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Votermedia connects people who are about to vote, with people who have studied the issues.
It helps communities connect with their elected leaders, by letting voters allocate community funds to competing blogs.
This motivates bloggers to serve the community, especially during elections; also between elections.
It can benefit democracies, co-ops and corporate shareowners.
Likely early adopters include student unions, credit unions and municipal governments.
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This website
is a demo showing communities that could benefit from votermedia, and blogs that cover those communities.
This illustrates the potential future expansion of votermedia.
If and when communities start funding their blogs this way,
voters will benefit from greater quality and quantity of useful content.
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Votermedia in practice:
Our best implementation so far has been at
UBC,
where the student union funded blogs using our system. As you can see from the videos, they consider it a success.
It's explained in the paper
Experiments in Voter Funded Media.
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The
Votermedia Democracy Blog
covers related democratic reform projects, focusing mainly on co-ops and governments in and around Vancouver, Canada.
Which blogs serving your voter communities deserve funding?
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It's easy to start for your community:
Email your community and blog information to admin[at]votermedia.org. We'll create the ballot page, usually within a day.
Voting can begin with or without funding. Bloggers compete for their rankings, plus for funds if/when your community ballot is funded.
As soon as the ballot page is up, you promote it to potential voters, bloggers and funders.
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It's cheap:
Usually a community would persuade its government to fund the voter-selected blogs, so that funding comes from all who benefit.
However, anyone can contribute funding. We suggest starting with $10/day/community, none of which goes to votermedia.org;
it all goes to the bloggers. (We're an all-volunteer nonprofit project.) Start at any time, and continue throughout the year.
We can put the funding schedule into our system to calculate awards.
Funders can pay bloggers directly, based on automated output from your community's
accounting page like this.
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There's also this one-page
Introduction to VoterMedia.
Similar designs for public funding of media are advocated by leading thinkers
Robert McChesney & John Nichols,
and
Dan Hind.
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