Steven Clift
Tue, 21 Jun 2005 09:01:15 -0700
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I've been meaning to give the Participatory Politics folks a plug for sometime. Steven Clift http://dowire.org See: http://www.participatorypolitics.org Our Work Current Projects Elections are nice, but we have a chance to go further. Participatory Politics builds software tools and websites that create new opportunities for continual engagement with government. Current Projects Collaborative Bill Tracking Right now it's unnecessarily difficult for individuals and small organizations to be informed participants in the legislative process. Thomas is arcane and intimidating, and most useful information (e.g. a bill's chief opponents, or its odds of passing) is unavailable to anyone outside DC lobbyist circles. By assembling all the available information about a bill in one place (news reports, blogs, media, .gov data) along with collaboration tools (wiki, comment areas, trust ratings) we can create a unique space for discussion and information sharing, and a conduit for insiders to leak information to the public. We also lay the foundation for a two-way street, where lawmakers track and respond to input from constituents. The Regular The Regular is a politics news site modeled on the popular tech news site Slashdot. Any reader can submit news items, which human moderators edit and publish. Conversate Conversate facilitates online discussions between friends. More specifically, it makes it easier to rope people you know into discussions of sources you find online. We believe increasing the quantity and quality of discourse is the key to pulling out of this political mess we're in, so facilitating discussions between people with existing social ties just makes sense. But this project could also be seen as an attempt to hit an untouched niche between blogs, Yahoo groups, and annoying carbon-copied emails. OpenCongress Small organizations pay huge sums of money to add simple "Contact Congress" or "Write a letter to your editor" functionality to their website. We can create an open source set of tools that lets organizations collaboratively maintain a shared database of media outlets and legislators. Once we put the structure in place, extending it to the state and local level will be easy. Software like this is long overdue. As a matter of principle, the tools required to rally voters to make their voices heard between election cycles should be a public resource. ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - - - W: http://publicus.net Minneapolis - - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - MSN/Y!/AIM: netclift UK Office Hours - 1pm - 11pm - - T: 0870.340.1266 Join my Democracies Online Newswire: http://dowire.org *** Past Messages, to Subscribe: http://dowire.org *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To UNSUBSCRIBE instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** New RSS XML Feed Available: *** http://www.mail-archive.com/do-wire@lists.umn.edu/maillist.xml