New Democratic Party: The Orange Room

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Another Election, New Ideas

For the 2008 Federal election, the New Democrat Party wanted to create an online community where users could post news, content and ideas, and allow fellow NDPers to connect and interact to help promote the party's platform. The result was The Orange Room, a radical approach to connecting with loyal party supporters as well as undecided voters. While other parties focused on using the classic negative approach by attacking their foes with smear campaigns, The Orange Room was a refreshing twist to traditional election campaigning.

Engaging Minds Instead of Pointing Fingers
How did The Orange Room differ from the other party websites? First, it allowed registered users to post links to any content scattered across the Internet. From blog posts to YouTube clips and links to articles of interest, any form of social media could be made available for the community to tag, review, comment and vote up. As users posted more content, they'd gain points and a reputation as a good source of constantly evolving election news. Additionally, the NDP was able to send notifications to members of The Orange Room who signed up for the Rapid Responder service. Its purpose was to keep users up-to-date on developing stories involving the NDP, and to help discredit attacks against the party.

What started out as a vision for an online community turned into an innovative one-of-a-kind system that brought political and social awareness into the new Internet-savvy age.

  • Custom tagging and classification system to help users find content related to their province, their local riding and the election at large
  • Integration with popular content APIs (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr)
  • Account creation and authorization using Facebook Account IDs (developed before Facebook Connect was around)
  • Facebook Application developed to display the latest news and developing stories voted up by The Orange Room community, and posting of status updates to users' walls
  • AJAX reloading of content for fast page refreshes and server load optimization
  • Post authentication and approval
  • Ability to create custom contests and content sub-categories