Credit: SquareUp.com

TechCrunch reports that Square, the cell-phone based payment processor, is being used by at least two local political candidates to fundraise at events, as part of the service's beta rollout. (via Tech Republican) TechCrunch's commentators are appropriately skeptical. Aren't trend stories required by some higher power to have at least three examples? But since it's Friday, let's go ahead and indulge in a little harmless speculation about what the potential of Square might be in politics.

Having gotten a chance to play with an early version of Square, we can report that the whole process has been engineered, by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, to be as easy as possible. The user experience is simple, for sure. But perhaps more importantly for Square users, Dorsey and his team have spent considerable energy streamlining the payment collector's experience on the backend, particular when it comes to engaging with a bank and payment processor. Think about the possibility of a candidate or advocacy group, just starting out, being able to carry a Square-enabled phone door-to-door, collecting small payments.

As TechCrunch notes, though, there's something hanging up Square's usage in campaign politics, and it's something that has also proven to be a hurdle in text-message fundraising too -- the ability to collecting donor information in the way the law requires. But TC reports that team Square is working on that:

[...] Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

We're always keeping an eye open for what people in politics are doing to experiment within the boundaries of the email form. Bit of an art, really. Here's something new, from Florida Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat: an email from his 12-year old daughter that highlights the etymology of her name. The full email is after the jump...

Somehow this slipped beneath our radar until now. The deal is that Harvard's Larry Lessig is supplementing his Change Congress/Fix Congress First push with a more fundamental -- yet more provocative -- appeal: let's start a grassroots movement to call for a constitutional convention, as provided for in the Constitution, to rework the basic nature of the agreement between "the People" and Congress. Here, from CallAConvention.org, is Lessig's thinking behind why the time is well nigh to provoke state legislatures into calling a summit on rewriting the Constitution:

From the Tea Party Right to the Progressive Left, there is agreement that something fundamental has gone wrong. But I believe that our frustrations share a common source -- an exasperation with the broken state of our political system -- even as we disagree passionately on what to do about it.

The solution to that disagreement is democracy. We should begin the long discussion about how best to reform our democracy, to restore its commitment to liberty and a Republic, by beginning a process to amend the Constitution through the one path the Framers gave us that has not yet been taken -- a Convention.

For the Framers imagined a time when the government might be captured. And they created a mechanism to respond to that capture. If 2/3ds of the legislatures of the states demand it, Congress must call a convention. That convention then must meet and deliberate about amendments to the constitution. If it agrees, it then proposes amendments to the states. 3/4ths of the states must then ratify any amendment before becomes law. Thus, 12 states of 50 have the power to veto any change, meaning no change could happen unless it appealed to a solid group of Red States and a solid group of Blue. We are, today, beginning the process to call a convention.

In particular, what Lessig wants that constitutional convention to tackle would be an amendment to the Constitution that requires Congress to ensure that "the financing of federal elections does not produce any actual or reasonably perceived appearance of dependence, except upon the People," with a non-partisan commission acting as the people's watchdog on when money is creating unholy dependencies on Capitol Hill.

Of course, one way of lessening the impression that Congress is paid for by high-donors is to create a widespread base of small donors and making political funding processes more transparent -- two things that the Internet has proven to be pretty good at. But first things first: here's where you can sign up to support Lessig's call for a constitutional convention.

With all due sensitivity, the tremendous disaster unfolding in Haiti as a result of Tuesday's earthquake just outside Port-au-Prince is putting the new media and tech experts inside the Obama Administration in what is a familiar place for the many campaign veterans among them: raising money online (often from small donors) and using every tool they know to get word out as quickly and efficiently as possible. But much is new and untested about this situation. And like the rest of us scrambling to confront the Haiti disaster, they're also often making it up as they go along.

The Obama White House has, for its part, taken on the job of sharing the presidential perspective on the crisis, posting footage from briefings with President Obama and, for example, shooting YouTube videos with First Lady Michelle Obama. The White House is also acting as an online clearinghouse, attempting to point to work being done both in and out of government. The latter includes the work being done by the William J. Clinton Foundation to provide relief in Haiti.

Often the work inside government that the White House is pointing to is the efforts of Hillary Clinton's State Department, which perhaps has the most dense collection of new media innovators working in the federal government today...

Given the situation in Haiti, we asked our go to mobile expert, Katrin Verclas of MobileActive to clear up some of the confusion about whether mobile donations meet towards Haiti relief are being reduced by mobile fees. SMS donations to the Red Cross, she reports, are being passed through without any carrier fees or processing fees, with the Mobile Giving Foundation and MGive (operated by Mobile Accord, a company working with the State Department on its mobile program) are handling the transaction (and declining to take a cut). Texting HAITI to 90999 sends ten U.S. dollars to the Red Cross.

Making contributions via your cell phone is convenient, but you can also, of course, give directly through the Red Cross website or by calling the Red Cross at 1-800-REDCROSS. It seems like all donations, mobile or otherwise, will go into the Red Cross's generic funding pool, to be allocated where they see the most need.

Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti foundation is fundraising online, and pledging 100% of the funds raised to relief efforts. And the State Department is tweeting the situation in Haiti.

UPDATE: Also worth mentioning is the online fundraising being done Partners in Health, the organization led by Dr. Paul Farmer that has been working to improve lives and public health throughout Haiti for many years now. (Pick up Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains for a look at the work that PIH does, and how it does it.)

The Massachusetts Senate seat up for grabs in next week's suddenly very exciting special election has leading Republicans gearing up their online operations on behalf of Republican candidate Scott Brown, who is challenging Democrat Martha Coakley for the seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy; we've seen Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty hit his email list on behalf of Brown, as has former Bay State governor Mitt Romney.

Leading Republican operatives also seem to be looking to turn the race, which could take away the 60th Senate vote Democrats very much want to protect, into a demonstration of their rising ability to shape major races -- and the Republican Party -- by harnessing online enthusiasm and dollars on behalf of their chosen candidates. "If we can do this now," tweeted techPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini at the tail end of yesterday's Brown money bomb, "imagine what we'll do for Marco."

Marco is, of course, Marco Rubio, the underdog candidate who seems to be mounting a surprisingly strong challenge for Florida's Senate seat against Florida Governor Charlie Christ. Here's some useful background from the New York Times magazine on how Rubio is emerging as something of the embodiment of the tea party movement, or at least a disapproval with what are seen as moderate, capitulating Republicans. The "this" Ruffini refers to doing is the more than $1.3 million that the Brown campaign is saying it raised through an online "money bomb" in one 24 hour period from, reports the Boston Herald, 16,800 people at an average contribution of $78 a pop.

As to the mechanics of pulling off his "money bomb," Brown rolled out a custom version of iContribute, the software developed by Engage, the DC-area firm led by Ruffini and partner Mindy Finn who happen to be the pair behind the Rebuild the Party drive launched in 2008 as a challenge to the Republican party's old guard. One way to "rebuild the party" in your image and likeness: equip your favored candidates with tools that help them amass the resources they need to get into office. The iContribute software is the same contribution tool that now-Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell used in his campaign, but in Brown's case, the backend had an added visual hook. His "Red Invades Blue" campaign boasted a map of the state of Massachusetts, slowly turning red as money was raised yesterday, from western Mass to the coastal east. By the end of the day yesterday, Nantucket was blazing crimson.

CQ Politics is reporting that the DSCC has just made a half million dollar ad buy in Massachusetts on behalf of Coakley.

Reflections upon the Obama campaign's design work? A crowdsourced fundraising effort? Total techPres bait, but Obama campaign design director Scott Thomas is involved in an intriguing quest. Wanting to chronicle the art and design that both was created by the Obama for America campaign and developed organically by supporters, but to put out a book with considerable production values, Thomas decided to avoid traditional publisher, go DIY, and fundraise himself for the production of Designing Obama -- using Kickstarter, what Thomas calls an "Obama-like fundraising model."

The finished product is set to come in an 360-pages of hard-bound art and commentary.

Think few people would prepay $10 for a digital version, or $50 or more for a print version of a book they haven't seen yet? With 13 days to go, 883 backers have contributed $57,000 of the $65,000 target Thomas set for the first run of the book.

Sara Holoubek, a friend of techPresident/Pdf, pass along a curious email. It's a fundraising request on behalf of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, and it went out, it seems, to a mailing list of people who happen to be registered on the financial news site Forbes.com. It's no secret that the vast Forbes empire leans to the right. At it leans hard on a free-market, dog-eat-dog view of the world. It's why Heritage would be interested in the company's list. That said, it strikes me as a tad broad-brushed for the note to the Forbes list to be addressed "Dear Fellow Conservative." What, no liberals read business news?

It strikes Holoubek that it's just simply bad email form to lead with a litany of Obama's supposed sins -- "socialized health care... high costs on productive people...unprecedented expansions of governmental power... his complacency toward national security" -- and then ask for folks to complete a survey on their own considered opinion on Obama's performance thus far.

Full text of the Heritage/Forbes email is after the jump.

Attempts to do political fundraising on Twitter has proceeded in fits and starts, but the Democratic online fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue has announced that anyone with a personal profile on their site can now contribute via tweet:

Friday evening, we released new software that connects our fundraising platform with Twitter. We started with our popular ActBlue Express that allows contributors to save a profile, make contributions to candidates or fundraising pages with just a few clicks, and review their full giving history. What's new is connecting that profile to Twitter: now allowing donors to give by just tweeting the candidate's Twitter screen name and an amount. We'll respond with a thank you note and you'll see the usual email receipt in your inbox.

The format: "donate $amount @candidate via @actblue" -- more details here. (Image via ActBlue)

Future Majority's Mike Connery points us to an innovative new campaign that lets cash-strapped college students contribute activist dollars while doing nothing more than buying their required text books. Through Textbooks4Change, about 7% of the cost of books purchased through the Amazon.com Associates program goes directly to the Courage Campaign's work to repeal California's Prop 8. Since the percentage is skimmed off Amazon's share of the profit, the student-activist's wallet isn't any lighter than it would otherwise be.

And considering that college text books are often so expensive that you think they must be priced in Zimbabwean dollars, that money could add up. Details here.