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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

Clay, I have read those Congress Foundation reports. And we regularly visit congressional staffers in DC. I'll also try not to resort to all caps in responding :).

Obviously your product, ScreenDoor, addresses some of the concerns you're raising around better data collection. Glad to hear you're so enthusiastic about that approach.

The EFF isn't planning on selling software to members of Congress. However, we are considering offering users the ability to make their comments public, which'd create a large public dataset about messages sent to Congress. If we decide to go ahead with that, the open dataset would then be available for anyone to run analytics on and create reports for members of Congress.

Improving the ways people contact Congress is one piece of the puzzle. The other part is making sure that people get better responses, and we hope to work on that too.

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> Obviously your product, ScreenDoor, addresses some of the concerns you're raising around better data collection. Glad to hear you're so enthusiastic about that approach.

Not sure what that's about other than it being a strange comment to make.

> The EFF isn't planning on selling software to members of Congress.

Who said anything about it being commercial? I think that if you talk to a member of Congress, or an LA or SA inside of the hill, they'll all tell you the same thing: we take electronic messages and basically throw them away. That's nearly universal feedback. And before we start thinking it's out of cynicism or dislike of the constituent, it isn't out of malice. It's because if they started reading every message they receive right now, they'd be stuck in July of 2015 for the next 10-15 years with the resources they have.

So my point is: why bother with increasing their volume. It's a bit like shipping gasoline to a forest fire.

The reason this is a problem is because it drives up apathy and cynicism. People will send more messages, get worse responses, and continue to be validated with the idea that Congress doesn't care about what they have to say.

> So my point is: why bother with increasing their volume. It's a bit like shipping gasoline to a forest fire.

Isn't this exactly what you did at BSD? Enabled advocacy organizations to send millions of form-letter to Congress, making real constituent contact get lost in the flood?

I've already addressed how we plan on incentivizing members of Congress to write better responses, but again: we're looking at an open dataset of comments, and reports on timeliness and content of responses.

>Isn't this exactly what you did at BSD? Enabled advocacy organizations to send millions of form-letter to Congress, making real constituent contact get lost in the flood?

Yes. More than a decade ago, I admittedly had a hand in creating this problem, and now I'd love to see it fixed.

>However, we are considering offering users the ability to make their comments public, which'd create a large public dataset about messages sent to Congress. If we decide to go ahead with that, the open dataset would then be available for anyone to run analytics on and create reports for members of Congress.

This was my first thought on seeing this project. That would be a great feature and could easily change the dynamics of "open letters" and petitions.

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