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This is great and I hope that people do call their representatives, but I wonder if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic w

by john_b 12y ago

This is great and I hope that people do call their representatives, but I wonder if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. To some extent, this describes the EFF and the ACLU, but I'm thinking more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. Each time a new bill starts making its way through Congressional committees someone spins up a new issue-specific website, which is good, but it seems like there must be a lot of overhead in organizing on an issue-specific basis and that a lot of work (collecting emails, convincing people that this issue is worth their time to call, etc) is duplicated. Maybe individual grassroots political advocacy could even be incentivized in a "gamification" kind of way if it had a more permanent organizational structure with account or email records that persisted across issues? I don't really have anything concrete though; mostly I'm just thinking out loud.

npizzolato 12y ago
Presumably, the people who will regularly call their representatives about privacy and civil rights issues are already members of the ACLU and/or EFF and can get updates through them. I'm not sure what group of people wouldn't want to be a part of either organization but would prefer to be a part of another organization that would send them updates on these sort of issues. The point of websites like these is to draw in other people who either don't know about the issues or wouldn't normally put in the work to keep up with news and regularly call their representatives.
declan 12y ago
> if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. EFF, and to a lesser extent the ACLU, has been doing this for over 20 years. >more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. You don't need to be a member of EFF to sign up for their alerts.

by john_b 12y ago

npizzolato 12y ago

Presumably, the people who will regularly call their representatives about privacy and civil rights issues are already members of the ACLU and/or EFF and can get updates through them. I'm not sure what group of people wouldn't want to be a part of either organization but would prefer to be a part of another organization that would send them updates on these sort of issues. The point of websites like these is to draw in other people who either don't know about the issues or wouldn't normally put in the work to keep up with news and regularly call their representatives.

declan 12y ago

> if it would be more effective if the pro-privacy and civil rights demographic would organize on a more permanent basis to call representatives rather than on an issue-by-issue basis. EFF, and to a lesser extent the ACLU, has been doing this for over 20 years. >more of ordinary people who understand that these kinds of reforms need to happen, but aren't interested in being a member of such an organization. You don't need to be a member of EFF to sign up for their alerts.