Loosing Site

Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons is considering a new challenge, Congress.

Lessig ‘08 – Change Congress. via kwout

Lessig believes that money is acting as a corrupting influence in Washington and is establishing a Change Congress movement to address that issue. Key actions for candidates supporting the bipartisan movement are:

• refuse donations from lobyists or political action committees
• ban earmarking of funds
• support public financing of campaigns

Lessig is himself considering running for office in the California 12th as a way of advancing the project.

Laurence sees on-line communities and technologies as timely and important mechanisms for mobilizing the electorate and increasing transparency.

The Sunlight Foundation, for example, “supports, develops and deploys new Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people”.

Sunlight Foundation via kwout

Activists are already emerging. A “Draft Lessig” site has been set up to promote and fund raise; together with a MySpace Page and a Facebook Group.

Internet activism in political, economic, spiritual and cultural areas has been stimulated by:

• the Obama campaign
• the EBay Strike
• Anonymous vs. Scientology
• the Free Culture movement

Providing fertile ground for grassroots empowerment.

While the campaign is focused on the United States the lessons, messages, frameworks and packages will have relevance internationally in political and non-political arenas where stakeholders perceive corruption.

Coventry based Senokian Solutions have just launched Tactile, a hosted contact management and sales pipeline tool. Tactile is aimed at small businesses who are daunted by the cost and complexity of traditional customer relationship management solutions.

Tactile CRM: Easy to use affordable CRM. Client and contact management, sales pipeline reporting and email management. via kwout

Before building Tactile CRM, Senokian spent time working with local companies to better fit the software design to the needs of a typical small business. Their approach is described in an evaluation of an implementation of Open Source in Health Care by OpenAdvantage.

NHS: National Institute for Mental Health in England — OpenAdvantage – Freedom, Choice, Control via kwout

Tactile is built on EGS, an award winning open source Enterprise Groupware System, built using PHP, Postgress, adodb, Smarty, Prototype, Scriptaculous and the Zend Framework.

EGS via kwout

With prices ranging from free (2 users) to 75GBP (200 users) per month Tactile’s hosted service provides a scalable low-cost  CRM solution. Where and whether Tactile finds a niche depends in part on their selection of features and interfaces, but also may be affected by location, support and cultural nuances expressed in the interface.