Yet another tool that makes it easy to write your representative. As though this is an actual problem. It isn't. The Market is saturated with so many tools to send messages to Congress. Especially electronic ones. Whether it be Blue State Digital, Change.org, BlackBaud, Salsa, or the plethora of other online tools, this problem is solved.
In fact, it's solved too well. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, Congress receives millions of messages a day, and it doesn't have the manpower to actually read the messages because their systems are so antiquated and underfunded. It's as though the market goes "Congress isn't listening to us, we need to make a tool to make our voices louder" when in fact, Congress isn't listening to us because we're deafeningly loud.
Want to really solve a problem? Build software that helps members of Congress receive and sort through their messages. Using their IT systems. Build a FrontApp for Congress that can handle a million messages a day and cluster things by topic group and sentiment. For bonus points, add a public element to it so that the press and the public can see what members have been receiving from their constituents.
Which leads to the second thing to build to help solve the problem: build a system that for real verifies that someone is a constituent instantly. Members want to hear from their constituents, not from the general public. But these electronic messages usually come with no verification. So do you know where they go? /dev/null
As someone who has worked with these guys for years, PLEASE stop making tools like this, and work on the other side of the equation.
BSD, BlackBaud, and Salsa all deliver messages to congress, but only for advocacy organizations who are willing to pay. Beyond OpenCongress, I don't think there are any tools that make it easier for constituents to write their own non-cookie-cutter messages to Congress. Change.org, for example, doesn't deliver emails.
The reason why Congress receives millions of messages is because advocacy organizations send millions of form letters. Congressional staff already have plenty of tools for separating those form letters from real, constituent-written letters. I can dig up their names, but they're built by high-level contractors.
Finally, one of our plans for Democracy.io is to measure response rates from representatives, and to use that to release a public report on how well MoC respond to real constituent messages. Both in terms of timeliness, and the relevance of their response.
> Yet another tool that makes it easy to write your representative. As though this is an actual problem. It isn't. The Market is saturated with so many tools to send messages to Congress. Especially electronic ones. Whether it be Blue State Digital, Change.org, BlackBaud, Salsa, or the plethora of other online tools, this problem is solved.
Congrats on founding & selling Blue State Digital, Joe.
Agree. Congress needs a public ticketing issue tracking system, using it to tell us what they're working on and why they aren't working on what we spammed them to do.
I played a very small role in this project, and did so with my eyes wide open to the issues you raise. I won't reiterate what sinak has already said well, but I see one additional benefit from this project: if public communication with Congress coalesces around this tool, then there becomes a focal point to building the Congress-facing tools you mention, perhaps even in a similarly open-source environment...solving both ends of the problem.
If you've worked on projects like this, I'm surprised you'd write such a comment to sabotage such efforts.
You're never going to solve the problem of verifying people's identity without some kind of elaborate system based on public information, or a new public national id number system, and even then you'd never be fully aware that the person is who they say they are.
The problem this solves is real.
I move a lot, and I've gone through exactly what is in the video more times than I remember, in fact, as soon as I saw the video, I sent it to several people because I thought it was such a good idea.
Your representatives don't have any way to know that any of the e-mails they receive or the submissions to their own personal web pages are strictly from their constituents.. so why do you think this is any different?
Or are you suggesting that members of the legislature will read zero e-mails and zero submissions to their website?
If you honestly believe that your legislators don't have the time to deal with the people they represent, then the problem is not a technical one, the problem is that you need more representatives.
There are some services in the UK which I think print out cards (birthday, etc) from internet orders and post them. I hear that handwritten letters work best. Maybe someone in Baltimore could hire young adults wanting to practice their writing skills to write out paid emails from legitimate citizens.
LOL, congress doesn't listen because it isn't in their interest to listen. Citizens without money are nobodies, congress fundraise 24/7, that's what they care about, saying anything else is either ignorant or maleficent.
What a complete waste of time, from idea to development to posting and commenting, truth sucks but congress does not care about your opinion unless it comes attached to a big check.
Cool to watch this project evolve. Awesome that it's open source, too. There is a lot of value in a platform that can abstract all of the shitty non-standard forms needed to contact raps into a clean API. This was previously only available as a commercial service, it's awesome that the EFF has quietly released this for free.
My only issue here is that because of the EFF's staunch (but very understandable) policy on privacy, the public doesn't get to see the responses from the contacted representatives.
If you want to contact your rep (or any other official) and have their reply be on the record, allow me to shamelessly plug a similar tool I developed: https://pubmail.io - free public email addresses for having on-the-record conversations.
This UK site https://www.writetothem.com/ that does a similar job works fantastically. Using it took a significant amount of pain out of working out where to send my emails, what I had to include to be likely to get a response and so on. Even moreso in writing to MEPs. It also allows them to measure responsiveness and publish that.
I like their policy of not allowing templated form emails, on the grounds that it just annoys MPs and they're more likely to reply if they're unique and personal. I also like the general philosophy of "You don't need to know which level of government representative you need to talk to, we'll find all of them and try to help you decide".
To agree with another poster on this thread, in the UK there's also the big problem with MPs getting too many emails to sort through them and reply personally, many from large campaign groups such as 38 Degrees. Democracy Club (http://www.democracyclub.org.uk, I'm a volunteer) also found the same problem in feedback from candidates in the 2015 UK General Election, many having to handle thousands of emails (partially our fault for making them open data ;)) on little to no resources or party support. I think there's definitely a space for a modern product which can group together and help a representative/candidate handle replies to different campaigns. This is much better than the alternative, which is making it harder to contact representatives/candidates.
I don't think writing to Congress has really ever been the problem, I think the problem is accountability.
The two things we need to see in one place are our representatives voting records for a given topic, and accurate data about what the constituents of that representative desired.
I'm not saying this is an easy thing to solve, mostly because getting accurate data about what constituent want, and doing it correctly, essentially means building an online voting system. That isn't easy, but that is exactly what we need.
Real. Transparent. Democracy.
[Edit]
The accountability application wouldn't need to be binding, it just needs to accurately show if the representative is actually representing the will of the people. It should provide one citizen one vote per pole/bill, provide information about the percentage of the constituency that's registered and voted, and compare those results to the representatives actual vote. I believe that authenticating citizens and public participation would be the biggest hurdles to a system like this.
At the very least this would raise awareness and stimulate conversations between representatives and constituents.
Congress people are quite accountable already. The problem is that they are accountable to gerrymandered districts so they are basically guaranteed support on their extreme ideas. Every time the public gets actually upset about something, the system works, everyone flips on a dime. The problem is systemic at a very high level. There are a few other problems I could describe, but they are also structural and prevent the will of the people from being accurately expressed. Once you resolve the accuracy issue, you can get into real political problems rather than manufactured ones.
Maybe make the placeholder text on the landing page something like:
123 Main Street
Anytown, US 12345
Instead of 1600 Pennsylvania.
Maybe I just didn't eat my wheaties this morning, but my first thought when seeing the form was that I was somehow supposed to provide the address of the representative I was writing.
That still leaves the ambiguity. The header for "Enter your address" should be larger/emphasized. Changing the example address doesn't make it more obvious if I enter my address or theirs.
E:
Sometimes I wonder why I am downvoted - or if I have a particular unhappy person following my posts. So I'll clarify my reasoning:
A small, easily missed header that is separated from the form is all that tells me to enter my address. Changing the example address doesn't magically fix the UX problem of "my address or the reps?" because the only prompt to enter your address is a small header that doesn't attract my attention that isn't located in the forms' area of attention. Adding a header to the form clears this ambiguity.
Placeholder text shows formatting. Whether it is 1600 Penn Ave or 1234 Example Street doesn't help remove ambiguity of "my address or the reps address?"
Look at their home page. Then look at my image [0]. I hope I'm explaining the problem well enough.
Heads-up to the creator: I browse with cookies disabled by default, and when I go to this site this is what I see: http://cl.ly/image/3W3D28153S0t
I'm not sure how deep the form goes but are cookies really required for this functionality? If so, yo might want to display a message indicating that "cookies need to be enabled in order for this to work".
And even if cookies are required for actually filling out the form, why on earth would the "Why we built Democracy.io" require them?? (I'm guessing that's the reason that entire section of content is blank)
This is pretty cool but sucks living in DC because we do not have equal representation. We just have a shadow representative who only has a vote in committee when democrats have the majority.
The worst part about all of this to me is that most people in the country do not know / do not care that 650,000 people that live in DC do not have fair and equal representation like everyone else. Wyoming has about 70,000 less people for the whole state and they have 2 reps and 1 senator. A little infuriating.
Can we have a Google Moderator/User Voice-like tool with a "page" for every representative, where they can then be encouraged to look to see what their constituents want most from them?
[+] [-] cjoh|10 years ago|reply
Yet another tool that makes it easy to write your representative. As though this is an actual problem. It isn't. The Market is saturated with so many tools to send messages to Congress. Especially electronic ones. Whether it be Blue State Digital, Change.org, BlackBaud, Salsa, or the plethora of other online tools, this problem is solved.
In fact, it's solved too well. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, Congress receives millions of messages a day, and it doesn't have the manpower to actually read the messages because their systems are so antiquated and underfunded. It's as though the market goes "Congress isn't listening to us, we need to make a tool to make our voices louder" when in fact, Congress isn't listening to us because we're deafeningly loud.
Want to really solve a problem? Build software that helps members of Congress receive and sort through their messages. Using their IT systems. Build a FrontApp for Congress that can handle a million messages a day and cluster things by topic group and sentiment. For bonus points, add a public element to it so that the press and the public can see what members have been receiving from their constituents.
Which leads to the second thing to build to help solve the problem: build a system that for real verifies that someone is a constituent instantly. Members want to hear from their constituents, not from the general public. But these electronic messages usually come with no verification. So do you know where they go? /dev/null
As someone who has worked with these guys for years, PLEASE stop making tools like this, and work on the other side of the equation.
[+] [-] sinak|10 years ago|reply
BSD, BlackBaud, and Salsa all deliver messages to congress, but only for advocacy organizations who are willing to pay. Beyond OpenCongress, I don't think there are any tools that make it easier for constituents to write their own non-cookie-cutter messages to Congress. Change.org, for example, doesn't deliver emails.
The reason why Congress receives millions of messages is because advocacy organizations send millions of form letters. Congressional staff already have plenty of tools for separating those form letters from real, constituent-written letters. I can dig up their names, but they're built by high-level contractors.
Finally, one of our plans for Democracy.io is to measure response rates from representatives, and to use that to release a public report on how well MoC respond to real constituent messages. Both in terms of timeliness, and the relevance of their response.
[+] [-] ChrisAntaki|10 years ago|reply
Congrats on founding & selling Blue State Digital, Joe.
[+] [-] username3|10 years ago|reply
Or congress should run on Twitter.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...
[+] [-] scrozier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_henry_paulson|10 years ago|reply
You're never going to solve the problem of verifying people's identity without some kind of elaborate system based on public information, or a new public national id number system, and even then you'd never be fully aware that the person is who they say they are.
The problem this solves is real.
I move a lot, and I've gone through exactly what is in the video more times than I remember, in fact, as soon as I saw the video, I sent it to several people because I thought it was such a good idea.
Your representatives don't have any way to know that any of the e-mails they receive or the submissions to their own personal web pages are strictly from their constituents.. so why do you think this is any different?
Or are you suggesting that members of the legislature will read zero e-mails and zero submissions to their website?
If you honestly believe that your legislators don't have the time to deal with the people they represent, then the problem is not a technical one, the problem is that you need more representatives.
[+] [-] rezistik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobylane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdjjdbne|10 years ago|reply
What a complete waste of time, from idea to development to posting and commenting, truth sucks but congress does not care about your opinion unless it comes attached to a big check.
[+] [-] Mizza|10 years ago|reply
Cool to watch this project evolve. Awesome that it's open source, too. There is a lot of value in a platform that can abstract all of the shitty non-standard forms needed to contact raps into a clean API. This was previously only available as a commercial service, it's awesome that the EFF has quietly released this for free.
My only issue here is that because of the EFF's staunch (but very understandable) policy on privacy, the public doesn't get to see the responses from the contacted representatives.
If you want to contact your rep (or any other official) and have their reply be on the record, allow me to shamelessly plug a similar tool I developed: https://pubmail.io - free public email addresses for having on-the-record conversations.
Congrats again, guys!
[+] [-] glomph|10 years ago|reply
I think this is great!
[+] [-] tfgg|10 years ago|reply
To agree with another poster on this thread, in the UK there's also the big problem with MPs getting too many emails to sort through them and reply personally, many from large campaign groups such as 38 Degrees. Democracy Club (http://www.democracyclub.org.uk, I'm a volunteer) also found the same problem in feedback from candidates in the 2015 UK General Election, many having to handle thousands of emails (partially our fault for making them open data ;)) on little to no resources or party support. I think there's definitely a space for a modern product which can group together and help a representative/candidate handle replies to different campaigns. This is much better than the alternative, which is making it harder to contact representatives/candidates.
[+] [-] Zmetta|10 years ago|reply
The two things we need to see in one place are our representatives voting records for a given topic, and accurate data about what the constituents of that representative desired.
I'm not saying this is an easy thing to solve, mostly because getting accurate data about what constituent want, and doing it correctly, essentially means building an online voting system. That isn't easy, but that is exactly what we need.
Real. Transparent. Democracy.
[Edit] The accountability application wouldn't need to be binding, it just needs to accurately show if the representative is actually representing the will of the people. It should provide one citizen one vote per pole/bill, provide information about the percentage of the constituency that's registered and voted, and compare those results to the representatives actual vote. I believe that authenticating citizens and public participation would be the biggest hurdles to a system like this.
At the very least this would raise awareness and stimulate conversations between representatives and constituents.
[+] [-] SapphireSun|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technomancy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwally|10 years ago|reply
Maybe make the placeholder text on the landing page something like:
123 Main Street Anytown, US 12345
Instead of 1600 Pennsylvania.
Maybe I just didn't eat my wheaties this morning, but my first thought when seeing the form was that I was somehow supposed to provide the address of the representative I was writing.
[+] [-] Nadya|10 years ago|reply
E:
Sometimes I wonder why I am downvoted - or if I have a particular unhappy person following my posts. So I'll clarify my reasoning:
A small, easily missed header that is separated from the form is all that tells me to enter my address. Changing the example address doesn't magically fix the UX problem of "my address or the reps?" because the only prompt to enter your address is a small header that doesn't attract my attention that isn't located in the forms' area of attention. Adding a header to the form clears this ambiguity.
Placeholder text shows formatting. Whether it is 1600 Penn Ave or 1234 Example Street doesn't help remove ambiguity of "my address or the reps address?"
Look at their home page. Then look at my image [0]. I hope I'm explaining the problem well enough.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/yYuEuVG.png
[+] [-] improv32|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanlev|10 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how deep the form goes but are cookies really required for this functionality? If so, yo might want to display a message indicating that "cookies need to be enabled in order for this to work".
And even if cookies are required for actually filling out the form, why on earth would the "Why we built Democracy.io" require them?? (I'm guessing that's the reason that entire section of content is blank)
[+] [-] dmarg|10 years ago|reply
The worst part about all of this to me is that most people in the country do not know / do not care that 650,000 people that live in DC do not have fair and equal representation like everyone else. Wyoming has about 70,000 less people for the whole state and they have 2 reps and 1 senator. A little infuriating.
[+] [-] witty_username|10 years ago|reply
America, land of democracy.
[+] [-] usefulcat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Flimm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foolinaround|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjsthompson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godgod|10 years ago|reply
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