
Show HN: Democracy.io by EFF – Write to your representatives - sinak
https://democracy.io
======
cjoh
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
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.

~~~
cjoh
> 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.

Intranet Quorum. Last updated in about 1996. It's probably what 95% of staff
uses, and it's woefully inadequate. Clearly you talked to zero congressional
staffers in the creation of this software. Which is a shame. Because if you
had, your software would be effective.

Heck, even if you'd read one of the dozens of reports from the Congressional
Management Foundation _FROM 10 YEARS AGO_
[http://www.congressfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_conte...](http://www.congressfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67&Itemid=)
you could spot the problem here.

Whether advocacy organizations "send" the emails or whether they're sent by an
individual has no bearing on either the legitimacy of the message, or whether
or not they will remain unread.

I'd encourage you to hop on a plane, and go visit some congressional staffers
and ask them how they'd like to receive your messages. Then build a tool
starting from there. Like it or not, they're the customer.

~~~
sinak
Clay, I have read those Congress Foundation reports. And we regularly visit
congressional staffers in DC. I'll also try not to resort to all caps in
responding :).

Obviously your product, ScreenDoor, addresses some of the concerns you're
raising around better data collection. Glad to hear you're so enthusiastic
about that approach.

The EFF isn't planning on selling software to members of Congress. However, we
are considering offering users the ability to make their comments public,
which'd create a large public dataset about messages sent to Congress. If we
decide to go ahead with that, the open dataset would then be available for
anyone to run analytics on and create reports for members of Congress.

Improving the ways people contact Congress is one piece of the puzzle. The
other part is making sure that people get better responses, and we hope to
work on that too.

~~~
cjoh
> Obviously your product, ScreenDoor, addresses some of the concerns you're
> raising around better data collection. Glad to hear you're so enthusiastic
> about that approach.

Not sure what that's about other than it being a strange comment to make.

> The EFF isn't planning on selling software to members of Congress.

Who said anything about it being commercial? I think that if you talk to a
member of Congress, or an LA or SA inside of the hill, they'll all tell you
the same thing: we take electronic messages and basically throw them away.
That's nearly universal feedback. And before we start thinking it's out of
cynicism or dislike of the constituent, it isn't out of malice. It's because
if they started reading every message they receive right now, they'd be stuck
in July of 2015 for the next 10-15 years with the resources they have.

So my point is: why bother with increasing their volume. It's a bit like
shipping gasoline to a forest fire.

The reason this is a problem is because it drives up apathy and cynicism.
People will send more messages, get worse responses, and continue to be
validated with the idea that Congress doesn't care about what they have to
say.

~~~
sinak
> So my point is: why bother with increasing their volume. It's a bit like
> shipping gasoline to a forest fire.

Isn't this exactly what you did at BSD? Enabled advocacy organizations to send
millions of form-letter to Congress, making real constituent contact get lost
in the flood?

I've already addressed how we plan on incentivizing members of Congress to
write better responses, but again: we're looking at an open dataset of
comments, and reports on timeliness and content of responses.

------
Mizza
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
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
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.

------
Zmetta
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
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.

------
technomancy
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)

------
jwally
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.

~~~
Nadya
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)

------
jordanlev
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)

------
dmarg
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.

~~~
usefulcat
Only one senator? What happened to the other one?

~~~
rlevy
1 rep in the house (who can't vote), no senators

~~~
usefulcat
Actually I was referring to the part about Wyoming only having "2 reps and 1
senator".

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

------
Animats
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.

------
higherpurpose
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?

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

------
cjsthompson
Representative government is not democracy.

