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What about a social-network-like site where people communicate directly with their elected officials?

This would need someway to make sure that the politician was actually looking at the site and not just the delegating it to subordinates. Having a direct line to these politicians (that cuts past all of the subordinates that answer email, snail mail, etc) is one of the strengths of lobby groups.



There is one, but I can't remember the name of it right now. I spent a week going through lots of it to see what kind of activity, but there was very little. On top of that, there were lots of people just barking non-nonsensical and/ or derisive remarks at the various federal politicians; and, absolutely zero participation from any of the politicians themselves.

This is why I suggested to start in a small community first. In order to keep it relevant to people that live in that community, the only thing that made sense was to authenticate users via post cards (with OTP passcodes) sent to an address within a zipcode (In my town they send out a community news page with my water bill). My thought was to keep it to short messages realted to only municipal maintenance issues and try to build from there. Funding it would be the biggest obstacle in my mind, so if anyone has specific ideas there, that'd be great.


You might want to look at http://www.theyworkforyou.com and the other mysociety tools as a starting point.




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