
Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help - frostmatthew
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/tech-volunteers-eff-needs-your-help
======
sinak
Full instructions on how to take part are at this link:
[http://theunitedstates.io/contact-
congress/](http://theunitedstates.io/contact-congress/)

And here is the Github repo: [https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-
congress/](https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress/)

~~~
sinak
100 people, 760 commits, 43k lines added to the YAML files in 13 hours. Thanks
all those taking part - we were expecting this to take a month and it looks
like it'll get done in a day :).

Still plenty more to do if anyone else is interested in dropping by and
helping close up issues.

~~~
arenaninja
Well I hope I'm not late. Just home from work but this looks too awesome to
resist jumping into

------
Theodores
In the UK we have a decent website for contacting one's MP:

[https://www.writetothem.com/about-us](https://www.writetothem.com/about-us)

And it works!

For petitions to Number 10 we also have:

[http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/](http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/)

...and it works, as in you can sign something that will be totally ignored
(eyes roll)!

So in every country we are duplicating effort. Hence I think the EFF need to
think beyond the shores of that renegade British colony known as the USA.
Maybe it is time for some open source system that can be rolled out to
everywhere from The Hill to Burkina Faso.

Let's also be honest about those people in congress - do the current batch of
revolving door military/corporate oldies that sit there really deserve to be
taken seriously? Does anyone believe they understand concepts such as reasoned
argument, being fair, the common good, progress, listening instead of
speaking, telling the truth instead of lying? Even if they do appear genuinely
for the good it can be just an act, as per that person you Americans have for
'President'.

So, to invite participation from the rest of the world and get some
enthusiastic input from those that think that the current batch of congressmen
are deserved of being Guantanamo-ed, the EFF should think bigger. They should
link up with groups that have made progress internationally and work towards a
tool for democracy that can work everywhere.

~~~
ig1
Write To Them is open source and is already being used in multiple countries:

[https://github.com/mysociety/writetothem](https://github.com/mysociety/writetothem)

------
rejschaap
I know this is all in good spirit and you just want to show some appreciation
for the help. But rewarding programmers by number of commits is a bit
perverse. Nowadays everyone generally agrees that paying programmers per line
of code is a bad idea. I think rewarding based on number of commits creates
very similar unwanted incentives and should probably be avoided completely.

~~~
Loque
Needs backlog with priority value, progress state... basically paper trail.

Also, I like the idea of this project, but I hate the pitch. I don't know why.
Maybe it is because programmers already go above and beyond, taking care of
the stuff that no-one else thinks over. I would actually suggest investing
time in looking to fund better development. Just my 2 cents - great idea, best
of luck!

~~~
unhush
Thanks for the feedback!

The tech team at EFF is pretty overloaded all of the time; we've hired outside
contractors before but this is a project where it seems more efficient (and
potentially more fun per person) to crowdsource. The same goes for HTTPS
Everywhere ([https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere](https://www.eff.org/https-
everywhere)), a browser extension that I maintain where almost all of the
10,000+ XML (ugh!) http-to-https upgrade rules are contributed by volunteers.

I think EFF is in a rare position to experiment with crowdsourced programming
tasks, because (most of) our contributors don't have any incentive to game the
system and deliberately submit low-quality work, which decreases the
usefulness of results you get from money-driven crowdsourcing platforms like
Amazon Mechanical Turk. This particular experiment was far more successful
than I predicted, which brings up the question of whether there is a
systematic way to make crowdsourced web development effective.

------
joelcollinsdc
The US House of Reps is almost done with development for an API (that was
spearheaded by outside organizations like CMF) for 'campaign' communications
(communications where the majority of the messages are 'similar') from third
party advocacy organizations. After this occurs, the hope is that only
messages sent via web forms are completely unique messages sent from
constituents without the assistance of a third party. The project has been
slow (10 years in the making?) but its near completion. Achieving 100%
adoption amongst the 440 member offices is a different question though,
although 100% adoption has been mandated.

~~~
HistoryInAction
As far as I understand, the Sergeant at Arms can enforce IT mandates upon the
various offices, no?

------
zachlatta
I think it's really great that the EFF is reaching out to the community like
this. I reached out to donate time and I encourage you to do the same.

~~~
HistoryInAction
I'll also point out that Sina (sinak) has been spearheading this effort, and
while he has a job title at EFF, he's primarily independently coordinating the
volunteer efforts of folks like us through
[https://taskforce.is](https://taskforce.is)

------
trentmb
> Secure Connection Failed

> An error occurred during a connection to www.eff.org. The OCSP server has no
> status for the certificate. (Error code: sec_error_ocsp_unknown_cert)

Anybody else getting this?

~~~
chrismorgan
Got it briefly. Tried again and it worked.

------
GoodGuy
Here is a very effective german platform for not only contacting, but also
making the answers to questions visible:

the site -
[http://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/](http://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/) the code
-
[https://github.com/parliamentwatch/parliamentwatch](https://github.com/parliamentwatch/parliamentwatch)

the site is in german, but you might guess the content with a little help from
an online translator. It is very popular and linked to from the biggest german
online media. It might be an indicator for it's success that several
conservative politicians tried to fight this site with all kinds of tricks,
but they still did not succeed :)

Unfortunately the code is drupal, it certainly would be much better to convert
this to some more flexible framework like pyramid or django, but it works.

It might be a much better alternative to make questions to congressmen
publicly visible than just sending stuff into spam-folders of people that do
not have interest at all in being contacted by "the people".

------
aidos
I'm really impressed with the project. It's a great idea - both the concept
and the execution are brilliant.

The bookmarklet for generating the yaml file could be used for all sorts of
things - I've never seen this idea before. Even better, it's being used to
crowdsource the data for the tool.

I'm really impressed with this. Kudos to all involved.

~~~
mrfusion
What does the bookmarklet do exactly?

~~~
goatburger
You fire up the bookmarklet on the MOC's site, point it at a form, and it
extracts the input fields and marries them to the parameters for email, zip
etc, or lets you marry them. produces YAML for their cucumber'esque system
etc. Quite a cool tool/idea.

------
chrismeller
They really need some copy editing done on _everything_ for this project.

~~~
sinak
If you have suggestions on fixes, please feel free to submit a pull request.
theunitedstates.io/contact-congress is on the gh-pages branch [1]. I wrote the
instructions page and realize there are a few grammatical errors, any help
fixing them would be really appreciated.

[https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress/tree/gh-
pag...](https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress/tree/gh-pages)

------
scrozier
Have been completely engrossed in this most of the day. Hope it's done soon or
I'll have to go cold turkey.

------
microjesus
"How technical do I need to be?" \- not very.

Sorry, what?

~~~
knieveltech
"You should be comfortable using Github, having basic programming proficiency
in at least one language and have a reasonable grasp of HTML and Javascript.
Experience collaborating via IRC is handy, but not critical."

So... very technical?

~~~
PeterisP
Is that called "very technical" nowadays?

Basic proficiency in a random programming language and some grasp of HTML is
something that's taught in a high school computer class or any introductory
course for a tangentially related college program such as statistics or
physics - this level of proficiency is something that a random student (of
not-computer subjects) is somewhat likely to have.

I mean, it definitely is _technical_ and does require some background, but
it's appropriate to say "a bit technical, but you don't need to be an expert".

~~~
dwaltrip
They don't teach HTML in physics or stats. Most people also don't take an
intro to computer programming course.

~~~
rprospero
They may not teach HTML, but my alma mater taught python to freshman physics
students. By senior year, you would have at least learned two additional
languages. That's just from the physics courses - if you decided to take an
intro to cs course (which most did), you would have learned a fourth (but
probably not a FORTH).

While they wouldn't specifically know HTML or Javascript, they'd know enough
to how to read the language documentation and gain basic proficiency in a
week. They wouldn't be a Douglas Crockford, but they could help out an open
source project.

Of course, this was at a state school. Things might be different elsewhere.

------
phantom_oracle
Disclosure: Only bother if you are American.

Next time you ask, make sure you specify who you are serving. Congress does
not serve me as a foreigner (then again, does it serve everyday Americans
either?).

New title:

"Dear US Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help"

~~~
id
1\. US laws can have a huge impact on foreigners, especially if they are
Internet-related

2\. you can help a good cause without directly profiting from it

------
microjesus
An organization that I had hope in, posts something like this for captcha
breaking and subtle bullshit. Really? Is this HN or ODesk?

~~~
sinak
Just to clarify, we're not trying to break any captchas - any system that
implements the open data format in contact-congress would need to return
captchas to users for them to fill out. We're simply making it possible for
third parties to create simpler, unified interfaces for sending emails to
someone's member of congress.

------
ttctciyf
I was pretty surprised to see the EFF's naive take on the Tea Party [1] in
"recent deeplinks" underneath the linked article, which seems not to recognize
it as pretty much an astroturf instrument of the neo-bircher Kochs [2], [3].

Of course co-opting TP sympathizers around a common goal of opposing
overweening government surveillance to unknown purpose is a Good Thing, but
unless the EFF, an org I've respected for ages, is unaware of the spurious
"grassroots" provenance of the Tea Party, which seems very unlikely, I'd
expect a less nakedly revisionist approach from them.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/tea-party-taxes-and-
wh...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/tea-party-taxes-and-why-patriots-
wouldve-revolted-against-surveillance-state)

[2]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0)

[3] [http://www.astroturfwars.com](http://www.astroturfwars.com)

~~~
dTal
If you're trying to get self-identified Tea Partyers on board, a great start
is not alienating them. Appealing to the aspects of their ideology we can all
agree on is a great idea to garner allies. The Tea Party's "grassroots" origin
may be spurious, but the sense of injustice that fueled its adoption by
ordinary folk is real enough. As I understand it, a lot of basically normal,
non-frothing people now believe that the Tea Party basically stands against
government overreach, and as such are sympathetic to it. Might as well channel
that. We might even see an evolution of what the Tea Party means.

~~~
HistoryInAction
This. We don't have to agree with them on everything. We do have to respect
them enough to use their language (think ./English/politics/Tea Party/ in
contrast to ./English/tech/ _._ ) when communicating our shared ideas to them.

I found the piece to be a very (actually surprisingly so) savvy bit of
strategic outreach from EFF, even if it was quite blunt in its tactical
approach.

See also: [http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Republican-Rand-
Paul-...](http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Republican-Rand-Paul-fires-
up-a-Berkeley-crowd-5332740.php)

