Mail-to-Jail suggestion

[Mike Barskey]

Mail-to-Jail is requesting your ideas and suggestions about expanding our services. Please read this blog post and let me know there, here, or via admin@mail-to-jail.com what you think. Thanks.

[Russell Kanning]

if someone wants to add someone to mailtojail, especially if they are some bigtime activist somewhere else
why not just send them mail themselves?

[Free libertarian]

No suggestions, but a sincere thank you for doing it.

[thinkliberty]

Adding high profile liberty activists from outside NH will probably at one point have 1000s of people sending 1 person a letter. That's a lot of mail to send, which means a lot of work. Lot's of people will send a Bradley Manning or Marc Emery a letter....

How much do you want for your time, how much do you need for postage?

Most letters take X amount of time for you to send and cost Y amount for postage. a simple counter can be used for each MtJ sent to deduct $Z dollars(which you get from adding X to Y) from an <area>  or <individual activists> money pool.  If the pool for a <area> or <activist> is 0, money will need to be donated before a letter can be written.

Maybe people can have an individual login where they can prepay for the letters they send as well as donate to a general <area> or <activist> pool.

It would be cool for the people making extra donations to be able to see that they were responsible for X number of letters sent to the activist(s) of their choosing. After someone uses the money they've donated to send a letter... they have a counter that increases by one.

A total letters sent counter would be neat to see on the site too.

That's all I have for ideas.

I can help you code the site, if you need/want help with that.

[Friday]

I'm not sure if this has already been posted, but it looks like Bernard von Nothaus tried to reference Mail-to-Jail in the latest issue of the Liberty Dollar e-newsletter, but he got the name wrong and used a bad link.     Here is the excerpt from the newsletter:

And equally noteworthy is one of Kevin's letters that was recently posted on the mailfromjail.com site and forwarded to me. PLEASE read this letter and marvel at the exulted space that Kevin occupies while standing firm for the Liberty Dollar after 14 MONTHS behind bars. Like Kevin, we have an extremely strong, winnable case and the government is going to lose dearly for this shortsighted misadventure.

[SethCohn]

I agree with Ron (as he posted on your blog entry): make subdomains, and add some form of donation tracking... so that 'outside' activists can get mail but only if it's funded, so that you are making it worthwhile for you to do this.

Doing here in NH, as a public service 'for liberty' is one thing, but doing it as a service for others elsewhere is the start of something either burdensome or at least needs to be breakeven for you (and I'd argue even that would be a failure in the long run, since you'd end up losing money in the long run)

[Mike Barskey]

Thanks for the ideas. It seems to make sense to support other activists once funding is established, possibly like Ron suggested in a comment on the MtJ website. Now I have to figure out how to do it. Does anyone who is familiar with Drupal want to volunteer some coding time? Thinkliberty, thanks for the coding offer; do you know Drupal?

[Ron Helwig]

Thanks for the ideas. It seems to make sense to support other activists once funding is established, possibly like Ron suggested in a comment on the MtJ website. Now I have to figure out how to do it. Does anyone who is familiar with Drupal want to volunteer some coding time? Thinkliberty, thanks for the coding offer; do you know Drupal?

What I'm doing on a few sites might be an idea. I set up UberCart with recurring roles. People can buy a role, with monthly or quarterly payment coming from their Paypal or credit card automatically. I try to give them some benefit, with removing the ads being the most basic and simple one.

You could set up the domains, with each one having a front page explaining the site's purpose and asking people to set up a recurring donation. When enough come in, activate the rest of the subdomain. You could also have a ChipIn to ensure a large enough starting amount. "We will activate this service once we have $50/month in recurring donations plus $250 in startup fees" or something like that.

[SethCohn]

Setting up subdomains in drupal is trivial - once you learn how, you'd be shocked at how easy it is...
So the real 'issue' is funding.  I agree with Ron: you'll want recurring funding pledges, or else a large initial fund...

I'd also add a donation request to every submission, explaining that this service, while 'free' is donation funded, with a a suggested amount.  The problem is the amount needs to be high enough to fund the site, but cheap enough to have folks want to use it, rather than pay postage/etc for sending it themselves.

[Jacobus]

Mike, thanks for providing this service.  Without it I probably would not have sent a few letters.  I've subscribed to the $3/month donation plan and hope it helps.

I also hope you can find a way to earn a profit with expanded services.  If it were me, I'd probably burn out and give up altogether if I were not getting compensated for the expanded services. 

[Mike Barskey]

Thanks for your input everyone (many people responded via different media). I've decided how I want to proceed, but I now need someone who can code and is familiar with Drupal standards.

Here is a list of what I want to change about or add to the MtJ website. If you're interested in this project, please let me know how much you would charge for coding the following functionality. If you are a Drupal coder and these are confusing, please contact me and I'll clarify my notes.

• "BrainSavers"
    • have categories (taxonomy?) of nodes, each of which is a poem, puzzle, game, picture, essay, etc.
    • allow mail-senders to choose up to X items (based on @ of pages?) to send to an activist (there should be one page where you can select an activist and then choose X items from a list of all items grouped by category)
    • track which nodes were sent to each activist so they aren't sent multiple times (or aren't sent again within X days/months)
    • have a special "BrainSaver" that is a packet on liberty (e.g., "how to i become a free stater?" or "what is a free stater?" or "what is liberty?") - Rich Paul says this kind of packet is good to hand out to other prisoners in the jail, so allow mail-senders to send more than one of these per X days/months

• Non-NH activists
    • each non-NH activist should have a subdomain (e.g., mikebarskey.mail-to-jail.com); or perhaps just a special "landing page" (e.g., mail-to-jail.com/mikebarskey)
    • have a donation drive for each non-NH activist
    • people should be able to donate for a specific activist (or multiple activists, with their total donation being divided evenly(?) amongst all activists they select)
    • donators should decide whether they want to be anonymous (those that submit their name/nickname will be displayed on a list of donors - each activist will have a list of donors)
    • MtJ will not take or send letters until $X (or X%) is raised
    • display the donation status ($ or %?) on the front page with each activist in the list
        • total donations should not be displayed to users in $, but in "credits" or perhaps in percent (e.g., if I want $20 in order to send letters to an activist and I've raised $5 so far, it would display to users as "25% of funds have been raised")

• improve postcard GUI
    • make postcard selection browser better, like via imageflow or cooliris or carousel
    • allow users to submit any picture (easily) for use as a postcard (including a brief description of image for small print on back of postcard)

• letter counters
    • have counters of all letters, postcards, and "BrainSavers" (separate counters for each) were sent
    • summarize counters by:
        • activist
        • month
    • also show a total (all letters to all activists at all times)

[SethCohn]

Off the cuff notes... Mike can't afford to hire me for this, and I can't take it on probono, but I can offer some unsolicited expertise:

• "BrainSavers"
    • have categories (taxonomy?) of nodes, each of which is a poem, puzzle, game, picture, essay, etc.
    • allow mail-senders to choose up to X items (based on @ of pages?) to send to an activist (there should be one page where you can select an activist and then choose X items from a list of all items grouped by category)
    • track which nodes were sent to each activist so they aren't sent multiple times (or aren't sent again within X days/months)

Interesting idea, but quite complex (due to the tracking of what to send... and who got it so far).
I'd use ubercart for this, to organize things into products, for maximum ease of 'ordering'.
But it's non-trivial...

Simpler suggestion: 1 packet, or perhaps multiple packets (ie once packet #1 is big enough, starting compiling packet #2), per prisoner, rather than pick and choose... less work, makes it easier to have 'packet' ready to add to mailings (ie "this is the current packet we'll add" and only sent once per person)

    • have a special "BrainSaver" that is a packet on liberty (e.g., "how to i become a free stater?" or "what is a free stater?" or "what is liberty?") - Rich Paul says this kind of packet is good to hand out to other prisoners in the jail, so allow mail-senders to send more than one of these per X days/months

Nice idea.  Ubercart product: 'fund a potential activist - for $X donation, we'll include Y packets in with our mailings so Prisoner Z can distribute to his/her fellow inmates.'  I'd suggest not making this per activist, but merely a general fund idea (Ok, I can spread 10 packets this month... Prisoner X will get 3, and Prisoner Y will get 7 in his bundle)

• Non-NH activists
    • each non-NH activist should have a subdomain (e.g., mikebarskey.mail-to-jail.com); or perhaps just a special "landing page" (e.g., mail-to-jail.com/mikebarskey)

Either way... but landing pages is likely _way_ less work.  Subdomains are good if you want completely separate sites...  but sounds like donation funding will make it easier to leave it all as one domain.

    • have a donation drive for each non-NH activist
    • people should be able to donate for a specific activist (or multiple activists, with their total donation being divided evenly(?) amongst all activists they select)

ubercart product for each activist.
The splitting can be manual, at least.  Might be automated.

    • donators should decide whether they want to be anonymous (those that submit their name/nickname will be displayed on a list of donors - each activist will have a list of donors)

Order option.

    • MtJ will not take or send letters until $X (or X%) is raised

Once the goal is reached, via a rule, create new page to send to activist, page won't exist until then...
keeps it simple.

    • display the donation status ($ or %?) on the front page with each activist in the list
        • total donations should not be displayed to users in $, but in "credits" or perhaps in percent (e.g., if I want $20 in order to send letters to an activist and I've raised $5 so far, it would display to users as "25% of funds have been raised")

Some custom views.

• improve postcard GUI
    • make postcard selection browser better, like via imageflow or cooliris or carousel
    • allow users to submit any picture (easily) for use as a postcard (including a brief description of image for small print on back of postcard)

views carousel/slideshow (there are a few choice), and a new content type allowing photo uploading (with some moderation)

• letter counters
    • have counters of all letters, postcards, and "BrainSavers" (separate counters for each) were sent
    • summarize counters by:
        • activist
        • month
    • also show a total (all letters to all activists at all times)

All views.

So with the exception of the brainsavers, the rest is likely not that hard to implement, just time consuming.
If someone wants to learn how, these would be good projects to learn some Drupal with... and other sites would benefit, from having more skilled volunteers/staff.  Almost none of the above requires coding to do with Drupal.

I've just inherited DrupalforLiberty, and likely won't get it running this week, but I like the idea of a 'volunteer clearing house' both to find folks, fund folks, and build the community up some more... this sounds like a good example for it.