Something that I've been thinking about is how to make it easier for people to take action when they want to get in contact with a local official or someone in DC, especially now with everything being so turbulent in our government. So much of this information is disconnected and/or hard to find on government websites.
How can we make this data easily accessible so people can write their representatives a letter, email, or call them?
@mysociety on Twitter posted this interesting site that is used in the UK, and is pretty similar to what I'm thinking the USA needs (if it doesn't exist already): writetothem.com/
I've always thought physical letters could carry more weight (literally and figuratively, since letters take up space in someone's actual mailbox as opposed to emails where their inbox may be huge and never run out of space...). A lot of people want to write letters, but don't know who to send them to...so again, how to get that info in front of people so they can make informed decisions about making their voice heard. Is there a way that an online web app could process someone's letter and format it for printing, as well as print an address label, buy postage, etc?
Also, where can we find a database of civic organizations that we can donate money or time to? Is there a website or database somewhere that someone could browse to find causes that are important to them? And also add new organizations or groups? I feel like this has to exist already...
There's also the whole conversation about education and media bias. What if there was a Chrome extension or something that could somehow flag certain media as biased or potentially biased? I feel like that would be a pretty subjective process but with the media being under such scrutiny right now, how do we continue to stay informed while at the same time being aware of sources that are potentially biased?
Tariq Ali is an aspiring web developer dedicated to producing interesting applications and websites for businesses. Before entering into web development, Tariq served as a journalist, real estate a...
What if there was a Chrome extension or something that could somehow flag certain media as biased or potentially biased?
I think it's not only doable, but can be done fairly objectively. Use sentiment analysis to understand how positive or negative the article is towards certain topics. If the extension points out Article XYZ is very anti-Trump, well, there's your bias. I think AlchemyAPI would be a good choice for this type of sentiment analysis challenge, and I might even try to make such a program, just as a proof of concept.
There are three problems with my idea.
First, I'm assuming that every article is biased, and the goal is to identify what bias the article has. While I do agree with this assumption, it is, ahem, biased.
Second, I'm not sure whether disclosure will meaningfully help people deal with bias. It's possible that someone could use my extension to dismiss articles because "Oh, it has a 68% bias towards the word 'conservatism'", when the bias doesn't mean that the article is wrong.
Third, like all algorithms powered by machine learning, you may see rather strange and surpious results, pointing out biases about topics you might not even realize or care about ("This author is very biased towards dogs and against cats"). Could people be able to shift through the noise and only look at the biases on the topics that they care about?
Re: contacting representatives, Zack Shapiro and some fellow developers created Call to Action which makes it easy to find your Congressperson's phone number. It seems like phone calls are a highly recommended form of contact vs. physical letters (though I'm sure every little bit helps).
There's also DailyAction.org which sends a daily reminder to resist. Today's alert urged me to call my Senator to oppose Steve Bannon -- they provided a phone number and link with more information.
I'm excited for more products that leverage political energy to help us all effectively resist.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Something that I've been thinking about is how to make it easier for people to take action when they want to get in contact with a local official or someone in DC, especially now with everything being so turbulent in our government. So much of this information is disconnected and/or hard to find on government websites.
How can we make this data easily accessible so people can write their representatives a letter, email, or call them?
@mysociety on Twitter posted this interesting site that is used in the UK, and is pretty similar to what I'm thinking the USA needs (if it doesn't exist already):
writetothem.com/
I've always thought physical letters could carry more weight (literally and figuratively, since letters take up space in someone's actual mailbox as opposed to emails where their inbox may be huge and never run out of space...). A lot of people want to write letters, but don't know who to send them to...so again, how to get that info in front of people so they can make informed decisions about making their voice heard. Is there a way that an online web app could process someone's letter and format it for printing, as well as print an address label, buy postage, etc?
For example - something like this: postinoapp.com/
Also, where can we find a database of civic organizations that we can donate money or time to? Is there a website or database somewhere that someone could browse to find causes that are important to them? And also add new organizations or groups? I feel like this has to exist already...
There's also the whole conversation about education and media bias. What if there was a Chrome extension or something that could somehow flag certain media as biased or potentially biased? I feel like that would be a pretty subjective process but with the media being under such scrutiny right now, how do we continue to stay informed while at the same time being aware of sources that are potentially biased?
I think it's not only doable, but can be done fairly objectively. Use sentiment analysis to understand how positive or negative the article is towards certain topics. If the extension points out Article XYZ is very anti-Trump, well, there's your bias. I think AlchemyAPI would be a good choice for this type of sentiment analysis challenge, and I might even try to make such a program, just as a proof of concept.
There are three problems with my idea.
Re: contacting representatives, Zack Shapiro and some fellow developers created Call to Action which makes it easy to find your Congressperson's phone number. It seems like phone calls are a highly recommended form of contact vs. physical letters (though I'm sure every little bit helps).
There's also DailyAction.org which sends a daily reminder to resist. Today's alert urged me to call my Senator to oppose Steve Bannon -- they provided a phone number and link with more information.
I'm excited for more products that leverage political energy to help us all effectively resist.