Groups?

Organizing around the Primaries is a statewise operation, so I have made some yahoo groups to facilitate it :

gravel2008expats, and

gravel2008tx

I live in Thailand and vote in TX, so those two are my "home" states.

I copied the name format from :

gravel2008mi

which was begun by eshornock, Edward Shornock.

These groups have not yet attracted a large membership, because we have not really started organizing around the Primaries, but... the time has come.

While I was looking for the Primary info I corresponded with folks from CA, OK, and OR and we created yahoo groups with the same name format for those states :

gravel2008ca,

gravel2008ok, and

gravel2008or

I hope that other folks from these states will flock to join these groups, and to work for Mike's campaign within them.

I'd urge folks from the other states to create groups with the same naming convention, because it mirrors the convention of this the mother site, and because it makes it easy to figure out what the name of your state's yahoo group ought to be if you don't already belong to it.

I'd be happy to create additional groups and turn over "ownership", in yahoo's terms, to someone from any and all states which do not yet have yahoo groups.

Or you can just make your own if you are conversant with such things. It's not very difficult to do.

As well there is a parallel community which you may or may not be aware of at campaigns.wikia.com.

At that site there are template based, ready made pages named as in :

http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Mike_Gravel/Get_Local/California

for instance.

Linking the groups.yahoo.com groups with the campaigns.wikia.com wikis makes a strongly complementary pair of entry points to our local campaigns.

The groups have messaging, polls, and a database, for example.

The wikis are more easily edited to display news links and upcoming events and embedded videos.

Making prominent links from the one to the other ties them together very nicely.

At present some states seem to have two communities, one wiki oriented and one group oriented and in these cases each can be strengthened by union with the other.

Anyone can edit the wikis.

Groups are built on "membership", and some of the group functions are reserved to "moderators" or "owners", with some few of the groups even "approving" and presumably therefore disapproving of "applicant" members. So the wikis are inherently more democratic by design. But when it comes to enumerating members and organizing the group model is more helpful.

Each one complements the other.