Hack Night at the Dojo

Wednesday Hack Night continues with our work on Spokenvote (http://railsforcharity.org/projects/3). The 0.1 alpha release is out, and our focus now turns to 0.2. Thank you for the awesome contributions of the members of RFC and Hacker Dojo. We are also beginning to use the tool internally, so do check out the working application at spokenvote.org (http://www.spokenvote.org) and search the group Spokenvote to see some examples.

And yes, we are in a brand new location: Hacker Dojo's new facility at 599 Fairchild Drive, Mountain View, CA. If you have not yet seen this amazing new space, that's reason enough to come code with us this Wednesday night on this exciting open-source collaboration.

Spokenvote is a tool to help groups of any size, from a local school board to an entire nation’s people, reach consensus with radical efficiency. We think the process should be intuitive, fun, and democratic. Deeply inspired by Wikipedia, Spokenvote is an open source non-profit intended for small groups today, but over time to reach national politics. It starts with spontaneously capturing ideas as they occur to us. When we do that as a diverse group, a “power of the crowd” effect is introduced. The result is often a revelation of common sense that is difficult to discover from a top-down approach.