This document is designed to provide background information to new volunteers.   

This work was inspired by the Fridays For the Future maps which you can see here: 

Then the Bernie Sanders had a very professionally done map.  Now no longer used. 

The Howie campaign, and Alex were considering building a simple web page, where you could search by zip code, when Christopher Lozinski showed up, showed them his existing maps, and was given the opportunity to help the Green Party. 

For a while it was just Chris and Alex working on the maps, then Howie won the nomination, and a lot more volunteers have been showing up.  There are some 23 volunteers now on the Howie Hawkins Base Camp Server.  Please Join us.  Although most of the data entry was done by 5 people.

Early in the project Green Party members were focused on Ballot Access.  For example, the project leader, Alex has been called away to help with the Pennsylvania Ballot Access process.  He will return the first week of August. When Ballot Access is over, this community will grow faster.

There is an interesting process at work here. The more people who see the map, the more corrections we get and the better the data becomes, and the more useful it is.  If you see something bothering you, please speak up, things are easy to fix, but it is hard for the developers to know what is needed. 

Already the map has helped at least one Party Leader to understand which states have the strongest Green communities.  It was not reasonable to visualize the data before then. 

We have transitioned from hardcore development to user support.  Christopher spends more time talking to people and writing documentation than writing code.  Lots of small changes that everyone wants, all quite easy to do. 
 

2021 Update

Shortly after the Nov 2020 elections, I had a conversation with the Howie Hawkins campaign manager Andrea Mérida Cuéllar.  She refused to recognize me as a volunteer, even though I was reporting daily to a campaign employee @NotAlexNoyle, and reporting regularly on the campaign basecamp discussion boards.  That put me at legal risk of violating FEC regulations,  In any case I (and others) had had problems with her  so we parted ways. 

My problem with Andrea was that she instructed me to remove several greens from the map.  She instructed me to list her on the maps, even before the maps did not have a feature for listing officers.  And she removed a member of the CCC from the Basecamp discussion boards, with an implausible reason.

Shortly afterward parting ways with Andrea and the Hawkins campaign received a tweet asking about details.  It turns out that someone was funding the Howie campaign to build the maps.

@NotAlexNoyle is still hosting the web sites.  I believe the campaign gives him a stipend to cover his hosting costs.

There was an amusing story of the North Carolin Green Party  contacting me very upset for having listed a candidate who was on the ballot as a Green, but who they did not endorse, because the candidate supported Israel.  State parties are in charge of their map decisions, so she was removed.
Then the candidate contacted me, even more upset over having been removed.

Over the next year the sites were polished up, and the news was split out into a separate site.  UncensoredNews.US

Mostly it is Christopher maintaining the data, although a few candidates, are using the site for their campaign data.  One organization is making very heavy use of the sites.  They even want to go multilingual.

Future Directions

GreenMaps.World is a map of organizations fighting climate change.
Several states and caucuses are considering hosting the maps on thei web sites.

 I am working to add the UncensoredNews.US content to the GreenMaps web site.  Then people will have reason to return to individual candidate pages.

I am also very keen to interface with Mastadon. 
I am working to make the site multilingual.  It is embarassing how few Green Party sites support Spanish.

Problems

The biggest problem is that I live in central europe, so it is not practical for me to attend US GP meetings in the evenings.  So I miss out on personal contact with key players.

My second biggest problem is that I have quite failed to convince people that this is way more than just a map.  It is a complete data model of the whole US Green Party.   Christopher’s professional training at MIT and U.C. Berkeley was in modeling distributed organizations.   (Maybe a degree in graphics design would have been more helpful.  )We can do wonderful things with this data.  I invite you to read the other section on “Using Map Data”.

Globally Green Parties need a lot of software.   Every politician, national state and local party needs a website, and additional services.  Many of the sites are very similar, it is a huge duplication of effort.    Worse yet, currently we spend a bunch of money on MailChimp, BaseCamp, Slack, Nation Builder and consulting services.  

Hopefully this software can help with some of those problems.  It is good to have choices.  Not just in presidential elections. 

Please Help

Your help with this project would be most appreciated.  While the Democrats and Republicans have lots of money from the Carbon Lobby, the Pharmaceutical Industry,  the Military Industrial Complex, and various monopolies, our strength is our committed volunteers.  Ideally we need a maps ambassador for every state.

If you see any Green Party or Politician who does not have a web page, they get an instant web  page here, and they can be given permission to edit their page, and only their page.  For simple “web sites” they can add pages, images and YouTube Videos.  We are working hard at putting in place the infrastructure to create a free website in a box for Green Party Politicians and Parties.   Most of the work has already been done. 

 

Built using the  Forest Map Wiki  

This Map is a volunteer effort, separate from the Stair Party.