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Comment by sachinag | Hacker News Reader

The reason this is, BTW, is that calling isn't scalable. Any idiot can fire off emails or print petitions or print and mail letters (albeit with a budget). Fielding calls is a huge pain in the ass and can be linked - via area code+prefix, among others - to a specific district.

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It never hurts to make a small campaign contribution along with voicing your concern, or mention a past donation. Forming your own local donation pool or interest group, even if it's small, is another way to do it. I'm pretty sure if the average HN member formed a small group with local co-workers and agreed to donate just 1 hours worth of wages, it would be taken seriously.

Unless things have changed a lot since I was there, the real advantage of calling a congressional office is that you're entered in a database faster with your associated issue. It's not like your congressperson answers the phones. That's what the interns and staff assistants do, who hold zero influence.

Be patient with the person taking your call. Many people who call don't even do it right. They contact someone who isn't their senator or representative, which gets ignored. They just say "Don't vote for X!" and hang up without providing contact information.

Also, if you don't vote, many representatives have a database from their board of elections saying which registered voters actually showed up to vote. You're put on the bottom of the stack.

Because democracy has to be bought these days.

sigh.

Moneyocracy: the government rules by the the majority of the money, not of the people.

>Because democracy has to be bought these days.

What a naive thing to say. The cornerstone of representative government has always been supporting a candidate whose views align with your own. This includes campaign contributions along with voting for the candidate, volunteering for their campaign, and getting out word that they're running.

Always?

I think originally it was something to do with having land and privilege, or being a free citizen and not a slave. And definitely male... Then you could have a say.

And naive? Sure is, I like the naive view of democracy - that we all ought to have equal say in the way things are run, regardless of monetary or time contributions to a campaign.

Ah, a budget ... what I would give to have one of those :).

More seriously though, I have definite plans to build a click-to-call tool in the next couple of weeks, but this news was sprung on my late yesterday, leading to a mad rush to get that page ready in time for this morning. Next time there's an action like this for FixtheDMCA, there'll definitely be a way to call. And if I build it I'll almost certainly open source it so others can do the same. Sunlight Labs have a great API for looking up rep's phone numbers that means its really just a Twilio integration away.

> More seriously though, I have definite plans to build a click-to-call tool in the next couple of weeks

I'm not sure how you do this on Android, but for the iPhone it couldn't be much simpler[1]. Also, most mobile devices will detect and enable any phone number they find on the page, so just putting it there and easy to find is often enough.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/iPh...

I think they meant to allow click to call from any device, ala Twilio.

I wonder how much demand there is in the tech community for both an iOS and Android app that receives push notifications that drop you right into the UX to make the call when a campaign of calls is necessary due to pending legislation.

Crowdshout are doing something similar to this. Generally, push notifications are a great idea, though convincing people to download the app is trickier.

Click to call isn't interesting because of connecting the actual phone number. It's a UX problem of minimizing the steps to figure out which Congressman belongs to the constituent visiting the page. [This gets way more complex on a state officials level.]

Isn't calling slightly scalable, now that we have Twilio? ;)

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