As fundraising consultant Ian Fraser outlined his campaign strategy before Cobourg council to raise $3.1 million for the new community centre, the issue of naming rights was raised. It is not uncommon for major fundraising drives to seek extraordinary donations from corporations and, in turn, give over naming rights.  Look at the General Motors Place where [...]

The Vote! project offers a unique opportunity to test certain aspects of the Citizens’ Assembly protocols. On Wednesday Oct. 18, 2006, a mayoralty debate was held at Loyalist College in Alumni Hall at 7 p.m. The three candidates, Mary Anne Sills, Neil Ellis and Doug Rolllins, attended a public meeting. History: Vote! Project 2006 Loyalist College e-journalism program is [...]

What a night! The stream went really well, I think. We had up to seven people at a time coming and going. It was a clear stream from our end. I think the server made a difference, plus the higher speed connection at the collere. We can really pump it out. The wireless thing with the student [...]

he stats are in for the first week of election work. Total of 886 visitors. 445 were first time. We received one email submission this week from David Dailey, of Belleville. Obviously, he is a union/activist from his email. We are very successful in pursuing questions for the site. It is interesting to note that people are [...]

The Peterborough consultation session for the Citizens’ Assembly was a great opportunity for the e-journalism students to get some practical experience, along with providing a chance to test our technology. The results of the journalism are currently being edited, but the live coverage was most interesting. Barb MacEachern was chosen to live blog the event using [...]

Our first opportunity to cover a public consultation done by the Citizens’ Assembly for TVO is December 5, 2006. We assembled an excellent team of student journalists who will do the coverage. We held a meeting on Thursday November 30, 2006 to discuss our strategy. Remembering, this is a two-track process, we must ensure solid coverage [...]

Project summary Nov 12, 2006 Things are picking up with the project. This weekend, broadcast students under the direction of Kathleen Bazurk, who instructs the remote broadcast component of the program, will be recording a presentation by Richard S. Katz, from John Hopkins University (Baltimore), an expert in democratic reform. The tapes will be sent to TVO [...]

We’ve decided that since we’ve had so many problems recruiting, instead of focusing on getting large numbers of people out, we should think more in terms of a small core group of participants. We need around 6-8 people who are dedicated and can get the job done. We need people who have enough time to [...]

We discussed readings to be done for this week. Three articles were sent to me at this meeting: ‘2006: Year of the blog,’ ‘Blogging in campaign situation,’ and ‘Effective blogs: Blogging down the money trail.’ Summaries for articles to be in Word documents and emailed to Rob as they are done. Also need to seek [...]

The Mac server – Zeus – is a problem. It hosts the Vote! site and has a tendancy to crash, a problem we are currently trying to troubleshoot. The server crashed at 5 p.m., two hours before we were to begin the mayoralty debate. Thankfully, there was one secretary in the information technology centre because [...]