About PTP
The Progressive Technology Project is a capacity building organization with deep roots in organized communities of color and low income communities across the United States. Our mission is to help community organizing groups achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently. We do that by helping them build their capacity — both skills and understanding — to integrate technology strategically into the life of their organizations.
PTP’s expertise is at the nexus of organizing and technology. PTP fills a niche by providing the guidance and skills for organizers and organizations to use the communications and technology tools that they need to achieve strategic wins.
About PowerBase
The PowerBase project is more than simply a database. It’s a combination of a uniform database and a system of on-call technical support and training provided by people who understand the field of organizing. Because PowerBase is a web-based platform, it’s accessible by multiple people in multiple sites at the same time.
When PowerBase is adopted by a critical mass of organizations as the standard database for community organizing, the gains go well beyond the work of individual organizations. The entire field of community organizing will benefit:
- PowerBase will allow organizations to share information with nearly “push-button” ease
- PowerBase will integrate smoothly and reliably with voter data
- PowerBase will enable the field to leverage market power with vendors
- PowerBase will facilitate the sharing of best database practices across organizations
- PowerBase will mean staff can move among organizations and not have to learn a new database each time
- PowerBase will allow the creation of database training programs for the field as a whole so that groups can gain the ability to use the database deeply and effectively (as opposed to the current situation where cross-organizational training is impossible because each group is using a different customized database)
About the core PowerBase team
Alice Aguilar is the lead PTP staff for the PowerBase pilot project. She worked as a developer for IBM in the 1980s and went on to work on the development and roll-out of ebase™, a database designed for the non-profit community. She has nearly two decades of experience working with organizing groups on technology issues and is the perfect lead for our team since she can understand and be understood by both organizers and database developers.
Arif Mamdani, PTP’s Executive Director, has a decade’s worth of experience working on issues related to databases both at PTP and at the Welfare Law Center’s LINC Project. In addition to Alice and Arif, all of PTP’s staff is involved in the PowerBase development in some way.
