Online fundraising and geekery in political campaigns. In KANSAS?

[matgb]

Normally when I think of Kansas politics I think of things like evolution being banned in schools or those silly stickers they tried, but this is a refreshing change; an interesting and innovative use of the internet by a USian running for the Kansas state legislature and raising funds through an XKCD style webcomic. It's attracting reasonable coverage in the US media, including a fairly favourable write up in the LA Times, and he's getting record numbers of donations.

full comic / larger version

The nature of US politics makes it very different to directly translate fundraising techniques to the UK, even if it's appropriate, our focus on parties within a multi-party polity is very different to their focus on individuals within a two-party system (even if in most districts we have an effective two-party system anyway, gotta love Duverger), but this sort of thing is certainly going to appeal to the sort of demographic that should be voting Lib Dem anyway—wonder if anyone could come up with a more generalised UK version with a similar sort of message?

Comments

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I went to a talk a few months ago aobut Ron Paul, a supposed libertarian candiate for the US presidency.

Unfortunately, the talk - which was meant to be about the netroots campaign and how the campaigners utilised the internet and social networking to gather (erm...) unstoppable momentum - focussed very much on the man and his politics.

The impact of the net on politics interested me a lot; the uncritical acclaim for Paul's politics didn't.

I think the internet can be a powerful politcal tool (a recent article in the Economist demonstrated how this could be for good or bad, with extreme right wing groups using Facebook-like websites to rally their forces - described by the Economist as "Hatebook").

But it also allows the rise of single topic campaigns and people working outside the party system. This could be interesting going forward!

[baseballchica03.livejournal.com]

I wrote a paper about this subject for a grad class about technology and how it's changing the shape of communities - although it was before "netroots" came into fashion, and I called it "grassweb campaigning". There's some interesting research being done on the subject by a group of people at Bentley College.

I'll be damned if I can find the link to the data and stuff, but here's the woman in charge of the project. http://www.bentley.edu/academics-research/faculty_research/faculty_database/faculty_detail.cfm?id=2889