In a couple of weeks, I’ll be presenting a training at Netroots Nation called Coding as Activism, together with my colleague Sandy Gani. The goal is to give attendees a taste of what it’s like to work with the NGP VAN API.

The blurb promises a three screen web form example. Here’s what that’ll look like:

  1. a simple email signup
  2. a voter file look up and canvass
  3. RSVP for an event

Each step will feed into the next: we’ll use the data from the email signup to look up a record in the voter file, and so on. Along the way, we’ll dive into the nuts and bolts of our API - how authentication works, how our voter and volunteer data is organized, and what the key components of the data model are.

This example is perhaps a little contrived, since I don’t think there are really any web apps in the progressive space which follow exactly this template. Instead, It’s meant to be illustrative of the most common use cases in our API. I work with hundreds of software developers across the progressive movement, and almost to a person, they are all doing some combination of the use cases above. So this training will be a great way to learn some of the key skills and concepts in progressive software.

I’m really excited to make this training available, because I think it’ll help developers get an overview of online progressive activism. It’s pretty easy for newcomers to this space to get a little overwhelmed, since there is just so much activity in progressive software these days. (An excellent problem, to be sure!) But when you distill all of this activity down to its most basic parts, you wind up with just a handful of basic use cases, and the three above are right at the top of the list.

I think this training will be a great look at the basic building blocks of online progressive activism. If you’re going to Netroots Nation, I hope you’ll join us!

Image courtesy of Roya Ann Miller