Canvassing and Get Out The Vote (GOTV) features in CiviCRM

Political groups and campaigns have been some of the earliest users of CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org/). We've had quite a few political parties using CiviCRM: Green Party of New Zealand, Green Party of Canada, Oregon State Democrats, Vermont Progressive Party and even the Pirate Party of Germany! One of the features missing from CiviCRM has been Canvassing, GOTV, PhoneList and WalkList functionality. This has been long requested and there have been various specifications on the CiviCRM wiki (http://docs.civicrm.org/) for this.

Earlier this year we worked with Progressive Technology Project (PTP) on CiviEngage (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviEngage), a Drupal Module that brings address parsing, walklist and phonelist support into CiviCRM. At the same time Will Brownsberger, a state legislator from Massachusetts, started using CiviCRM to support his office and campaign operations. As part of his campaign he wrote a drupal/civicrm module to do voter canvassing (http://civicrm.org/blog/6885). Will was kind enough to attend and demo his module at the CiviCRM Boston Developer Camp in February.

We've got the above folks and a few others to join forces and help us build an open source solution to address this problem. The specification and feature set for our proposed solution is on our blog and wiki here:

http://civicrm.org/blogs/lobo/support-canvassing-and-gotv-get-out-vote-f...
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+for+Canvassing+an...

We'd love it if you could read the specs and give us some feedback (and if interesting to you/your org help support the project). If you have any questions or comments please do comment on the wiki page / respond to this message / send me an email directly :)

thanx

lobo