

Congress Match - Does your Representative (or Senator) represent you? - patton01
http://www.popvox.com/blog/2012/announcing-popvox-congress-match-does-your-represe/

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tocomment
Seems kind of useless to put it behind a paywall. Has anyone made something
similar that anyone can use?

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maco
It's not a paywall. It's free.

Here's how it works: you use PopVox to communicate with Congress, sending
support or oppose messages which are publicly tallied so all can see which way
any given Congresscritter's distric was leaning. This tool then shows you,
bill by bill, whether your two senators and congressperson voted the way you
told them to through PopVox.

If you contact them some other way, PopVox can't possibly know that (nor can
anyone but your congresscritter, so there's no accountability), so it's
useless without an account.

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kznewman
Its a paywall. Just I have to pay with info rather than money. It is not free.

To accomplish the goal of knowing how my congresscritter (really?) matches
with me, I should not need an account. If I wanted you to contact them for me
then OK but to call the site useless without an account just makes it so.

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maco
I don't work for PopVox, so I'm gonna stick with "Congresscritter" :)

Anyway, I guess you were expecting one of those hokey quizzes news sites have
that never really cover the bases properly. _shrug_ PV's actual purpose is to
enhance constituent communications. That means your messages to Congress route
through them so they can sprinkle on loads of metadata and make it easier for
the Congressional aids to sort through while at the same time providing public
accountability. This personalized bill-by-bill member-by-member thing is newly
added on top of that larger main goal.

I use it because I like that accountability thing (transparency, woo!), and I
have enough friends that used to have to sort through paper letters to the
offices they worked in who have warned me that I will make staffers hate me if
I send paper letters ;)

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guimarin
Pay-wall business model is broken and thus I don't think this site in this
form will ever be successful. The thing to do would be to compile all the
publicly available information pulling out relevant information via filter for
particular topics, groups, and interests. The way to pay for it all is to
charge representatives, senators, presidential candidates, etc. money to have
an 'official from them' page on the page that describes what they do and who
their interests are. The public should never have to fork over any money, or
information to these congresspeople, unless they specifically create an
account to ask directed questions to congresspeople who are paying money to be
on the site. Should charge $25k per year to each state representative ( at a
federal level ) and $50k per year for each senator. CA and other state
legislators should have to pay $5-10k per year depending on their level.
Presidential hopefuls should pay something like $1m per cycle. Most to all of
these people are millionaires, and their campaign funds should be allowed to
be used on this site. It should also give information about effectiveness of
voting technologies, etc.

disclaimer, I wrote up a site like this, but haven't coded/launched because
success is dependent on design skills and the ability to implement them, not
in quality/quantity of info. Until ordinary citizens are using it, no rep is
going to pay for it as a platform for access, and it needs really great design
to get ordinary people to use it. If I become rich this is the first site I'm
going to throw money at because I think we really need something like this.

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mayneack
Voted on a few of these things and the percent of support surprised me. I
wonder what group of people keep skewing these polls. I know online polls
aren't anywhere near accurate, but the percents still surprised me.

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drewem
Yeah, seems pretty skewed right/conservative in the few bills I voted on. I
have seen this phenomenon before, for example in Votizen, where a lot of well
organized Ron Paul supporters are some of the earliest adopters of online
political tools.

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maco
So get your preferred groups to make use of the handy widgets PopVox makes
available for easily contacting Congress on whatever their important-bill-of-
the-moment is. <https://www.popvox.com/services/widgets>

(You can embed them in your personal homepage too. It's free. I've got an
anti-SOPA one on my homepage.)

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marcidale
"tocomment" - what do you mean? there's no paywall.

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showerst
I also run smack-dab into a 'create a popvox account' box. Nothing on
bugmenot, and definitely not something i'd bother to create an account for.

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maco
If you and ten other people shared a BugMeNot account, that'd mean your
opinions and those ten others would all be grouped as one user, meaning it
wouldn't ACTUALLY represent your views. Also, Congress requires your REAL name
and your REAL address to contact them, otherwise the Congresscritters' online
forms reject the email as being not from their constituent.

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binarydud
seems kind of simple, the answer would always be NO!

