Here's a list of things we're considering/working on/developing at VoterSpeak, feel free to
share your thoughts:
-
Letter generation
From the beginning, the primary site goal was to facilitate
communication from contituents to their elected representatives. The
original idea was to help generate a
letter on-screen (by looking up the elected offical, addressing it,
formatting, etc.) that users could then download and print, email or fax.
This is still a design goal and progress is being made, despite a few
unexpected challnges. (We can't believe how expensive the
list of elected officials turns out to be. Something is wrong there...)
Anyway, all the design issues are addressed
in a different document.
We welcome your feedback on this, it is the foundation project for the
entire site.
- External links - How to handle with care?
An incredibly useful (3,000+!) set of news sites (mostly newspapers) has
been submitted and included into the references database. (Thanks
Kondor!) However, we now have way more links than we can possibly
handle manually. We've automated a process for checking for dead
links but there isn't a way to easily detect/filter out "bad" sites
(bad as in spamming, adult oriented, etc.)
We want to provide the best/broadest resource list possible but
we don't have the staff to sift out the garbage (and we don't
like the idea of pre-selecting/filter any information resources...)
So, we thought we would just ask, Should we screen our news links?
If so, how? If not, let us know you're willing to put up with whatever
may lurk one click away on the guise of looking like a useful site.
Would a simple 5-second interveing "You are leaving VoterSpeak" page
suffice?
As always,
comments welcome.
-
What do you think about the privacy policy?
The privacy policy area has become
something of a hornet's nest, as those things always seem to do for
some reason. We simply want to assure people
that we're not interested in their data. We'll store it so they don't
have to type it in again and again but beyond that, there's no sense
in it. Everytime we try to come up with a privacy policy that explains
that, however, it comes off sounding defensive ("We aren't sharing,
we aren't collecting kids' data, we aren't guilty of anything, really!")
or conniving ("We're not going to sell it, share it, etc. It really
is important to us, so important we arenyt' going to use it for
anything...no, really!") and in the end, we just walk away from it feeling
as if we need to take a shower or something. Weird.
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