Eliberate, Online Deliberation

After banging my head against the wall for two more days with no real understanding of why the poll variable was failing, I posted a code snippet to Stackoverflow, where several other people have made suggestions to do all of the things I've already done. haha.

But, if you bang your head on a wall long enough, something is bound to leak out and I rewrote the method to access another DB object and it's a much more performant approach. So moving forward on that. The logic is up next, the data is returning.

I'm having a phone meeting this evening with Mark Frischmuth of Democracy Lab about the preferred vocabulary for a nonprofit business plan for Civitas since I have two applications (one a competition, another for an award) coming up at the end of April.

We've also been discussing criteria for evaluating activism. Is there a standard we could use to determine whether a political protest or other action is 'successful'. This seems key to combatting slacktivism. Within the context of Civitas, Mark has suggested Politarchs could give feedback on whether an event had influence, but we're discussing how to frame the UI so that they don't have an opportunity to spin. This is an interesting issue and I'd like to get general and perhaps ongoing feedback from the class.