Let me be up front, I am a Democrat and Obama supporter, as well as being a techno geek nerd. So, naturally I take notice of how my political party and candidates are making use of technology and the World Wide Web.
The Democrats are taking full advantage of the web. They have recently launched McCainpedia, a Wikipedia like site that details his political positions of the Republican candidate from a Democratic perspective. They are using Mediawiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.
The Democratic National Convention has an attractive web site built with an open source content management system called SilverStripe from New Zealand which I think might be a very promising CMS for the Alumnae Association web site. SilverStripe has a tightly integrated administrative back-end and a ton of built-in features, such as, a built-in image editor, support for development and production versions, a forms builder, web traffic reporting, searching, blogging, commenting, widgets, membership management, work-flow control, menu editor, shopping car, image gallery and much more. The drawbacks of the software are that it is relatively young and does not yet have the add-ons or community that Drupal, Joomla or Plone has, but they are off to a running start and are showing great potential.
It's great to see the Democratic party utilize open source software and when the Dems win back the White Office and additional seats in Congress, maybe the open source movement will be further championed in the federal government. One can dream, right?
I also reviewed the web sites of Obama, Clinton and McCain. I think Obama has an excellent site and is taking full advantage of what the web has to offer, more so than his opponents. He is on every major social network (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter) and then some that I was not aware of, such as Eons, BlackPlanet, Glee, MyBatanga, AsianAve, and FaithBase which target certain social demographic or ethnic groups. I am not going to link to all of them. You can go to he Obama web site and scroll down to the lower right hand corner for the links.
There is even a my.barackobama.com social network component within the web site where you can post your own blog, join groups, look up local events and find friends. You can even subscribe to notifications on your cell phone, as well as, download wallpapers and ring-tones.
Why do I share this with you? I think we can draw some inspiration from Obama's web site, not just politically, but technically for the Alumnae Association web site. I think they do a lot of things right which relate to the type of things we would like to do on our web site. The company behind the Obama web site is Blue State Digital. They use ExpressionEngine which is not open source, but is available in free and paid versions ($99.95 and up).