George Wins Public Interest Software Prize
My buddy George won the first Pizzigati Prize For Software in the Public Interest for his work on the CitizenSpeak project. (I suspected he may have won when, some time after the prize contenders were announced, he began asking me questions about exactly how he ended up working on it.) He was up against some great projects, but I’m glad he was chosen. Congratulations, George!
I’m a small part of the story that helped it happen.
A couple years ago, whilst at the annual NTEN Conference in Chicago, I attended a panel on which sat Jo Lee, founder of CitizenSpeak. Her tool ingeniously provides a way for even the tiniest advocacy organization to create “email your X” campaign (where X could be “city council members” or “dog catcher” or “principal” or other person(s) in power who you want to reach en masse) on a website, easily. The killer feature for organizers is the fact that CitizenSpeak stores the email address of each participant so organizers can track the campaign and follow up with their base. Handy, simple, widely useful and fully grounded in the reality of organizing.
On the panel, Jo spoke of needing some developer help. She hoped to convert her site from a quick-custom job to a Drupal module so others could add the same capability to their own sites. I didn’t have the chops nor the time at that point, but I definitely thought the project was cool and worthy. I talked to a lot of people about it, including George, who eventually offered to write the new module for a very modest fee.
That same conference season, at SXSW-Interactive, I learned about Fundable.org. After turning him on to it Gregory Heller, another friend, helped a initiate a Fundable.org drive to pay for development costs of the new CitizenSpeak re-write.
George went on to build the thing (with some help from Eric from DevelopmentSeed and Jo) and the new site looks great. Maybe with this encouragement, he’ll update it for Drupal 4.7 and better integrate it with CiviCRM. 
