Online advocacy: what we learn from hate groups
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- Josh – freelance, Citizen
- Action Kit
- Engaging Networks – the worst
- Emily – student at Hack Right, before an intern at Causes.com
- John- Multi-technology collective, Incorporated Cicero into CiviCRM
- Also Salsa, Convio, Blue State Digital
- John – CiviCRM
- Josh- Action Kit and Salesforce, BSD in the past
- Sylvan – Pete Library
- Lilia – Causes.com, EFF (especially Action Center), Salsa,
- Ryan – Facilitator - Soap Box Engage, CiviCRM, Salesforce
- Bill – EFF, stopped with Salsa -> CiviCRM and own in-house infrastructure
- Amp
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
- Key areas of discussion
- What systems people use
- Ouches
- Opportunities for collaboration
- Common data model?
- What innovation is needed
History of how online advocacy has evolved
- 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
Development of EFF System
- 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
Challenges:
- 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
- Worked with Recourse Action network to pull data from Salsa
- Aren’t any open source tools for contacting Congress…
- 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
- Vote pledging – has a direct impact – I’ll vote for you or not
- Think would be illegal for a 501c3 – can’t endorse certain candidates
- Have a privacy policy – build tools that don’t personally identify people
- How many people looked at this action? How many people took action?
- Signed petition, contacte this rep
- Print this to PDF
- 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
- Thunder Clap
- Would like to have a vagrant system for the action center
- Big problem with current congress is bad delivery rate – almost 60%
- 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 –
- Google Civic API – top 100 metros in the US
- Sierra – interested in crowdsourcing getting local school board member data
- League of Women Voters –worked on data munching, all the people up for election into a centralized data store
How address look-up works:
- 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
- Credo Action contributes to Congress forms
- NGP VAN – contributes to that too