www.brothersoft.com/Project_Management_Freeware_Download.asp
Maybe this?
http://www.brothersoft.com/Business_Project_Management_SmartworksPE_16416.html

There seems to be a comp.groupware group on usenet with FAQs here:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/comp-groupware-faq/

[DUreader]

8. I don't know but I'll keep this kicked for others

[RedEagle]

9. Dunno Either...

...but will help keep this kicked for Greg.


Folks, it's a LOT of work to do what Greg and gang do over at vv.org. In ya' all got some insight as to what he wants, chime in, please.

[GregD]

10. I'll try to redescribe this

I'm thinking there may be some sort of application that allows us to send an email to that tool, specifying keywords. The message then gets stored in a database, indexed according to the keywords, so that when we wish we can retrieve entries based on their keywords.

Is that a more-undestandable description?

GregD

[ret5hd]

11. OK...this is easy...

but you need to run linux (as far as i know)...

HTDig is a web indexing tool (similar to but much simpler than google, etc).

A simple Perl script would place each e-mail on its own "web page" on your server. Set up htdig to run re-index every few minutes, or every hour or so.

get it at:
www.htdig.org/

It is really very simple to use. I use it at work.