Forum Post: EveryVote.org - building an ethical, open source election information proliferation platform

Hi Occupy Wall Street,

EveryVote is an open source platform designed to improve voter turnout in any university election by providing free election and candidate information tools that integrate with Facebook and Twitter. We believe that as students get used to the power and convenience EveryVote provides them to connect with university candidates, they will grow to expect and demand the same level of #opengov accessibility from their US government candidates.

EveryVote is targeting colleges because student organizations hold elections once or twice a year to replace graduating students, and so are a great demographic for experimenting with election information tools. Also, unlike US (or any other) government candidates, college students are not beholden to financial donors or party politics that would prevent them from using new technologies to maximize their accessibility to constituents.

What is most exciting about EveryVote is it could be easily downloaded and deployed to deliver university election information for any country, not just the US. If we coordinate to make these international implementations of the app federation compatible, we could make a global hub of college election information.

If you would like to learn more, we’d appreciate hearing from you at contactus@everyvote.org. We are a student driven volunteer project right now, but we are applying for grant funding and seeking additional volunteers in hopes to deploy stand-alone, Facebook, mobile, and tablet versions of the app before Fall 2013 elections (early September). The current prototype is in CakePHP and MySQL, but we are open to redesigning the app more cleanly in another language if more volunteers are interested.

Video introduction www.everyvote.org/fbintro

To try the EveryVote prototype now, please visit apps.facebook.com/everyvote, and check out the sample elections at EveryVote University.

EveryVote on Github: www.github.com/everyvote

Thank you for your consideration, Mitch Downey