Hi LibTech, I'm a UX designer and developer working on a few open source liberation technology projects. Please email me if you would like to learn more, have feedback, or may want to get involved in any of the projects below. I would especially like to connect with college students who could be interested in designing and/or developing these tools together for college credit, and professors who may want to integrate one or more of the following into a class project.
*EarthHQ* <http://mitchdowney.com/items/135/> - aka Earth the RPG (role-playing game): turn our only home and species into a RPG character and SimCity-style game, with health bars and interactive maps displaying human quality of life indicators based on aggregated scholarly data. Eventually we would like to provide not only easy-to-read data, but also facilitate actions for users to help address each need globally or locally. *EveryVote <http://mitchdowney.com/items/139/> *- Online election and townhall meeting platform. Hold a verified election and debate online for free. The MVP is designed to assist with the 10,000+ university student elections held worldwide each year. It would be relatively easy to hold *verified *online elections for university student elections because most colleges provide each student with a unique email address. Our plan is to finish the beta this summer, in time for Fall 2014 (Spring 2014 if you're south of the equator) university elections. *Partystarter* <http://mitchdowney.com/items/42/> - Create and manage a political party online. To save time/energy, Partystarter can be built on the same open source backbone as EveryVote (this backbone would be like a Wordpress for civic engagement tools). I started designing Partystarter in response to a blog post by Krist Novoselic of Nirvana and FairVote<http://kristnovoselic.blogspot.com/2013/12/open-source-party-part-ii.html>, where he called for the creation of an "Open Source Party" that uses online direct democracy tools to decide on party platforms and elect representatives. *TopVideoTimeline* <http://mitchdowney.com/items/138/> - Automatically generate a video timeline based on keywords, hash tags, and view count data. This would be a fascinating and insightful tool for browsing the most seen videos of recent protests and historical events. Imagine automatically generated video timelines that tell the story of the Arab Spring, Kiev, the civil war in Syria, Anonymous, Occupy, etc. through the most popular internet videos from that time. Ideally videos could be sorted not only by the date they were published, but also by which videos were most seen on each day. If the video API data needed to power this tool is already publicly available, this would be a simple tool to create. Each of these projects will be open source (AGPLv3), will comply to and help develop open standards, will be 100% financially transparent (except possibly TopVideoTimeline), will abide to ethical user data and privacy practices, and should make its features federation-compatible wherever possible in order to prevent a monopoly on these public services from forming. Any questions, feedback, or interest in collaborating would be appreciated. You can email me mitch [at] everyvote [dot] org. I can also be reached on Twitter @m_downey <https://www.twitter.com/m_downey>, and here's my Github profile <http://github.com/themitchuation>. Thanks for reading! Mitch Downey
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