March On Washington Website Technology

I am, at the moment, putting together a website to help manage the elaborate process of getting as many millions of marchers organized state by state.

I am not in a race to secure the official website status. I do however feel that attempts to rally us marchers around websites in the last day have had premature aims. Premature in that the date for the march is unknown and being claimed by several different sources.

I am making a site that will allow for discussion about the march in general. There is no doubt going to be a march and I care not what day. I do care about technology and which we choose. My interest is to have a most effective hub for general communication. Hundreds of other websites will deal with specifics.

I want to talk about technology used for the site I am currently building. My choices/ideas for technology are as follows:

1) Drupal as the core software. Reasoning - Daily Paul uses it and this could streamline any integration of various data. his is important because the Daily Paul seems to be the official citizen news desk for the revolution.

2) OpenID - Is supported by Drupal out of the box and can be integrated into most RP sites running Drupal or Wordpress (War Room, etc...). It can really be integrated into any site that requires users to login with a little extra effort. OpenID is an important feature because of the ability it allows for users of the Daily Paul and any other site which adopts this functionality to have a universal login. Your username and password work at all important sites.

3) Email Lists / Subscribers / Marcher Tally - I will build a custom application to allow for those who 'pledge' to march to be kept in state and national lists. State lists can be assigned to state organizers (meetups, etc...). National Lists can report the more general and non state specific information. Those who step forward with a voice that we deem appropriate for speaking to the lists can be granted the access to these lists.

4) Choosing the date - Simple application. A marcher chooses their ideal date and live updates produce the most commonly desired date. Instead of debating the importance of certain dates up front, that can be done in the back-end. The front end will show the most popular date and that date can be considered by the official RP campaign or others who are more aware of certain logistics us marchers are not.

5) Hosting - I will host the site at my Media Temple machine where it can be given a dedicated box. My idea for dealing with the cost is to publish the actual bill monthly to those who ask to help. I do not want to keep a donations button and would keep all fundraising private. I suspect the cost would go from 100 or so a month to 300 or so a month. This is a very optimistic estimate assuming that traffic will increase dramatically.

6) Site optimization - small files, no nonsense, faster page loads, reduced bandwidth, lower costs. etc...

Those are my thoughts and my explanation of what I am doing with the site. I will post it asap for you review.

Your encouragement, perspective, ideas, discouragement will have the largest effect on the outcome of this project.

Note: I have been building lean mean web apps for the last ten years and my main area of study is make them leaner and leaner and meaner and meaner. This means cheaper and more effective a the same time. The less is more principle.