Hello Congress
- App URL
- http://hellocongress.org/
- Source URL
- http://github.com/jgilliam/hellocongress/tree/master
- Description
Hello Congress is a collection of sites, one for each member of Congress and their staff, created by White House 2, a bipartisan network of over 8,000 citizens imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet.
Our goal is to take a first step in solving two problems every Senator and Representative faces. The first is simply managing constituent communications. We can only imagine what it must be like to receive the overwhelming number of emails and faxes pouring into their office. Since much of it is auto-generated by advocacy groups, it's becoming harder to manage, and increasingly less helpful. Here each member of Congress can get a simple dashboard to track what their constituents want, and how it changes over time.
Second, staffers are totally overworked, but they still have to pull together mountains of research and legislation for their boss. There is a very well-funded industry of lobbyists who've spent years developing white papers and talking points, and when the time comes, they are more than willing to help. We think that over time, citizens can offer a better alternative, just like Wikipedia is now a better alternative to a very well-funded encyclopedia.
Think of us as a citizen-powered think tank. In just a couple months, we've built a database of 1,800 talking points covering all sides of every important issue facing our country, and it's growing fast. You can search this database, or just ask us to put together research for whatever you're working on.
There isn't a whole lot of trust in our political discourse, indeed it can be difficult to discern the agenda behind a lot of political information. So we offer an unprecedented level of transparency. Every talking point indicates it's support or opposition to a given priority, and you can see how all sides of an issue rate it. You can even see the author's own list of priorities, so it's clear where they are coming from. Our members span the entire gamut of political ideology, so you are destined to find at least a few people you consider crazy, just like Congress.
This application was submitted by Jim Gilliam, White House 2 on March 30, 2009