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Show HN: We made a site to crowd fund lobbying.

50 points by sankho ↗ HN
Hey guys,

So we made this site with the goal of funding a lobbyist to represent the 99%. The money comes from small pledges of $5 and up. So far we've raised nearly $10k in under a week. We're focusing fund raising efforts on causes.

I'm the founder and lead developer, and I'd love to hear this community's thoughts on the project as well as answer any questions.

Thanks guys!

http://www.wethelobby.com/

30 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] thread
DevX101
You should lobby to limit the influence of lobbying. Seriously.
sankho
Well, last night Obama did urge congress to write legislation in that vein... so if there is legislation proposed, feel free to submit that as a cause on our site!
mapster
that will become a Supreme Court ruling, and based on recent trends, lobbying will continue to be Constitutionally legal. If there was a watchdog agency like SEC, that would be a start.
zipizap
I'm portuguese (not a USA citizen), and I spend and send my own money to support investigations against lobby, bribery, political-corruption, and such parasite-fenomenons that deter democracy. Do that instead, and I'll fund you. It would even be funny, as private investigators could be contracted, and the reports could be released in internet, as if were episodes of a serie - it could also be amusing!
zipizap
..."and I would spend and send"...
sankho
Firstly, once lobbying efforts begin we do intend to post video updates as often as possible.

We don't feel that lobbying is inherently evil - it is just unbalanced and mis-guided. We wish to cast an example of how lobbying can be positive, as well as provide an argument for it's need to be regulated and more closely watched.

The general constituency of a democracy should not have to pool money just to be heard by it's government, but the current lack of regulations over gov't lobbying have forced the hand of the people.

zipizap
I understand your noble efforth to go in as a player to change the vicious-game, but be aware that the "adversaries" have much more money to put in (by orders of magnitude), and so in that game, they lead by advantage... Also, the "corporate" player offers more money/media-support/carreer-influence/discretion, so I undestand that for a corrupt politician, it can be hard to turn your back at "corporate", even if by a bigger (one-time) amount of money... But I just cannot shake from my head the absurdity of the reality: citizens pay taxes for politicians to govern the country in their interest, and now again would have to re-pay for lobbying ?!? Would not be easier to fight corruption and lobby in a stroke? It will have to happen sooner or later? Or would it go forever offering money for politicians to decide?
sankho
There's definitely more money on the special interests' side than ours... but we will also have data to link donations to the actual voting constituency. Maybe this will increase our impact.

We agree the concept is somewhat abusrd, but... maybe just the fact that we resorted to making this a real thing will be enough of a wake up call to congress. Maybe.

thinkcomp
We thought of doing this for PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org) but unfortunately the law precludes it. We'd love to work with you though. aaron.greenspan at plainsite.org
kevs
Could you elaborate why the law precludes it?
thinkcomp
Collecting money to transmit to a third party is money transmission and requires a license in 46 states + Washington, D.C.

http://www.plainsite.org/issues/index.html?id=1

sankho
We've been looking at the best ways to deal with finances, and we are thinking of adopting Kickstarter's model. This way we wouldn't hold the money itself - we would direct all transactions to the bank account of the partnered lobbying / advocacy firm of a cause.
thinkcomp
Do you get to choose which cause you are donating to? Either way, you would basically need to have that organization directly debit the donor's account. Sounds tricky.
sankho
(in response to thinkcomp's reply to this)

we are using stripe.com as a our payment processor, and they allow exactly what you've stipulated.

We'd love to have an extended chat about this - mind reaching out at contact@wethelobby.com?

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
kevination
Isn't this what PACs are for?
sankho
To a point, but PACs are focused on a candidate or a specific cause. We The Lobby allows for multiple causes, and will not be defined as an organization by any one cause.
JayNeely
Who's doing the actual lobbying? How are you ensuring accountability that the groups receiving the funds are advocating actively enough, and doing it in a way that you support (e.g. no backroom deals, future consulting jobs for politicians, negative ads)?
sankho
We are working on securing partners to receive the funding.

Lobbying firms are in fact by law transparent about their finances - but we will also draft agreements with any partners demanding transparency and analysis of any financial data be updated on the site, available to the public.

On top of this, we are setting up a system to update users on the activities of the lobbyists, where they will disclose what they've been up to.

As for "backroom deals" and the like - if you research lobbying, you'll find it's not quite as shady as it's made out to be. It's just controlled by one small portion of the population, which owns a majority of the wealth. We The Lobby wishes to balance that.

caller9
I had been considering a site called "Rent A Rep" where you would donate money to a pool tied to an outcome of a vote. So a No vote on SOPA would have a pool. Once the votes were in, the Legislators voting that way would get a cut of the pool. Contribution limits would be at $100 and no companies could take part. With something so enraging as SOPA, the pool could get pretty huge.

Direct monetary democracy.

I dismissed the idea as too cynical and possibly illegal? A promise of monetary compensation for your vote is probably illegal. Monetary compensation with a suggestion of what the vote should be is completely different. The payment is not contingent on the action. I'm not sure that the money pool with no named recipient in advance abstracts that away enough.

sankho
While buying votes is probably illegal, I've had the same thought but instead of crowd funding to buy votes, we crowd fund to support politicians in elections, with one MAJOR stipulation -

Taking the money crowd funded means you can accept no other form of donations.

Just a thought, not related to We The Lobby, but perhaps a future project?

taphangum
I don't know know what the legal issues associated with this are. But this is an excellent idea.
Mizza
I applaud your effort, please open source your code! As the founder, you'll be too busy to keep the code flowing with all the other stuff to be done, and lots may want to help with this.

Also, this was an Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/articles/american-people-hire-highpo...

Life imitates satire.

sankho
You're not the first person to ask, and we are heavily considering putting it on GitHub soon. If you'd like to contribute when that happens, shoot an email over to contact@wethelobby.com so we can alert you.

In the vein of the Onion article, I hope you've been watching the hilarity of Colbert's super PAC.

newbusox
As others have mentioned, if you don't have an attorney helping you with election law matters, I'd recommend hiring one or consulting with one. You really want to make sure you don't run afoul of election and campaign finance laws (there might be personal liability for you, if you do)--and, if you state that you do comply with these laws, you'll give people that donate a lot more faith that their money will actually be delivered to the correct groups. These laws all exist in a nebulous area which requires some time/effort to sift through.

I'm an attorney and, although I can't give you legal advice, I can try to steer you in the right direction, presuming you're not already in touch with a lawyer.

[dead] x_synapsis
What a great idea, so happy that someone is actualy doing something about this. The site looks good, can not believe you managed to put it up since 10 Jan 2012 (now 25 Jan). Have already looked over your website analysis on DomOf :

http://domof.com/www.wethelobby.com.html

... and thigs are looking good considering youth of the site, there is great potential there, keep it running.

andr3w321
You should replace "K" with ,000 it's not clear that you're talking about dollars and not # of signatures or something.