Use of Meetup.com and the Internet for the NDP

Hi,
My name is Chris Becker and I am currently in Windsor. I am posting this to see what direction NDP members think the party should take with the Internet. What do you as the ways that the party can use the Internet/Meetup.com to its advantage at both the central and grassroots level?

To start some discussion, here are my thoughts.

Fundraising
- Things like selling merchandise on the website (currently the Liberals do so)
- Having Jack do live online events that people can view for a certain price (i.e. Howard Dean Campaign charging 3$ to have people watch him eat a turkey sandwich. This one day event raised 300K).

Online participation of grassroots members
Blogs
- An area where People can post their thoughts in a free manner that isn't controlled by the central campaign. The Dear NDP Campaign was excellent and I think that it could be used further in the future.

Individual Message Promotion (i.e. current star wars campaign)
- Could be in a different area of the website, if a blog is placed at the top, it will encourage the most participation from members.
- Also, t-shirts and other things would serve to allow individual members to order them online, which would increase fundraising, and to wear them in public, which will increase publicity.

Meetups
Continuing to have meetups based around central campaign based themes. The U.S. election night meetup was a huge success. The promotion of it on the central website was the greatest promoter. However, it is unfortunate this has not been follow-up up on since.
If the party has the resources, it could hold the meetups from the central website. This would allow the party to keep track of info from central headquarter.

I hope this spurs a healthy debate that generates ideas. I am looking forward to discussing this in the future.

Chris Becker

We in Burlington ON are taking another run at revving up the meetup technology. I believe it is quite practical for bringing people together. So many people told me they thought the NDP platform was the most credible way to build a civil society Canada. They just couldnt believe their vote would count this time.

Come over to our Burlington NDP site, see the photos from the campaign.

Let us know if you think Chris Becker is onto something here!

Ian G