Political “Engagement” help, services and code from…. Microsoft. TownHall & Campaign Ready announced (with Azure added for flavor)

LiveSide - News blog - Microsoft announces TownHall, based on Azure

“At the Politics Online Conference today, Microsoft announced two new offerings, TownHall, a new “online engagement program” that politicians and others can use to “drive rich discussion around top interests and concerns”, and Campaign Ready, “a collection of Microsoft products and services that can be configured to meet many of the day-to-day needs for running a political or special interest campaign”.

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TownHall will be available later today via a free download on MSDN [GD: MSDN Code Gallery that is], and will be accessible via a number of platforms, according to an email describing the service …

CampaignReady is a collection of services, including advertising from Bing, TownHall, free Microsoft Office Templates, and online fee based services to help campaigns (political or otherwise) “identify and engage citizens on the Web as part of their campaign efforts”, according to a post on Microsoft on the Issues.

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Windows Azure Blog - Introducing Microsoft TownHall, a New Windows Azure-hosted Engagement Platform

“Today at the Politics Online Conference in Washington, D.C. we launched TownHall, a new Windows Azure-hosted engagement platform that fosters, moderates and houses conversations between groups. As you may have seen on today's Microsoft on the Issues blog, TownHall is an ideal tool for politicians and other public officials (among others) who want to host online social experiences that drive richer discussion around top interests and concerns with the American public.

Think of TownHall as software that allows you to easily create a destination for folks to voice opinions, identify problems, offer solutions and come together around common interests and concerns.  It is also a place to ask questions, where the most popular or relevant questions bubble to the top, so all can quickly see timely topics at any given moment. It does this by letting the community decide what's relevant, allowing folks to ‘vote up' questions that they would like to have answered or ‘vote down' questions that don't interest them. Check out this site to see TownHall in action. 

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Because TownHall is hosted on Windows Azure, we do the heavy lifting for you. Windows Azure provides a scalable environment which makes TownHall ideal for people who don't want to manage bulky technical infrastructure. It's available using a pay-only-for-usage model, so customers don't have to pay for unnecessary hardware and bandwidth that might sit idle or worry about handling a crush of traffic around a spike in activity.

Licensing TownHall is free from Microsoft; you only pay to host TownHall on Windows Azure [GD:Emphasis added]. With the cost benefits of the cloud, you could engage with hundreds of thousands of citizens for less than a penny each.   

Though today we're primarily talking about the ways politicians and other advocacy organizations in can use TownHall, it isn't limited to those groups. In the way TownHall fosters conversation between public officials and citizens, it can do the same for non-profits, associations and corporations in the private sector looking to connect with customers …

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MSDN Code Gallery - Microsoft TownHall

“Individuals, whether in the context of citizens or consumers, are online 24x7x365 and they want to engage with organizations from whatever device they may be using at that moment, be it a laptop, tablet, phone, etc. For organizations, there is an opportunity to engage with these individuals and gain valuable insights, but this often must be done within the constraints of existing budgets.

TownHall provides a cloud-hosted solution in a low-cost, low-friction fashion. TownHall, with its multitude of existing and planned clients, allows organizations to engage individuals on whatever device they may be using at a given moment.

TownHall also delivers valuable insight. Recognizing the value of collecting data at the level of the individual, TownHall is delivered with a reputation system that incents users to create profiles. Every engagement an individual has with the site results in the collection of data that is associated with a profile and which can be used for analytics. To drive continued engagement within the community, TownHall’s reputation system awards points and badges for every contribution to the community (asking questions, answering questions, or voting). In our first beta customer, NASA, we’ve seen this reputation system prove itself to be very effective, with some individuals earning just under 2 million points in just under 6 months.

With TownHall, you own the data and we’ve made it very easy to access it. The data collected in TownHall is stored in Microsoft’s SQL Azure, which provides you the opportunity to retrieve and/or interact with data into a number of existing and familiar tools like Microsoft Excel.

This project contains the source code for the core API and the web client. This provides an organization and/or partners with the ability to make customize or extend TownHall.

follow @mstownhall on twitter to be kept up to date on the latest TownHall news
watch videos at http://www.youtube.com/mstownhall
see screenshots at http://www.flickr.com/photos/49307777@N02

The first code drop will be made available later this evening (4/19) after TownHall is officially announced at the Politics Online Conference.” [GD: Project Description Leached in Full. Also download drops are starting to become available as I write this…]

Contoso Politics (http://www.microsofttownhall.com/)

Okay, this is really kind of cool. Sure it’s a tiny bit self-serving (i.e. the Azure hosting) but still there looks to be a great deal of time invested in this product, most of which Microsoft is making available for free. Now that’s a deal!

I mean come on, we get badges!  :)

BTW, the downloads for TownHall are starting to come online now…