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Show HN: Democracy.io by EFF – Write to your representatives

144 points by sinak 11y ago

foolinaround 11y ago
having the party affiliation of the representatives would be useful, and easy to add.
dmarg 11y ago
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.
- witty_username 11y ago
  Even worse with Guam and other territories. America, land of democracy.
- usefulcat 11y ago
  Only one senator? What happened to the other one?
  - rlevy 11y ago
    1 rep in the house (who can't vote), no senators
    - usefulcat 11y ago
      Actually I was referring to the part about Wyoming only having "2 reps and 1 senator".
cjoh 11y ago
Sigh. 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 11y ago
  Hey there, I worked on this. 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.
Flimm 11y ago
As much as I like the EFF, I feel a non-profit organisation dedicated only to things like this would be better.
Zmetta 11y ago
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.
- SapphireSun 11y ago
  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.
higherpurpose 11y ago
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?
Animats 11y ago
There was already "http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/" http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/" for lookup. It even has map integration, if your ZIP code isn't enough.
Mizza 11y ago
Congrats on shipping, guys! 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 https://pubmail.io - free public email addresses for having on-the-record conversations. Congrats again, guys!
glomph 11y ago
This UK site https://www.writetothem.com/ 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 think this is great!
- tfgg 11y ago
  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 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.
jordanlev 11y ago
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 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)
godgod 11y ago
Great tool. The problem isn't contacting congress. the problem is that congress doesn't give a damn if we contact them. They vote how the lobbyists tell them to. We have taxation without representation and that is a undeniable fact.
jwally 11y ago
minor UI tweek... 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.
- improv32 11y ago
  I had a similar first impression aswell
- Nadya 11y ago
  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. [0] http://i.imgur.com/yYuEuVG.png http://i.imgur.com/yYuEuVG.png
technomancy 11y ago
There is great irony in using the .io domain for this considering its extremely undemocratic history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Diego_Garcia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Diego_Garcia
cjsthompson 11y ago
Representative government is not democracy.

144 points by sinak 11y ago

having the party affiliation of the representatives would be useful, and easy to add.

dmarg 11y ago

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.

witty_username 11y ago
Even worse with Guam and other territories. America, land of democracy.
usefulcat 11y ago
Only one senator? What happened to the other one?
- rlevy 11y ago
  1 rep in the house (who can't vote), no senators
  - usefulcat 11y ago
    Actually I was referring to the part about Wyoming only having "2 reps and 1 senator".

cjoh 11y ago

Sigh. 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 11y ago
Hey there, I worked on this. 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.

Flimm 11y ago

As much as I like the EFF, I feel a non-profit organisation dedicated only to things like this would be better.

Zmetta 11y ago

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.

SapphireSun 11y ago
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.

higherpurpose 11y ago

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?

Animats 11y ago

There was already "http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/" http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/" for lookup. It even has map integration, if your ZIP code isn't enough.

Mizza 11y ago

Congrats on shipping, guys! 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 https://pubmail.io - free public email addresses for having on-the-record conversations. Congrats again, guys!

glomph 11y ago

This UK site https://www.writetothem.com/ 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 think this is great!

tfgg 11y ago
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 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.

jordanlev 11y ago

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 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)

godgod 11y ago

Great tool. The problem isn't contacting congress. the problem is that congress doesn't give a damn if we contact them. They vote how the lobbyists tell them to. We have taxation without representation and that is a undeniable fact.

jwally 11y ago

minor UI tweek... 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.

improv32 11y ago
I had a similar first impression aswell
Nadya 11y ago
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. [0] http://i.imgur.com/yYuEuVG.png http://i.imgur.com/yYuEuVG.png

technomancy 11y ago

There is great irony in using the .io domain for this considering its extremely undemocratic history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Diego_Garcia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Diego_Garcia

cjsthompson 11y ago

Representative government is not democracy.