NationBuilder is a radical and fun new way to run your country, state, city, neighborhood, corporation or non-profit completely democratically with thousands of people over the internet. 

This project started as White House 2 (http://whitehouse2.org/), but it's now expanding into NationBuilder so anyone can use it to run a democracy.  A web service version of this will launch in mid-June to make it technically easy as setting up a Blogger blog or a Ning social network.

My blog has a bit more on the goals:
http://www.jimgilliam.com/2009/05/making-the-future/

NationBuilder is coded with Ruby on Rails 2.3.2, and is in active development.  It's not packaged up all nice and neat yet, it's still a bit raw from that perspective.  If you've never built a Ruby on Rails application before, this may not be the right place to start.  It is released under the MIT License, the same as Ruby on Rails.

Jim Gilliam
http://www.jimgilliam.com/
http://nationbuilder.com/
http://whitehouse2.org/

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Completely incomplete installation instructions:

install rails 2.3.2
install various gems (check environment.rb)
install memcached
install sphinx

git clone git://github.com/jgilliam/nationbuilder.git
git submodule init
git submodule update

Create your database and configure config/database.yml for your database server and remove the .dist.  You should also change the session_key and secret_key to something unique.

Load the database:

rake db:schema:load
rake single:start

Remove the .dist from the various config files in config/ and configure them appropriately

config/contacts.yml -- for the contact importer
config/newrelic.yml -- for new relic
config/nb.yml -- you probably won't want to change anything on this
config/amazon_fps.yml -- not used right now, but will soon

add cron jobs based on the example in config/crontab.dist

To enable Facebook integration:

Go to Facebook developer's site and create an application.  
Under "Connect" options, be sure to put the domain you are using.  
The API key and secret key go in your database.yml file. 

rake facebook:register_templates