Online advocacy: what we learn from hate groups

Bill

A lot of the challenging work has been how to get in contact with representatives (don’t provide email address) – worked with Contact Congress on Get Hub – use the recipes on how to fill out each and every field

2003-4 – a lot of promise about what we could do as a community
Early days of “Democracy in Action” – was a nonprofit, now Salsa – private
CiviCRM had just started
Came from very grassroots level
A lot of talk of collaboration
Saw organizations and companies become more insular and weren’t communicating, these tools and sets weren’t an ecosystem, just sold to the same people
Now seeing a lot of innovation happening
But don’t see them represented here – those businesses aren’t sharing knowledge and being a part of that, such an opportunity for collaboration
Need to come back to where we were in 2003 to work together

Existence of Civic Space – part of the Dean campaign – fork of Drupal got folded back into Drupal
Open source advocacy tool that you could download and install
Software as services
Subscription, access it and you don’t control the data
My Society- in the UK, theyworkforyou.org – send letters to their members of parliament and if enough people signed on, letter was public so it was public shame if the member hadn’t responded. Became a big deal in the UK
Integration Proclamation – a bunch of people signing on saying the tools should integrate – developers do this
Might be a place to find people passionate about

Salsa didn’t work for a number of reasons:
Tickets for a year out that hadn’t been fixed
Supporters of EFF – mixed content errors – would access an EFF action, wouldn’t fully load on certain browers, Salsa slow to fix
Lousy system, not a good experience
Plus couldn’t handle a major load when they had a big action
Are very proud of open access to data and controlling our own data vs. a third-party platform that didn’t meet our needs
As a nonprofit with a large techie support group, saw opportunity to build our own platform

Contacting reps – some efforts to create an API, but not much headway -> Let’s take Congress and wrap it in an API – project = Congress Forms (API part of it)
Sunlight Foundation – Contact Congress on GitHub is the datasource

Communicating with Congress working group- out of beta stage – Congress on the house side has paid Lockheed Martin to build out a black box

Once it’s there -> Staffers need to actually be able to interpret the data, what does this mean?
Form analytics and PDFs – so activists can

Action Center works like a blog:
Post content -> Creates web page
Can attach tools to that webpage
Form that people can fill out like: Contact congress (look up your rep and fills out the form automatically, streamlines that process, even subject line drop-downs) – Sunlight recently added state congress
Petitions
Call tool (put in your phone #, it calls you back with the quick script and then connects you to the office)- powered by Twilio
Tweet Action – sunlight

Use CiviCRM for email services – data from the Action center cycles into their CiviCRM to get on the email blasts

Timeline: A lot of the efforts are going into the next election cycle, labor intensive process to map out all the forms of Congress – could do it using huge volunteer base, satisfying task to help with – had 2K commits in the two days
Worked on the trust model – will make you a repo admin
Scale up that model –

League of Women Voters –worked on data munching, all the people up for election into a centralized data store

Smartistreets – using external – user puts in their address -> get GPS, figure out who their rep is – have deal with Smarty that won’t log
Free for nonprofits
Tried to do with Open Street Maps, but had issues getting the data there, Nominatum, did it for a while
Jon – said they did it too, but a lot of regular addresses just didn’t come up
Google look-up – secondary
Warning on Smarti – Salesforce Foundation – made an integration as the default way for address cleansing – some orgs being rejected on the types of issues they supported – Foundation had to walk back and not endorse Smarti