One of the original goals of VoterSpeak was to improve communication
between the electorate (Voters) and the Elected (Legislatures, Mayors,
Governors, Presidents, etc.) Towards that end, we began working on
a project to make it easier for voters, such as yourself, to write
to the people who need to hear from you. When talking with friends
and family before the project started, we noticed that everyone had
an opinion that they wouldn't mind if, say, their Senator knew. But
they never actually communicated it to them. Why? A variety of
reasons, usually minor things that weren't too difficult to overcome but...
The thing is,
inertia works both ways. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. So,
bodies that aren't writing letters tend to continue not writing. There
was always a reason it didn't get done...some of the most frequent
ones, however, included:
- I don't know their address
- I don't know who they are (*blush*)
- I don't know how to address them (Dear? Honourable? Most Senatorial?)
- Not so good with the words I am, not stupid I want to be sounding...
- I don't know how to format the letter, 8th grade was a long time ago....
- The dog is on fire....
Some of those we can help with (Sorry, pooch!) by making it a little
easier to write the letter. Let us look up their address, we'll
help you format it, and we'll even find out what the proper form
of address is, all you need to do is the one thing that is most
important: Put down your thoughts. Don't worry about how you
sound, it will be better than not being heard at all.
For now, we're working out the details, we've learned a lot about
elected offcials
mailing lists (they are expensive, they get old quickly and you
can't trust the Gov't Printing Office to have this year's data on
line...this year.) But, no matter, we've made progress and the
Letter Wizard is the result of our efforts.
Try it out and let us know what you think...
Here's a list of things we're considering/working on/developing at VoterSpeak, feel free to
share your thoughts:
-
Should we store old letters that users have sent?
At first, the design goal was to generate letters for users on the
screen that they could then download and print, email or fax. It
was then pointed out that being able to store them online would be
useful, perhaps making them available as a PDF download. We can do
that (we think) but the next question became, should we store them online
for the users? We can probably do that too, but how important is this
ability?
-
Should we require login IDs before generating letters for people?
Our take on this is no, because an anonymous user should be able to
walk up, generate a letter suitable for printing/faxing and then
send it on their own systems, terms, and time. However, the business
with the privacy policy and concerns of abuse gave some of us reason
to pause and re-think the whole 'anonymous user' issue. The current
feeling is to proceed as planned but comments are welcome pro/con.
-
Should we give the option to share user's paragraphs with others (when the
auto-letter generator is online) or should we instead say we will review
the letters and build new sample/template paragraphs of the best ones?
This actually is an open issue.
On the one hand, sharing the paragraphs (with the users' permission,
of course):
(1) Reduces the workload and makes the site more self-supporting,
(2) promotes community (at least within VoterSpeak), (3) reduces the
liklihood of bias from the site administrators, (4) doesn't require
the admins to take a "big brother" review approach to the letters being
generated.
On the flip side, not sharing but instead review/building new paragraphs:
(1) increases the likelihood new paragraphs will be generated (and
shared across topics), (2) allows people to be more specific in their
letters' details, (3) maintains the user's choice to submit the paragraph
for review (that is, we won't review the letter unless allowed to by
the user)
Hmm..I don't think we fully understand all the angles yet. Input
needed.
-
Would a "forum/chat" area be of much use or
are we suffering feature
creep at the early stages?
Feature creep or not, the VoterSpeak forums are up and running!
(Sorry, we couldn't help ourselves, there was a nice piece of software that was
easy to work with and the 2005 "State of the Union" speeches begged to be discussed.
Should there be a forum area or will that let people 'vent' to the 'wrong'
(i.e., a group other than the elected officials) audience ? Most of
the chat/forums we see aren't high-throughput, meaning there's a lot of
noise/chatter without necessary staying on topic, advancing the issues,
sharing ideas and opinions. There isn't an inherent decorum on chats
and as such, the signal/noise ratio gets high. The way to reduce this is
to moderate the areas but that (a) allows censorship/bias (b) takes
staffing resources we don't have.
Then again, it has been pointed out we're making a lot of design issues
based on current staff levels and that isn't necessarily a recipe for
success...Ah well, let's just take it one issue at a time.
Input
very much welcome and appreciated here.
-
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. Every time 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 aren't' 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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