About Open Campaigns
Open Campaigns is a web-based application service provider, developing a suite of interconnected software products for use in political campaigns, using the Ruby on Rails framework. My intention is to make pricing for hosting affordable to even the smallest of clubs and campaigns. Open Campaigns believes in the value of open source software, and the software is available for free download under the Affero GPL (see Open Source). Contact Asa at open.campaigns@gmail.com if you would like to explore a demonstration of the current version of the software.
Open Campaigns is a sole proprietorship of Asa S. Hopkins, a Democratic Party activist from Pasadena, CA. I am a graduate student in Physics at Caltech, as well as the former Vice President of the Pasadena Young Democrats and Technology Chair of the Pasadena Area United Democratic Headquarters. Open Campaigns was founded to develop software that would serve the needs of grassroots field and GOTV operations like those run by the Pasadena UDH. In particular, other full-featured online campaign software services are so expensive that continuing operations, like our local Democratic Headquarters, could not maintain full data availability between campaign cycles, resulting in lost information.
There is no reason that we should work hard to gather information about the concerns and skills of our supporters, only to let it get out of date over the two years between election cycles. Open Campaigns software makes a good match with the "permanent precinct operations" model supported by Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee, and many state Democratic Parties.
What products does Open Campaigns produce?
Open Campaigns produces a web-based software products, developed using the Ruby on Rails framework. All make use of modern tools, such as AJAX, for smooth, fast and effective operation. Manager and Treasurer received their "baptism by fire" in the 2006 operations of the Pasadena Area United Democratic Headquarters, and survived with flying colors. Several features have also been added in response to the 2006 campaign.
Manager
Manager is a volunteer and supporter-management system which allows a campaign to keep record of the current relevant information about each of its supporters, including their volunteering interests. It also allows a campaign to track each volunteer session, as well as each campaign contact with supporters, in order to record and evaluate the effectiveness of campaign outreach and volunteer commitment. Manager is currently is late beta form. It is almost feature complete and has just a few remaining bugs.
Features:
- Record multiple addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers for each supporter
- Custom fields allow you to extend Manager to record information particular to your organization
- Export mail merge files and print mailing labels
- Built-in simple-to-use HTML-formatted email system
- "Sign-in terminal" mode allows you to record all in-office volunteer activity directly to the database
- Search your database on all fields
- Track which volunteers have committed to volunteer on a particular day, as well as volunteer history
- Tag supporters with arbitrary tags
- Track group memberships, like the members of committees or local Democratic clubs
Treasurer
Development on Treasurer is on hold, as I now recommend all campaigns use a professional political treasurer to prepare their reports. Manager has taken over the contribution-tracking role from Treasurer, and con import CSV files from your outside treasurer.
Treasurer is a political accounting system for political committees which collects, maintains, and summarizes financial information, allowing up-to-the-minute reporting of financial status, basic budgeting (coming soon), and covering all common transactions. Loans are not yet supported. It is mostly feature complete and has very few remaining bugs.
Features:
- Record all financial transactions for your club or campaign
- Know where you stand financially at each moment, and your outstanding bills and non-yet-deposited contributions
- Easy reconciliation with bank statements
- Assign contributions and expenses to categories for ease of budgeting
- Alerts when individuals or organizations exceed legal contribution limits
Field
Field will be a voter file management system, designed to be effective for both single campaign and long-term/continuing operations. It is still early in the development/brainstorming process. Campaigns can track each voter contact, allowing them to collect the information necessary to target voters effectively year after year. Field will allow campaign field operations to use all the standard tools of the trade -- walk lists, phone lists, etc -- to collect information about voters, with an interface designed by people who have helped to run field campaigns, ensuring that information is collected in as "smart" a manner as possible. Supporters will be able to log in to see just a set of voters they have been assigned. Distributed phone banking will also be possible.
Development of Field is on hold while national and state Democratic Parties decide on their technological choices, which may involve making voter data and software generally available.
Screencasts and Screenshots
Manager screencasts:
- Tour of the start page you're greeted with upon logging in
- Introductory use of the Advanced Search page and MyPeople
- Building an arbitrary search using the "Intersect with MyPeople" and "Remove from MyPeople" buttons
Manager screenshots: click here.
Treasurer screenshots: click here.
Hosting and Pricing
Open Campaigns's software products are web-based, and need to be hosted on a web server. If you like, you may download the software to install and configure it yourself (see Open Source below). However, this may be an unnecessary hurdle for you or your organization. Open Campaigns will happily host the software on our server, and you won't have to deal with it -- it will "just work" (and stay up to date). In order to cover our hosting costs, we need to charge you. We'll make every effort to make sure that the charges are reasonable and affordable to your organization.
Hosting fees:
| Manager | |
|---|---|
| # of supporters | Cost |
| under 100 | $10/month or $100/year |
| under 1,000 | $25/month or $250/year |
| 1,000 to 10,000 | $50/month or $500/year |
| over 10,000 | email me |
Open Source
Open Campaigns is a firm believer in open source software, and intends to release the source code for all of its applications under the Affero General Public License v3. I didn't write all this code in order to allow others to add features and then not share those advances with the community at large.
Aside about licenses: There are licenses like the BSD license, which would allow anyone to use the code for anything, including integration in a proprietary product. The 2nd version of the General Public License (GPL) has a known loophole for web applications that would allow anyone to host a modified version of the software for a profit, while not sharing their modifications. The Affero GPL v3 closes this loophole.
You can download the current running version of Manager here.
If you are interested in working on improving these software products, or interfacing them to another piece of software, please email me. You can also sign up for the Manager users email list and the Manager developers email list here.
Integration
I was one of the early signatories of the Integration Proclamation, which states:
"We, the undersigned progressive leaders, have together identified technology integration as a top priority infrastructure need in 2007. We urge progressive funders, vendors and technologists to support a collaborative effort dedicated to ensuring that our tools integrate effectively, so that we can move forward with innovative, powerful platforms that will help us win."Manager and Treasurer use a web services API to communicate, a model which I prefer as the way to integrate different pieces of campaign software together. Open Campaigns is committed to working towards complete interoperability between our software and software from other providers.
Contact Us
Email: open.campaigns@gmail.com
Phone: 626-354-3141
Mail: 1036 N. Chester Ave., Pasadena, CA 91104
Last updated May 29, 2008, by Asa Hopkins