51–59 of 59 posts
Disclosure: Only bother if you are American. Next time you ask, make sure you specify who you are serving. Congress does not serve me as a foreigner (then again, does it serve everyday Americans either?). New title: "Dear US Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that called "very technical" nowadays? Basic proficiency in a random programming language and some grasp of HTML is something that's taught in a high school computer class or any introductory course for a tangentially related college program such as statistics or physics - this level of proficiency is something that a random student (of not-computer subjects) is somewhat likely to have. I mean, it definitely is te…
They don't teach HTML in physics or stats. Most people also don't take an intro to computer programming course.
While they wouldn't specifically know HTML or Javascript, they'd know enough to how to read the language documentation and gain basic proficiency in a week. They wouldn't be a Douglas Crockford, but they could help out an open source project.
Of course, this was at a state school. Things might be different elsewhere.
Full instructions on how to take part are at this link: http://theunitedstates.io/contact-congress/ And here is the Github repo: https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress/
Still plenty more to do if anyone else is interested in dropping by and helping close up issues.
In the UK we have a decent website for contacting one's MP: https://www.writetothem.com/about-us And it works! For petitions to Number 10 we also have: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ ...and it works, as in you can sign something that will be totally ignored (eyes roll)! So in every country we are duplicating effort. Hence I think the EFF need to think beyond the shores of that renegade British colony known as the U…
I know this is all in good spirit and you just want to show some appreciation for the help. But rewarding programmers by number of commits is a bit perverse. Nowadays everyone generally agrees that paying programmers per line of code is a bad idea. I think rewarding based on number of commits creates very similar unwanted incentives and should probably be avoided completely.
Needs backlog with priority value, progress state... basically paper trail. Also, I like the idea of this project, but I hate the pitch. I don't know why. Maybe it is because programmers already go above and beyond, taking care of the stuff that no-one else thinks over. I would actually suggest investing time in looking to fund better development. Just my 2 cents - great idea, best of luck!
The tech team at EFF is pretty overloaded all of the time; we've hired outside contractors before but this is a project where it seems more efficient (and potentially more fun per person) to crowdsource. The same goes for HTTPS Everywhere (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere), a browser extension that I maintain where almost all of the 10,000+ XML (ugh!) http-to-https upgrade rules are contributed by volunteers.
I think EFF is in a rare position to experiment with crowdsourced programming tasks, because (most of) our contributors don't have any incentive to game the system and deliberately submit low-quality work, which decreases the usefulness of results you get from money-driven crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. This particular experiment was far more successful than I predicted, which brings up the question of whether there is a systematic way to make crowdsourced web development effective.
I'm really impressed with the project. It's a great idea - both the concept and the execution are brilliant. The bookmarklet for generating the yaml file could be used for all sorts of things - I've never seen this idea before. Even better, it's being used to crowdsource the data for the tool. I'm really impressed with this. Kudos to all involved.
What does the bookmarklet do exactly?
Disclosure: Only bother if you are American. Next time you ask, make sure you specify who you are serving. Congress does not serve me as a foreigner (then again, does it serve everyday Americans either?). New title: "Dear US Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help"
That sounds like terrorism (ironically). Then again, if you try to point out a different view on HN concerning some subject ... aah forget it.
Full instructions on how to take part are at this link: http://theunitedstates.io/contact-congress/ And here is the Github repo: https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress/
100 people, 760 commits, 43k lines added to the YAML files in 13 hours. Thanks all those taking part - we were expecting this to take a month and it looks like it'll get done in a day :). Still plenty more to do if anyone else is interested in dropping by and helping close up issues.