Campaign Truth is a collaborative website devoted to providing an unbiased portal to information on candidates' positions on the issues relevant to the 2004 Presidental Election. By harnessing the collaborative power of webloggers that has been proven by sites such as The Command Post and by the influence of the blogosphere itself, Campaign Truth will offer a place where voters can come to get past the story-of-the-moment in the media, and dig deep into candidates' true positions on the issues that matter to them most.

What kind of information does Campaign Truth collect?

All kinds: public statements and press releases by the candidates; their past actions as legislators or other public officeholders; and news, opinion, and weblog articles on all of the above. Campaign Truth's goal is to provide a portal to sources with which voters can form their own judgments, with particular emphasis on primary sources (such as links to the text of legislation).

How does it work?

Each candidate has a single page for each issue being tracked by Campaign Truth. Anyone who finds information they believe is relevant to the topic can submit a comment on the page, providing a link to the source and a summary. Periodically, the site administrator(s) will sweep through the comments and incorporate the submitted information into the main body of the page. In addition, bloggers can also issue TrackBack pings to candidate-issue pages.

What information should be provided in a comment-submission?
Keep it simple: a brief (one or two sentences) summary of the information, and a URL to the source. All submissions must have a source URL. Any comments that you include in your submission beyond these basics will not be included when the information is added to the main page, and will therefore be lost.

Who can participate?

Anyone!

Who are the administrators?

Campaign Truth is hosted by The Truth Laid Bear, and is currently adminstered by N.Z. Bear, the author of TTLB. In the future, additional administrators may be added from the ranks of those participating in the project.


Can I post my screed about why Candidate X is a lying evil menace who eats small children for breakfast?

We'd really rather you didn't. The emphasis here is on facts, and on well-argued, rational opinion pieces. If, on the other hand, you have actual evidence of Candidate X's fondness for toddlers with his morning coffee, then that is fair game.


Can I sort and search through information in lots of neat ways?

At the moment, not so much. The current site design is a rather basic one, but N.Z. Bear has grand ideas for future enhancements that will add more sophisticated, database-like capabilities should the project prove successful.

You left out an issue from your list; how can I suggest you add it?

Send an e-mail to N.Z. Bear with your request. In this early stage, the project will try to focus on fairly broad topics, but going forward, we may break them down into more focused subcategories.