Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
sendwrite.com
Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#2This is great action on the part of SendWrite.
One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#3This is great action on the part of SendWrite. One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
Would love to do that. We wanted to get this out the door quickly. If it is popular we'll see about improving the UI. Thanks!
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#4> Don't know who is your local representative?
I believe that should read "Don't know who your local representative is?", no?
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#5This is great action on the part of SendWrite. One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
Would love to do that. We wanted to get this out the door quickly. If it is popular we'll see about improving the UI. Thanks!
Sunlight Labs has an API that'll do it by zip code:
http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/
They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would love to do that. We wanted to get this out the door quickly. If it is popular we'll see about improving the UI. Thanks!
Sunlight Labs has an API that'll do it by zip code: http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/ They've got libraries for Ruby, Python, and even PHP, and the interface is drop-dead simple. Definitely worth a look - I'm baking them into one of my projects right now.
This could have saved us a lot of time. Thanks!
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#7This is great action on the part of SendWrite. One suggestion: since you ask for the sender's home address anyway, why not use that to scrape the contactcongress website to automatically fill in their representatives?
If people don't want to waste paper, you can also check out popvox.com or votizen.com. Both allow for electronic communication with Congress.
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#8Does any advocacy group (EFF, etc) have info on who the key swing/undecided/"marginal" votes are?
Knowing that we could try and focus dissemination of this to people in those districts.
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#9Thanks for this =)
Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter
#10I was briefly skeptical, but on reflection, I like this for three reasons:
First, email just doesn't work for contacting Congress. They get entirely too much, and it's entirely too easy to get lost in the pile. It's the preferred means of communication for most of us on HN, but it's just not effective outside our industry. Phone is better, but there's nothing quite like flooding someone's office with paper to convey the will of the electorate.
Second, SendWrite is one of the companies that would be hurt by the bill - being able to generate volume like this shows the reach and effectiveness of their lobbying efforts. Sacks of cash are the backup currency of Congress - Votes are still the coin of the realm.
Finally, you guys are putting your cash on the line for this - that's a powerful statement, and I applaud you for doing so.