Forum .LRN Q&A: www.alben2004.com / .LRN posting in Salon Blog
Scott Rosenberg, the Managing Editor of Salon magazine, made a blog posting on July 7th - http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2004/07/02.html#a636 - about an open-source CMS political product.
I went ahead and replied back, telling him about the Alex Alben for Congress - http://www.alben2004.com - web site that Caroline built for me, using .LRN (and OpenACS, but I only mentioned .LRN.)
Professionally, I'm just thrilled with .LRN. It's everything I could have asked for and more. I have to mask my public pushing of .LRN inside of pushing Alex, but one of the things I promised Caroline when she took the gig, is that I'd be making public statements in which I praised .LRN to the skies. This is just the start, because I'm now moving into the marketing phase of the campaign.
My hope is to week after next, get Slashdoted, and see what happens then! At anyrate, I apologize to y'all for the political bent of the below - I'm not trying to recruit y'all for Alex - although now that I think about it, I'd love to have as many of you as would be so kind, to please sign up to receive our newsletter *smiles* - https://www.alben2004.com/register/user-new.
But please know that because we're a political campaign, whenever I'm making a public statement about .LRN, it's always going to have to be in a political context, and about trying to get Alex elected. But along the way, I intend, as I promised Caroline back in early January, to get lots and lots of free publicity for .LRN. Below is just a start, and in an audience that is highly technically sophisticated, as well as very committed to open source. Not a bad start at all. *smiles again*
Best to everyone,
Jesse Wendel
http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2004/07/02.html#a636
(Click on the "Comments" link to find the below text)
Hi Scott,
I'm Jesse Wendel, the Director of Internet Strategy for Alex Alben - http://www.alben2004.com - the front-running Democratic congressional candidate in Washington State's 8th Congressional District (Puget Sound's east side including Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and south to Mt. Rainer), an open seat race replacing the retiring Rep. Jennifer Dunn. The winner of this race will be the "Congressman from Microsoft."
Alex not only has raised more money than anyone else in the race, both Democrat and Republican, but he also has the endorsement of Governor Gary Locke, U.S. Senator Patty Murray, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, and Members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation including Rep. Brian Baird, Rep. Norm Dicks, Rep. Jay Inslee, Rep. Rick Larsen and Rep. Adam Smith.
I'm writing because we have also developed an open source solution for political races. In our case, our web site - http://www.alben2004.com - was developed using MIT's .LRN - http://www.dotlrn.org - which is an Enterprise class web application and portal framework, for supporting online communities and collaboration. .LRN is part of MIT's Intellectual Commons - http://web.mit.edu/cet/strategy/commons.html. For more detail on how our site is constructed, please see our Credits page: http://www.alben2004.com/credits
We've customized open source .LRN specifically for political campaigns. Source is available by contacting me.
.LRN is backed by a world-wide consortium of educational institutions, non-profit organizations, industry partners, and open source developers. The underlying kernel has been in production use for nearly a decade in hundreds of websites, among them Siemens’ award-winning global knowledge management application, ShareNet, and the World Bank’s Global Gateway Project. Elements of the underlying software infrastructure (also 100% free and open source, with commercial alternatives supported) are at the backbone of the largest and most demanding production environments in the world, including aol.com, mapquest.com, and netscape.com.
People who are interested in supporting Alex in being the "Congressman from Microsoft", please come to our site at www.alben2004.com and 1) sign-up for email from us - https://www.alben2004.com/register/user-new - and 2) please feel free to contribute. I've been in IT since the 1980's. We're hoping that people in IT, as well as everyone else will look at Alex, and think he's worth supporting. We're recommending a donation of $99 bucks to support Alex. This is a key open seat, and Alex is well positioned to win. You may contribute to Alex's Campaign at http://www.alben2004.com/contribute/index Obviously, as people feel appropriate, they should contribute less or more than $99 bucks...
And in any event, people who are interested in using open source .LRN for political web sites, should feel free to contact me directly.
Thanks everyone, and don't forget to vote.
Best,
Jesse Wendel
Director of Internet Strategy
Alex Alben for Congress (D)
http://www.alben2004.com
425-454-3100/Campaign Headquarters
mailto:jesse@alben2004.com (campaign email) or
mailto:jwe@jessewendel.com (personal email)
