In the past couple of months I have been doing some work for a political party in South Africa. We built a volunteer website to get party supporters to join as volunteers to help spread the word.

As part of my research I registered on the John McCain website first. The website provided its supporters with some key tools for spreading the word and supporting the party. Once you logged in you would land on your action center with big call-to-action icons requesting people to do take action. All user interactions could potentially score that use points. The user’s points would be displayed in a sidebar widget. Please note that the social network part of the website has now been closed due to election being over and John McCain loosing.

I decided to try out the Barack Obama website next and was pleasantly surprised when I found out it wasn’t ASP.NET like the McCain website! When the website first appears, the viewer sees a ’splash’ page – an entry page with a video and a signup form to join the Barack Obama ‘team’ – basically to receive Email concerning the Obama campaign. The Obama site promotes its own group and event system with the my.barackobama.com section, their statement is to “Organize Locally with our online Tools”:

• Talk to Voters
• Join a Local Group
• Find an Event
• Fundraise
• Blog

I have a project that needs me to do the following:

• Build a volunteer database and get the volunteers to promote the party
• Get the volunteers to aid in driving the objectives of the party
• Empower the volunteers by providing them the tools to connect in their geographic area
• Drive discussion amongst the supporters and volunteers

My aim is to use BuddyPress to build a community of party supporters. There are a number of bp-components that are missing, like the following:

• Friend importer tool and more advanced tools for recruiting new community members
• User point system tracking and allocating points for user interaction
• Action center and user dashboard page displaying member stats and call-to-action tools
• Fund raising module allowing users to create and run fund raising initiatives for the party
• Design a mobile theme for buddypress making the site more accessible
• Integrating a Jabber client into buddypress allowing an in browser chat experience
• Points status and leader board sidebar widget

I will be blogging each of the above points over the next day or so…..

All components we write will be released as open source and buddypress users will have full access to source code. My objective is to get feedback on my ideas to ensure that we write useful addons for buddypress.