DFIA Co-founder Dr. Alta Price at DemFest

© 2004 Democracy for Iowa. All rights reserved.

DFIA Co-founder Dr. Alta Price of Bettendorf Reports on a Great Find Coming Out of DemocracyFest


DemocracyFest was a wonderful chance to connect – or reconnect – with
outstanding grassroots activists from around the country. Really, from
around the world. I met Dean people from Tokyo and Switzerland, on
their way to Boston for the convention.



In
addition to informal sharing, the organized workshops were fantastic.
There were too many to attend them all, and I wasn’t always aware of
what was happening when. Fortuitously, I sat next to Rich Cowan of Organizers' Collaborative at lunch (the food was great!) on Saturday, otherwise I would not have known about his workshop.



Organizers'
Collaborative is a nonprofit that promotes low cost, easy to use, and
open source technology for social change organizers. What I was
particularly interested in was the Organizers Database
(ODB). ODB is free software for Windows designed to let small campaigns
and nonprofits easily manage member, volunteer, and donor information.



Rich and
I set up a rough database for DFIA during lunch, stopping only when we
decided we had to listen to Joe Trippi (who gave a wonderful speech, by
the way). ODB is very flexible, and we can categorize our members in
many different ways. Then Rich used the DFIA database we set up as an
example during his workshop.



I can’t
wait to get our database guy (you know who you are!) working with ODB.
I’m going to download it onto my computer and start playing with it. I
believe it will handle DFIA’s needs beautifully.



Other
groups and small political campaigns will also find Organizers'
Database useful. I’m going to ask our blogmistress to find a place for
Organizers Collaborative tools somewhere on Blog for Iowa, so other
groups can use them, too.



Alta Price