Civic Design Democracy is a design problem.

I have goosebumps.

The first four Field Guides went to press at Scout Books yesterday afternoon. They are delicious little creatures, and I can’t wait until they come back from Scout. Download PDFs of the beautiful Field Guides designed by Drew Davies and his extremely talented and wonderful team at Oxide Design Co. in Omaha, Nebraska.

Oxide worked really, really hard making this happen. Write to them and tell them how much you love the Field Guides and how important they are: drew@oxidedesign.com.

And: Whitney Quesenbery has been, well, amazing! Line-by-line reviews. Suggestions for improvements. Late night reviews and edits and more reviews.

Thank you, my talented, dedicated friends.

What happens next, you want to know.

1. Whitney Quesenbery is the keynote speaker at the most important gathering of election officials in the U.S. on June 29. The event is the IACREOT conference. And there she will hand these lovelies out, for FREE .
2. Research for the next two Field Guides has commenced. Whitney is beginning a project to understand what works for voter education materials. We’ve gathered some interesting examples, and we’re in the process of designing the research. As soon as she can come up for a little air, she may call on some of you to help her out.
3.  Also, Cyd Harrell, about to embark on a whole new phase of her career, is now my partner on a project to get at what makes an effective web site for a county election department. We’ll do this in two phases. The first is to go look at what election departments are offering now. The second is to compare what voters want to know to what election departments are offering.

We can’t do this alone. There are more than 3,000 counties (or equivalent) in the U.S. We don’t plan to test them all for usability, but we’re looking at significant coverage. So, if you’d like to help us, email me and we’ll put you to work: dana@usabilityworks.net.

These projects will probably take all summer. And then we’ll publish those two Field Guides and a few more goodies.

By the way, the first edition of 500 of each of the first 4 guides cost $5,000-ish total to print. I expect that between Whitney speaking at IACREOT, and a couple of gigs I have (like speaking to California election officials at their conference in July in San Diego), that the first edition will be exhausted pretty quickly. So, doing another print run, plus paying for a few design- and research-related expenses, and then printing the next two Field Guides — seems like a good way to spend the rest of the Kickstarter money. Thank heaven for volunteer, um I mean, pro bono help.