Early this morning I woke up and had an idea for our name badges at our first workshop.  I find that name badges at conferences are always hard to read and with a background in civil engineering I decided to create a name badge with the fonts that are used on the highway signs. Highway signs are designed to be read from as far away as possible and always present the most important information biggest and boldest.  The fonts used on highway signs were developed through a decade of research starting in the early 1990′s.

So I was on the hunt for the Clearview font that is used for roadway signage.  The Clearview font was developed by a design team that has received interim approval by the Federal Highway Administration for use in road guide signs. Yaffa at the New York Times wrote an article about how roads signs are changing, The Road to Clarity.

Name Badge #1

Name Badge #2

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Technorati Tags: name badges, Politics4All, workshop

I have to say, I do think times are changing for the Republicans.  But being from the technology side with a strong interest in politics and building our non-partisan platform here at politics4all.com I have watch the parties involvement over the years online. Let’s recognize that Obama’s team has a proven record and everyone else still has a long way to go.

In the time that I have been following and researching the online behaviors of political parties, I have noticed some key points with the GOP that I think need to be focused on; one of these is openness. It seems like everywhere I go, I see closed and membership-only groups from a national to a local level. If you are going to appeal to the masses, you need to be transparent and open yourself up to all of the praise and the criticisms that comes with it. Don’t worry about the “trolls” that come a long, they might be putting a check and balance on the situation. You have to appeal to the masses and not just the registered party members. Recognize that it’s also going to be an online and offline movement that’s going to create a strong position.

Here is a good example of the lack of openness you will see with the GOP. I wanted to post a comment on the RedState.com site which is the leading blog for right of center online activists. It was established in May of 2004 by Ben Domenech, Mike Krempasky, and Josh Trevino, and has played an important role in the right’s fight online against the left. I went to comment on a blog post December 30th called Rebuild the Party: The Technology. It took me registering for an account and waiting 5 days for approval before I could start commenting and posting. By then the conversation was well over on the blog post and I ended up being the last comment to date. This makes it very hard for openness and collaboration to go on. As I return today to the site to see if there were an other comments after mine, I realized that it was going to be hard to find because the site does not have a search feature. I even logged in to see if I was missing something.

I don’t know if it’s being tech savvy is the problem or worried about the openness that it brings. Whichever, it will be nice not to have these barriers anymore.

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You can read this post and it’s comments on Politics4All, Republicans Tech Savvy or Just Paranoid

Technorati Tags: GOP, Politics4All

Politics4All won first place for the best political Website in Mashable’s 2nd Annual Open Web Award’s for  People’s Choice.  The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards is a multilingual, international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology which recognizes and honors the top achievements of websites and services in 26 categories.  Over 100 of Mashable’s Blog Partners help make this the biggest Open Web Awards to date spanning 25 countries and written in 10 different languages.

Technorati Tags: Award, Mashable, Politics4All

The TMIweekly girls, Julia, Meghan and Mary talk about how you can get local information about politics and give you tips on what Websites to hit up during the 2008 Election.  One being my favorite Politics4All and it’s mention about 3:07 into the video.

Technorati Tags: Politics4All, TMIweekly

I had a chance to talk with Meghan at NONSOCIETY the other day and she did a nice write-up about Politics4All.  Thanks Meghan!!

You can check it out here, http://meghan.nonsociety.com/post/51022344/politics4all-very-rarely-do-i-spend-a-lot-of-time

Technorati Tags: Politics4All

Sukhjit from the Seesmic team went around and interview a few of the companies.  At about 4:58 into the video she interviews me about Politics4all.

Technorati Tags: Interview, Politics4All, TechCrunch50

On Tuesday, September 9, we launched our Website Politics4all at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.  TechCrunch50 finds the best start-ups and provides a platform for early-stage companies to launch for the first time to the technology industry’s most influential venture capitalists, corporations, angel investors, fellow entrepreneurs and international media.

Our invitation validates our concept, our technology platform, and our staff’s dedication to developing a unique Website that will facilitate conversations about political and social issues, and encourage political activism.  Over 124 million Americans have sought information from the Internet about the U.S. presidential campaign, and more than 18 million Americans visit the Internet daily to engage politically we hope to play a roll with politics on the Internet.

I would like to thank our team for all the hard work and our investors, we couldn’t have done it with out you!

Here are some other photos from TechCrunch, veiw slideshow.

Technorati Tags: Politics4All, TechCrunch50

As we work on our platform and our development team becomes more defined, we have an opportunity approaching us that could give us visibility with the investment community and a great place to launch our site, Politics4all.  That opportunity is TechCrunch50.  Although I haven’t discussed applying to TechCrunch with our team, but when we do I will need buy in from everyone in order to make this happen.

TechCrunch50 takes the 50 best companies they can find and allows them to launch their new products at the conference. They will provide the place to connect with the media, investment and business communities that can help these companies succeed.  They say the 40 start-ups that launched at last year’s event have now raised over an estimate of $143 million.

We’ll see how it goes and I’ll up this post when I have more news.

UPDATE: We made it into the Demo Pit at TechCrunch50 so we’re headed to San Francisco. Go Team Go!

Technorati Tags: Politics4All, TechCrunch50