VoteEarlyNY (website and voting reform education/engagement)

[jberg42]

What problem are we trying to solve?

First wave of voting reform is coming to NY beginning this fall (2 weekends and a week of early voting being implemented by 62 counties) but there is no state funding and very minimal guidelines or requirements for voter education and engagement. New law is a pro-voter reform, but implementation is everything and the BOEs have a bad track record meeting modern expectations of fair access and due process.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

ALL eligible NY voters, civic leaders and community groups, lawmakers, and policymakers

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

www.voteearlyny.org; www.twitter.com/voteearlyny

What help is needed at this time?

technical assistance with perfecting the website for usability, stress testing, language access, SEO help and advice, etc.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

enlist a few volunteers to provide feedback and help implement improvements (with wordpress and beyond)

Project management

Checklist for NEW ideas 👶

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• Create this idea issue
• Flesh out the who, where, and what questions above
• Join our Slack
• Join the #project-leads channel.
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Checklist for ACTIVE projects 🔥

Let's get this project started! When this idea starts taking off, the Progressive HackNight Team will start helping this project's lead(s) out with project management and connecting you to resources you may need. To get there, please complete and check off the following:

• Update your project at least once a month. This can be either an update on this issue, a ping in the project-ideas channel, rsvp-ing to hacknight, or a conversation with one of the organizers managing project progress (the one listed in the channel topic).
  • It's ok even if your update is just "nothing new happened this month" or "we saw a small increase in traffic to our app this month". If nobody hears from you at all in more than one month, we may mark it as abandoned so that others can pick up this idea and run with it.
• Create a GitHub repository and Slack channel for work.
• Create issues to describe each task that you plan to do or need help with and how a contributor can get started on that task. You might start and stop a lot, so consider issues as your to-do list.
• Create a team for your core contributors
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• Create a Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage to share larger files
  • Github and Data.World are good for code and data, respectively, especially when you need version control. But they're not good for very large files, documentation, articles, etc. A cloud storage option will allow you to easily share, create, and collaborate on documents with your team and help organize ideas and thoughts.
  • Doing this early on can help your team stay organized and to onboard new contributors who wouldn't have access to files you all have shared over email.

If you get stuck at any point, feel free to reach out to the leadership team in the slack channel or with an email to [email protected] or come find an organizer at a HackNight. We're here to help bring great ideas to life!