President Wikis - Round #2 - Partnering With Another Organization For A Quicker Launch

Today I am driving down to Transparency Camp http://transparencycamp.org/ in Arlington Virginia. 

"TransparencyCamp is an “unconference” for opengov: an event where, each year, journalists, developers, technologists, policy-makers, government officials, students, academics, wonks, and everyone in between gather to share their knowledge about how to use new technologies and policies to make our government really work for the people -- and to help our people work smarter with our government."

My goal this weekend is to partner with the Sunlight Foundation http://sunlightfoundation.com/ to bring the President Wikis Network to the next level.  President Wikis was started back in 2006 by Barclay and I.  We saw that the emerging trends would lead to a day when the government would be held fully accountable for its actions.  Wikipedia had just started to become popular at this time & Wikileaks was just starting.  The people behind Wikipedia verified many of our conclusions through their Wikia organization, which specialized in wikis specific to industries.  I knew from the beginning that the idea of a wiki (exponential, perpetual, non-repeating collection of information) was the future, and that there would be a information war in the future to control whole entire industries through the information that that those industries consumed.  Hobbies were a natural fit for my first few wikis. Barclay & I started off building SnoWiki, the official ski & snowboard wiki.  We also built bookmark wikis, trend analysis wikis, symbol/ shape wikis, company planning wikis, pollution wikis, and many others.  SnoWiki caught the eye of Wikia, they contacted me, and I decided to partner with them on the project.  This is why it is now hosted on their server.  Around this time they also asked me if I would be interested in working for them.  I said no.  Although they were & still are the kings of information, I know logically that we cannot allow a monopoly on information.  This is why i turned down the job.  I didn't want to empower them while hindering alternatives.  I would rather empower independent self-sustaining communities that can be used to keep each other in-check & aligned with reality.

So, President Wikis was formed after Barclay informed me about Ron Paul.  I was not political before since I believed since I was a kid that the government was fair, just & aligned with constitutional principles (as they taught us in grade "school").  I knew right away that I had to learn more, and educate those around me.  The facts were all out there, but they just hadn't been presented in the proper manner yet.  Information should be vetted, well sourced, and inter-linked with related content.  I knew that the wiki would be the future of keeping governments in-check.  It just had to be.  There was (& currently is) no better way to compile information for long-term dissemination and propagation. 

Luckily I had just got into the hobby of domaining, buying & selling domain names.  Kyle T., Barclay and I were discussing the idea of an interactive media company, so I purchased myself a few domain names related to that hobby (or potential business).  As the wiki idea became more popular, I knew i had to start buying up wiki & encyclopedia related domain names.  Feeling an obligation to help keep America free, I went on to spend a large sum of my money of President Wiki, Constitution Wiki, & presidential candidate related domain names.  To my surprise nobody else had purchased them!  So I went on monopolizing them.  The only one I didn't get was BarackObamaWiki.com, but luckily I got that over the past year!  I now own all the .com & .org domain names for recent & current presidential candidates!  It feels sort of like a monopoly game, but instead of holding pointless cards, I am holding onto some of the most powerful words in the english language.  .Com will always be king in the search engines, and if you own the keyword domain names in a .com domain, you will show up #1 in google for said keywords.  This is very powerful.  Especially when all grade school & college students use wikipedia for the majority of their research.  Although they shouldn't, they do anyways.  These students are not typing "wikipedia" into google, but rather they are typing "wiki" with whatever keyword page they want to see.  For example "Wiki Obama" or "Barack Obama Wiki."  My domain names have the power to over-power Wikipedia in the search engine for these search terms, and they did just that in 2008.

You may be asking yourself, ""why haven't you continued to push this project non-stop since 2008?"  To which I would respond that I have been bust trying to get my life in order.  As a young entrepreneur whom just graduated college in 2008, I have had a lot to deal with.  Lucklily my hard work has started to pay off though and my web design business is truly taking off!  The original President Wikis websites were built using mediawiki, since this was the preferred wiki platform at the time.  SInce then I have gotten into Drupal.  Drupal is the best!  It has by far the most features of any open source CMS.  Drupal 6 presented a few problems for multi-site, and Drupal 7 was not released until this year.  Drupal 7 is finally developed enough that I now feel comfortable re-launching President Wikis with it.  This is coming asap.  This is why I am headed down to Arlington, Virginia right now.  The Sunlight Foundation should eat this idea up since it embodies their mission statement.  I plan on transferring them either the .com or .org President Wiki related domain names, while I hold onto the others.  I was this idea to spread quickly, so combining my resources with theirs will make for the ideal launch.  By splitting the domain names between us, we can ensure checks & balances on the transparency system.  If they ever censor info, I will split the project off onto my own 1/2 of the domains.  Then there will just be 2 competing databases on the candidates for the worlds most powerful position!  I don't think that it will come to this though, as the Sunlight Foundation seems to have a good track record.  I know that I am putting myself and potentially my life out on the line to establish this open government system, but I don't care.  I know that it is worth it to help spread the freedom that has made this world so great.  We must not lose sight of our dreams and the United States should be the beacon guiding all of us on our way.   To ensure that this happens, we must ensure a fully transparent leadership.

Right now I am about 2 hours away from arriving at the camp.  I figured that I would write this post to commemorate the event prior to its occurrence.  The future looks bright, but it looks even brighter through a transparent lens!