In particular, it has been an honor to be involved in the election of Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, now to be the first independent governor of that state. Despite an election year fueled by backlash, his progressive message carried the day.

Congratulations to all who prevailed in this year's harsh electoral environment. Now let's get back to work.

This new release, in development over the last five months, brings refinements as well as big new features to the Campaign Engine platform. As I did with our 3.0 release, I'd like to highlight the Big 3 out of the dozens of changes:

Dashboard. The new Dashboard page for site administrators contains interactive charts of recent financial contributions and supporter signups on your site. It's a visual representation of activity on your site at a glance. The data updates in real time without needing to be reloaded.

Search Query Builder. Campaign Engine's admin application now sports a full-featured Query Builder that will be familiar to database administrators, but retains the Campaign Engine ease of use. The Query Builder allows you to formulate complex database queries, including AND, OR, NOT, and fuzzy matching.

Time-delayed email confirmations. Previous versions of Campaign Engine included the standard feature of sending an email confirmation when someone signs up on your site. But now, additional emails can be sent out automatically after a number of days you specify. As always, the content of these emails can be different for each signup form.

For example, if someone volunteers on your site, a thank you email can be sent out right away. One day later, you can also automatically send a follow-up message as a reminder, with more suggestions of how to get involved. A second automated message can be sent a week later, with another message of encouragement.

All clients receive this update for free, as part of their regular service, and are encouraged to sign up for our training calls on the new features.

With Campaign Engine 2.0 in 2008 and 3.0 in 2009, we've continued to increase the pace of development, and are already at work on our next releases.

You can see Campaign Engine in action by signing up for a free demo.

The three main new features are:

Contact Manager. Keep notes on your staff's interactions with supporters. Keep track of phone calls, meetings, emails, or any other event, right in a user's record, along with who on your staff made the contact and their comments. A simple way of adding offline contacts to the automatic record of your supporters' actions on the web site.

Report Generator. Create PDF reports from any supporter records, such as Contribution Histories or Call Sheets. Additionally, we can implement complex custom reports for you with the data you choose.

Site-Wide Asset Manager. The same asset manager is now available throughout Campaign Engine, in email broadcasts or on any event, form, or other page. You can upload images and files directly within the asset manager, include them in your messages or on any page, and then reuse them again in the future.

We've also added enhancements like faster email queue processing, email HTML code that is more compatible with Gmail and Yahoo Mail, an enhanced search list view, and more.

As always, we don't add a feature just to check a box on a feature list. We work hard to make even the most advanced function easy to use for our clients, and I think our implementations of the above components meet our high standard.

We encourage you to see Campaign Engine in action by signing up for a free demo.

Ben Schaffer, the president of Media Mezcla, a Democratic online media firm, immediately noted "the absurdity that is her website."

"Fiorina parallels her campaign to the eternal struggle between cats and dogs," he went on. "She also seems to be suggesting that if you like cats and night then move along, you're probably a Democrat."

What's weird about this site is not that it has technical problems, as some have suggested. Sure, it does lack content and graphically resembles a Macy's circular. But I was most surprised by its lack of strategy. That there is no compelling reason for her candidacy is not surprising, but it's surprising they didn't try to come up with one anyway.

The closest they get is some idea that the election is about "good vs. bad" -- and while many politicians do see their own advantages in this simplistic way, few of them are naive enough to think that's a sufficient message.

It's Your Money NYC is a fully searchable database of the New York City budget, including earmarks (or as they are innocuously called here, "member items"). You can search by keyword, sponsoring council member, the group that received the money, amount of grant, and more.

This is a brand new level of transparency for New York City government at the time when we need it the most. Please take a look at the It's Your Money NYC site and let us know what you think.

Update: A writeup over at The Observer.

(And because of the way we handle contributions, he paid the lowest possible credit card fees and no commission to us.)

So, who wants to be the next record holder?

Mark Green for Public Advocate of New York City

Campaign Engine is the software platform supporting all contributions, events, and email broadcast for this site.

It's great to be working on this project personally, as my very first involvement in New York City politics was handing out flyers for Mark Green in the previous century!

Go Green!

As you may know, the Maldives is a tiny archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the smallest Muslim nation in the world, and has been ruled by a dictator for 30 years, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. In 2008, free presidential elections were held for the first time in many people's lives. We had the opportunity to work with a leading candidate for president, Dr. Hassan Saeed, a former attorney general and chief justice.

The very newness of it all made it somewhat difficult to tell who was a likely voter, so the approach was to go after everyone! We set up a database containing just about every human in the country (about 350,000). Addresses in the Maldives are complex, because there are no streets or street numbers: just a house and an island. Houses have names, not numbers, rather like English country manors. And people's legal names are different from our expectations in the U.S.: a person might have three names (Abdul Abdullah Abdul), or two names (Abdul Abdullah), or even just one (Abdul). We created a custom version of Campaign Engine to handle this different structure.

In a field of 6 candidates including the incumbent dictator, Dr. Saeed ultimately achieved third place. In a runoff round, however, Mohamed Nasheed won against the dictator, and the free elections were a success.

We will continue technology consulting with Dr. Saeed throughout the year as he builds a new party from scratch in this new democracy. This has been an exciting project and I am pleased to be a footnote to history.

I am also proud to say that Jeff Merkley has been elected as Oregon's junior Senator. Jeff will be a progressive voice for Oregon and for the nation, and an excellent partner for President Obama. It has been a great experience to work with his team this cycle.

Congratulations are also in order to Senator-Elect Daniel Squadron, of New York's 25th State Senate District. This was also a special campaign for me personally, as I live in the district Daniel will be representing in Albany! I know we can expect him to be a leader in the New York Senate, which will also be under Democratic control for the first time in forty years.

Rounding out the night for us, San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi earned a second term in a broad showing of support for his progressive record.

So, a great night for America, and a great night for Media Mezcla clients. We're three for three for the evening. And did you hear -- President Obama?

Congratulations Daniel!

Congratulations to Mayor Sam Adams, of Portland, Oregon!

The most obvious change for users will be the new contribution screen, which automatically adapts to events and memberships as well. This is a one-screen contribution process, the same approach taken by the web sites of the Democratic candidates for President, which will now be familiar to your supporters.

But that's just one example — there are over 40 new features in Campaign Engine 2.0. We'll be happy to go over them all with you! Please contact us for a free demo to see for yourself.

In fact, he goes on to boldly state that "I will NOT FUNDRAISE for any candidate who does not pledge to stop direct mail" to those who prefer not to receive it.

While Markos has called upon web site vendors such as ActBlue to enable an opt-out checkbox for contributors who don't wish to be contacted via snail mail, there's good news for Campaign Engine clients today.

In the version of Campaign Engine you already have, our Form Designer allows you to add a custom checkbox to your contribute, volunteer, email signup, or any other form, by which your supporters can opt out of paper mailings. That status will be marked in their records and with every export of your list.

It's just a question of creating the field and dragging it onto your form. That's the simple approach we take to solving these real-world problems.

If you're currently a Campaign Engine client, please feel free to get in touch with any questions you may have. If you're not a Campaign Engine client -- we'll be standing by to make sure Markos will still fundraise for you.

The site offers public education on health and fire safety, as well as provides the Foundation with online fundraising and communication capability.

The site is now live, at www.fdnyfoundation.org.