The challenge of crowdsourcing policy and feedback

Personal Democracy Forum’s Techpresident posted an interesting video in which White House Science and Technology Officer Beth Novak makes the point that new media has been great for getting the message out there, but poses the question, “How do we crowdsource feedback and input in a way that’s manageable?”

C2C’s by-election live blog a great success

Yesterday, the DA achieved a landslide victory in an important bellwether by-election in Mitchell’s Plain.

What made it even better was that DA Director of Special Issues and Volunteers Manager Gareth van Onselen live-blogged the day on our Volunteers’ Social Network, Contribute to Change.

Vote to win! DA kicks off election campaign

The DA kicked off its election campaign in Kliptown, Soweto on Saturday morning. Here is how the Times covered the event.

more about “Vote to win! DA kicks off election ca…“, posted with vodpod

Pretty nice story, although there were about 2000 people there in total, so “a few hundred” was a bit of an underestimate. We even had people in an overflow facility.

Zoopy | Videos | DA leader Helen Zille spelling out the DA’s plans (00:42)

Here’s an interview with DA leader Helen Zille posted on Zoopy after the re-launch of the party at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg. I’m sure there’ll be more clips to follow.

more about “Zoopy | Videos | DA leader Helen Zill…“, posted with vodpod

And here’s an interview with DA national chairperson Joe Seremane:

more about “Zoopy | Videos | Da national chairper…“, posted with vodpod

Are you registered?

Next year’s general election will be arguably the most exciting since 1994. Will you be a part of it?

This weekend, all the IEC’s Polling Stations will be open for registration. If you’re not registered, or if you’ve moved since you last voted, I hope you’ll all go out and register on Saturday or Sunday.If you’re wondering why it’s important to register, or whether your vote can really make the difference, DA Leader Helen Zille provides the answers in the following video clip:

more about “Are you registered?“, posted with vodpod

If you know anyone who’s unregistered, please encourage them to register this weekend. Every vote counts.

Temporary DA web page increases opt-in conversion by 700 percent

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted about an extremely minimalist website for an Australian web development and design company (which I think I picked up from Seth Godin) . My first impression was, “Wow! That’s quite ballsy.”

They chose not to showcase all the bells and whistles they could provide prospective clients; but, rather, to provide a one page resumé with a single call-to-action – “Please contact us.”

Little did I know how prescient my tweet would be.

Three days later, we decided to take the DA website down. We’d been battling with a hacker’s SQL injection for some time, with multiple pages going missing from our archives and rogue outward links being inserted, and it got to the stage where it just wasn’t worthwhile to keep the site up any longer.

We had already commissioned an exciting new website, but that’s a major project, and it’s only going to be ready in October. So we’re setting up a mini-site on a WordPress template to make our latest news available until then.

In the mean time, we’ve also put up a temporary holding page informing people about the site being compromised. And that’s where the minimalist website with a single call to action comes in.