Peter,

I apologize for taking so long to follow up after meeting you at Northside DFA.

As you can see, I am copying my husband, Gerry Gleason, on this email.  

As I started to mention to you, we use this site developed by friends in our network. The organization Grass Commons is a non-profit that developed wagn.org and more recently (using the Wagn platform, wikirate.org)  If you go there you can see that it's a powerful combination of database, wiki and tagging.  

Gerry's resume is here:  http://gerry.wagn.org/Gerry+Software_Architect

I gather from your background that you would appreciate the potential of using Wagn to maintain a database of potential voters, etc.  

This ties in with peer to peer democracy.  

Imagine having people who may be either volunteers or staff finding out relevant concerns that would be addressed by Cook County Treasurer. Think of them as people who would act as preceinct captains but who are unattached to a political machine.  If this were developed into an app, it could be a very powerful tool for not just your campaign but for other campaigns down the road.  With smartphones, people could much more readily share information with one another.  

I believe I mentioned to you how I observed efforts being duplicated by volunteers, ie, calling the same people over and over again to the point of extreme annoyance.  If your campaign were to use Wagn, that would be automatically much more efficiently done.  

But more than that, we could truly build community, by both connecting people who are drawn to the same issues and people from diverse backgrounds.  

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at (773) 777-7618, (773) 663-3820, (773) 807-5700 or email us.

Debbie Gleason