One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.
This is amazing. Some years ago, I wanted to build a site that did essentially the same thing (but for a different issue), and this API either didn't exist or wasn't complete/accurate enough. It's remarkable how much power the web has to effect political change - seems like we're only seeing the beginning of it.
...that is, unless SOPA passes, in which case this may be as good as it gets....
You do mention "focus dissemination of this to people in those districts", and that is key, because unless a Representative/Senator is the head of a committee, an email/letter/etc., from outside of their district is completely discarded.
Also, if you are not registered to vote, your comment goes in the waste bin, too. Trust me, I know plenty of people who work or have worked in various legislative bodies, and the first thing they do when they get contacted by a "constituent" is check to see if they are registered to vote in their district. If not, then the message falls on deaf ears.
I was briefly skeptical, but on reflection, I like this for three reasons:
First, email just doesn't work for contacting Congress. They get entirely too much, and it's entirely too easy to get lost in the pile. It's the preferred means of communication for most of us on HN, but it's just not effective outside our industry. Phone is better, but there's nothing quite like flooding someone's office with paper to convey the will of the electorate.
Second, SendWrite is one of the companies that would be hurt by the bill - being able to generate volume like this shows the reach and effectiveness of their lobbying efforts. Sacks of cash are the backup currency of Congress - Votes are still the coin of the realm.
Finally, you guys are putting your cash on the line for this - that's a powerful statement, and I applaud you for doing so.
Email works better, actually. All of Congress uses web forms that categorize and route the messages directly to their CRM systems. So it is easy for them to tally and respond. Mail, on the other hand, has to get irradiated for bioterror and takes 4-6 weeks to arrive. The letters are made brittle and staff dislike handling them, and they have to be typed or scanned into the office CRM.
Congress uses multipliers to figure out how predictive each piece of communication is (ie, how likely it is that a certain piece of communication will result in a change in voting behavior).
I don't remember the exact numbers, but the hierarchy goes (in descending order): in-person visit to DC office, in-person visit to local office, physical handwritten letter, physical typed letter, phone call, email. The multiplier attached to email is close to zero.
(The exact method varies by congressman/senator, but the relative rankings are the same throughout).
Not exactly. The person would have to be a constituent, so he would live no further than any other people in the district.
You could make a statement about wealth and lobbying, but to be honest, those are considered in a different category anyway.
It's actually rather accurate. If someone takes the time to write a handwritten letter and mail it, it means a lot more than just clicking a DemandProgress button that has all of your personal information pre-populated. The Internet lowers the cost (effort) of communication, but on the other hand, the non-material cost is a way of showing that the issue is important to you.
I've used faxes reasonably effectively. With my former representative in Congress, I always received a written response in a timely fashion. (Swing district, and they were taken out in the last "swing".) Faxes (well, letters sent as faxes) have some of the impact of a physical letter, but can be delivered on short notice and escape the scenario the parent describes -- if that is indeed what is happening.
I've put some considerable time and thought into a few letters that I've in turn faxed.
If you have a Windows machine with a modem, and a landline, you already have a fax. I presume *NIX boxes have or can acquire software that will do the same job.
If Google understands what's at stake hear, they need to stage a "government backed hijacking of their search engine" for a couple hours during peak business with a written statement explaining the evil of the bill.
This is great. What's the cashflow situation here - how many donations will you/do you need (I'm aware this is obviously demand dependent, but I'm just intrigued about the general situation)
Really nice of you to have made this free. I would have paid! I wouldn't have sent this if not for sendwrite, just because the cost for me to type, print, stamp, and mail an envelope is too high.
Individual postal letters have considerably more influence than form e-mails, but I don't know what category these letters would be placed in. I worry that a letter that is sent from an automated website might not carry as much weight as putting your own letter in an envelope, handwriting the address, and sending it out from your zip code.
Supposedly, the constituent contacts that carry the most weight are in-person visits to the congressperson's office, contacts from people authorized to represent groups of constituents (like mayors), individual letters that are not copied from a form, and individual phone calls that are not read from a script.
If anyone has a reason to be in Washington, calling the office of your congressperson and scheduling a meeting with their staff during that time will be very helpful, especially if your congressperson is on a relevant committee, in this case the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
For those who have yet to do it, I should point out that there is a PayPal donate button to support this effort that you are shown after submission of your entry. Send cards to all your representatives, then send those nice folk a couple of bucks to cover the postage at least.
A suggestion: I'd like to be able to send a letter to all of my representatives and senators at once, instead of having to fill out the form multiple times.
I absolutely love the idea. I cant remember where I read it or heard it, but physical letters do get much more attention. Nothing against SendWrite, but I think even more attention can be gained via distinctive-looking enveloped letters that need to be cut open and unfolded. A stack of similar-looking postcards will have an impact in terms of volume, but will likely be sorted into a bin and never read. If you have the time and have extra company logo-ed envelopes, please consider sending one by hand as well.
Thanks! Just to clarify, SendWrite letters are mailed in an envelope, so each one will need to be opened. Also we deliberately didn't use a pre-written letter as a template. The result is that the letters we have received are very unique.
Damnit! Great idea, but I HATE it when on-screen text is not user-selectable. I want to take your on-screen address and put it on my own envelope. GRRRRRRR!!
I'd love to send people to this site, but I worry people who have never heard of the bill won't know what is going on. Can you embed the explanation video or point to or something?
Edit: I see you just did. Thx! I just linked to it on DuckDuckGo as well as donated and sent my letter. Thanks again.
How insane is it that you have 12k karma, have no problem commenting on js, ruby, jquery, mongo or even css... but you're worried about people not understanding this bill.
NOT a comment about you, epi08, but just commentary about what matters.
If you haven't called your congressperson about this, then you don't care.
If you are really serious about taking a stand on this bill, then the most impact will achieved by going to the source of it, not Congress... unless you have more to offer Congress' incumbents and the nation's economy than the industry source does.
They are a very important constituent.
If a large number of consumers stopped purchasing a certain entertainment company's products for one day, would it have a noticeable impact on their revenues? How about a week? A month?
The industry claims it's losing business to pirates. While it's probably true to some extent, it is speculative and nearly impossible to measure accurately. How many of the consumers of pirated content were never consumers of paid content to begin with?
The products this industry sells are not life necessities.
In summary, a branded entertainment "hunger strike" by actual existing, paid customers. This would cause real loss.
And, if it's a noticeable loss, it would send a very strong message.
Have always wondered if an online service for political mailings like this couldn't introduce some randomness to the opening, key statements and closing (Sincerely, Regards, etc) and varying the layout and style so they don't look too much like they were cranked out with the push of a button.
Not that I don't want to support you guys for doing something awesome like this, but I wish the "Like" button showed appropriate meta-content on my facebook wall, instead of just a generic description of SendWrite. Also, donated. :)
This is a great idea. I'm sending in mail through this. Not everyone has the luxury of literally stopping by in person, but this is a fantastic alternative.
I love this, though I've held back on commenting on SOPA until now. One of the frequent comments on SOPA I see is that the original founders behind the internet believed it should be free and unregulated. While I agree, once you introduce capitalism to the internet, as most companies have, you cannot let it be entirely unregulated. What is happening in the internet now is the same process that occurred directly after the industrial revolution - first there were completely unregulated, grievous abuses in the industry. The entertainment industry is attempting to regulate the flow of information and "capital" in the same way the government had to go "trust buster" on the industrial sectors in the last two centuries.
However, while this is all good and well, as the side video explains, they already have protocols for doing this. They don't need any more methods of stopping piracy and the like. They should shift their attention to different ways of raising capital and earning revenue. The system they have isn't working, but erring on the side of regulation instead of erring on the side of libertarianism is still erring. There needs to be a comfortable balance, and SOPA does not make such a balance - it tips the scales in favor of the entertainment industry, and that is the last sector of the United States the internet should be supervised and moderated by.
97 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadOne suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.
...that is, unless SOPA passes, in which case this may be as good as it gets....
I believe that should read "Don't know who your local representative is?", no?
Knowing that we could try and focus dissemination of this to people in those districts.
Also, if you are not registered to vote, your comment goes in the waste bin, too. Trust me, I know plenty of people who work or have worked in various legislative bodies, and the first thing they do when they get contacted by a "constituent" is check to see if they are registered to vote in their district. If not, then the message falls on deaf ears.
First, email just doesn't work for contacting Congress. They get entirely too much, and it's entirely too easy to get lost in the pile. It's the preferred means of communication for most of us on HN, but it's just not effective outside our industry. Phone is better, but there's nothing quite like flooding someone's office with paper to convey the will of the electorate.
Second, SendWrite is one of the companies that would be hurt by the bill - being able to generate volume like this shows the reach and effectiveness of their lobbying efforts. Sacks of cash are the backup currency of Congress - Votes are still the coin of the realm.
Finally, you guys are putting your cash on the line for this - that's a powerful statement, and I applaud you for doing so.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but the hierarchy goes (in descending order): in-person visit to DC office, in-person visit to local office, physical handwritten letter, physical typed letter, phone call, email. The multiplier attached to email is close to zero.
(The exact method varies by congressman/senator, but the relative rankings are the same throughout).
millions of people affected by some law, 0.01
one retired guy pissed of by something minor, but that happens to live close by, 700
You could make a statement about wealth and lobbying, but to be honest, those are considered in a different category anyway.
It's actually rather accurate. If someone takes the time to write a handwritten letter and mail it, it means a lot more than just clicking a DemandProgress button that has all of your personal information pre-populated. The Internet lowers the cost (effort) of communication, but on the other hand, the non-material cost is a way of showing that the issue is important to you.
I've put some considerable time and thought into a few letters that I've in turn faxed.
If you have a Windows machine with a modem, and a landline, you already have a fax. I presume *NIX boxes have or can acquire software that will do the same job.
Supposedly, the constituent contacts that carry the most weight are in-person visits to the congressperson's office, contacts from people authorized to represent groups of constituents (like mayors), individual letters that are not copied from a form, and individual phone calls that are not read from a script.
If anyone has a reason to be in Washington, calling the office of your congressperson and scheduling a meeting with their staff during that time will be very helpful, especially if your congressperson is on a relevant committee, in this case the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
For those who have yet to do it, I should point out that there is a PayPal donate button to support this effort that you are shown after submission of your entry. Send cards to all your representatives, then send those nice folk a couple of bucks to cover the postage at least.
However, I've now donated $5 because of the selfless thing they are doing. Thanks to everyone at SendWrite for doing this, hopefully it will help!
A suggestion: I'd like to be able to send a letter to all of my representatives and senators at once, instead of having to fill out the form multiple times.
Great idea, though. Thank you.
Edit: I see you just did. Thx! I just linked to it on DuckDuckGo as well as donated and sent my letter. Thanks again.
NOT a comment about you, epi08, but just commentary about what matters.
If you haven't called your congressperson about this, then you don't care.
period.
Everyone with a site, please do this. I've put it on PadMapper.
They are a very important constituent.
If a large number of consumers stopped purchasing a certain entertainment company's products for one day, would it have a noticeable impact on their revenues? How about a week? A month?
The industry claims it's losing business to pirates. While it's probably true to some extent, it is speculative and nearly impossible to measure accurately. How many of the consumers of pirated content were never consumers of paid content to begin with?
The products this industry sells are not life necessities.
In summary, a branded entertainment "hunger strike" by actual existing, paid customers. This would cause real loss. And, if it's a noticeable loss, it would send a very strong message.
Good luck.
I love this, though I've held back on commenting on SOPA until now. One of the frequent comments on SOPA I see is that the original founders behind the internet believed it should be free and unregulated. While I agree, once you introduce capitalism to the internet, as most companies have, you cannot let it be entirely unregulated. What is happening in the internet now is the same process that occurred directly after the industrial revolution - first there were completely unregulated, grievous abuses in the industry. The entertainment industry is attempting to regulate the flow of information and "capital" in the same way the government had to go "trust buster" on the industrial sectors in the last two centuries.
However, while this is all good and well, as the side video explains, they already have protocols for doing this. They don't need any more methods of stopping piracy and the like. They should shift their attention to different ways of raising capital and earning revenue. The system they have isn't working, but erring on the side of regulation instead of erring on the side of libertarianism is still erring. There needs to be a comfortable balance, and SOPA does not make such a balance - it tips the scales in favor of the entertainment industry, and that is the last sector of the United States the internet should be supervised and moderated by.