callcongressnow's comments

As far as I am aware, Julia isn't that fast for string operations yet. The language has been optimized for numerical calculations but they haven't done much work on making working with strings as fast as they could. I remember reading this on a github issue at some point but I can't find the issue at the moment.

A friend worked at a congress person's office a while back. When I told her about automating calls, she was not pleased. Very high noise to signal ratio. I think that effort would be better invested in informing the public and giving them better tools than mindlessly spamming their offices.

https://github.com/zmaril/callcongressnow/issues/1

Thank you! It's actually really dumb. Like, it's piping out to Readability and then just searching for capitalized pairs of words and then pounding a hash-map for look ups of Congress folks. MVP or something right?

https://github.com/zmaril/CongressionalHound

[reposting this from another comment for visibility]

Ever since the NSA business leaked, I've been thinking about this problem. It took me a few months to wrap my head around all the crazy stuff that's been going on but I've started building some systems that I think might have a chance of helping out.

"Call Congress Now"- using Twilio, you can call Congress folk from your browser (for free).

http://www.callcongressnow.org/

Here are some Congress people who some consider are doing some shady stuff: http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/F000062 http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/L000174

But it's pretty hard to get the word out about websites like that. In a sense, nobody passively cares enough to call Congress. Only when the Congress folks do something that brings about outrage do people care enough to really pick up the phone (or click the twilio button, as it were). So I built the /u/CongressionalHound, a bot on reddit that hunts for mentions of current sitting members of Congress in submitted articles and displays information about them in the comments:

http://www.reddit.com/user/CongressionalHound/comments/

If you are a mod and want me to run the bot on your subreddit, PM the bot and I'll have it saunter on over and get to work. Slowly putting the bot on subreddits that give me permission or invite me to. My hope is that when articles about the NSA, or Obamacare, or the shutdown, or or or any big political issue comes up, that the bot will channel people towards getting in touch with their representatives and senators and effectively voicing their opinions.

Both of these are prototypes and there are major known bugs in both, but I think they can serve as examples of systems that could help citizens better impact their government through the power of the internet.

Ever since the NSA business leaked, I've been thinking about this problem. It took me a few months to wrap my head around all the crazy stuff that's been going on but I've started building some systems that I think might have a chance of helping out.

"Call Congress Now"- using Twilio, you can call Congress folk from your browser (for free). http://www.callcongressnow.org/

Here are some Congress people who are doing some shady stuff: http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/F000062 http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/L000174

But it's pretty hard to get the word out about websites like that. In a sense, nobody passively cares enough to call Congress. Only when the Congress folks do something that brings about outrage do people care enough to really pick up the phone (or click the twilio button, as it were). So I built the /u/CongressionalHound, a bot on reddit that hunts for mentions of current sitting members of Congress in submitted articles and displays information about them in the comments: http://www.reddit.com/user/CongressionalHound/comments/

If you are a mod on reddit and want me to run the bot on your subreddit, PM the bot and I'll have it saunter on over and get to work. Slowly putting the bot on subreddits that give me permission or invite me to. My hope is that when articles about the NSA, or Obamacare, or the shutdown, or or or any big political issue comes up, that the bot will channel people towards getting in touch with their representatives and senators and effectively voicing their opinions.

Both of these are prototypes and there are major known bugs in both, but I think they can serve as examples of systems that could help citizens better impact their government through the power of the internet.

If you'd like to call or get in contact with Senator Sanders, try: http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/S000033

Just click the call button, give the microphone permissions, and then it will call his Washington office for you via Twilio.

If you'd like to find another member of Congress, just visit the root domain: http://www.callcongressnow.org/

This is a little app I've been working on and I'm just starting to talk about it today, so bugs are to be expected. If you find one, please file an issue here: https://github.com/zmaril/callcongressnow