[Community] Community Tool

[Kaliya Hamlin]

Hi Stewards,

There is a project that supports groups doing online organizing and  
voting - CrabGrass.
It is free and open source software  -- and we can add OpenID and  
information card support.

They are oriented towards 'social justice' as obvious from this  
description - that they use to self describe.

That purpose is not why I putting this forward - they have group  
voting and coordinating tools that go beyond e-mail (this is a sucky  
way to do voting).

I think we should look at it and consider it for IC.  We can talk  
about it more next week.
=Kaliya



from https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/about

Crabgrass is a software libre web application designed for group and  
network organizing, and tailored to the needs of the global justice  
movement. Crabgrass is the next generation of social software, we  
call it (d)emocratic social organizing. Our goal is to facilitate and  
help unify grassroots social movements, in this country and around  
the world. Currently an elegant suite of groupware tools (wiki, task  
list, personal messaging, asset tool, straw poll, ranked voting tool,  
discussion board, and chat room) embedded in a social software  
platform, Crabgrass allows individual users to easily manage and  
participate in multiple groups from one platform.

Why Crabgrass?

While social movements have grown more adept at using the web to  
communicate publicly, we are still mostly using inadequate tools to  
communicate amongst ourselves. Most groups rely heavily on email,  
lists, and wikis— but these tools are not suited for the complexity  
of relationships that activist organizations face in the real world.

There are many existing social networking websites out there.  
However, these offerings are geared toward the needs of advertisers  
or informal social groups. There are also many existing web services  
for group collaboration. These sites are typically designed for small  
businesses and do not match the needs of movement organizations.

Most importantly, Crabgrass is software libre. As such, it can be  
provided as a service by radical tech collectives such as riseup.net.

What does the name mean?

crabgrass is subversive: as the bane of suburban lawns everywhere,  
crabgrass is the ultimate in grassroots resistance.

crabgrass is diverse: there are 300 species of native to tropical and  
warm temperate regions. crabgrass is native to north america, and in  
important source of food for many birds.

crabgrass is hard to kill: because of its networked nature, it is  
very difficult to pull out enough crabgrass roots to get rid of it.  
it is resistant to many herbicides.

more info:
https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass-dev
https://we.riseup.net/groups

or just try it out---create an account at:
https://we.riseup.net