Yeas & Nays: A Shiftspace Proposal by Christian Croft
Shiftspace Commissions Proposal
Core Idea
Call your representative from any webpage and publish a recording of that conversation on that very page.
Basic Description
A web browser plug-in that allows a citizen to call her representative from any webpage, record her call and publish it on that very page. Yeas & Nays attempts to promote civic responsibility and a democratic discourse and make our citizen duty just a bit easier.
User Scenario
Yeas & Nays transforms any webpage into a space for informed civic action. For example, let's say Alice finds a web article about affordable housing in her area. This issue concerns her, so she clicks on the Yeas & Nays icon in her browser. A window opens on the page listing all her elected officials. Alice types some notes into her "action notebook" in the Yeas & Nays window, carefully noting the article's statistic of how many housing units her community needs.
Now prepared to make a call, Alice clicks on the name of her House member. Thanks to a free phone connection provided by Yeas & Nays, Alice's cell phone rings instantly. Her phone is connected to Congress, and Alice uses her notebook to explain her case to the representative, asking the secretary to pass along the article that supports her position.
After she hangs up, an mp3 of her exchange appears above the housing article. She emails the article's URL to her friends where they can listen to her conversation and read the article that supports her position. Anyone using the Yeas & Nays plug-in who stumbles upon the article will see an alert about Alice's call, and Yeas & Nays's affordable housing group will receive an RSS update that a new call has been made.
Yeas & Nays leverages the power of ShiftSpace with functionality that I have developed for another web project, called Reminding to Remember. This website allows people to make VoIP phone calls to Congress about Iraq War casualties.
Rationale
A communication gap between citizens and their representatives currently hinders more widespread civic engagement. We have singled out a specific instance where the power of information can manifest into action: that fertile moment when citizens discover information online about issues that affect them. We need an interface that bridges citizens at this moment when they are most likely to deliver informed arguments to their representatives.
At that fertile moment, our project Yeas & Nays will provide a simple tool to initiate a phone call to a representative and a way to share a recording of that call with others. Our goal is getting citizens listening to other citizens expressing informed positions to their representatives.
Our strategy fits current web trends towards user participation and moves one step beyond plain information sharing. It merges two civic actions: direct contact with policy makers and citizen voices joining in collective protest. It reinforces the private address with the validation of public demand. Using CFA, citizens can launch their own micro-campaigns about issues of importance to them.
Technical Feasibility
Shiftspace's core functionality already facilitates posting text and other forms of media above any webpage. Thus, posting audio of user's conversations should be easily achieved. Using VoIP connections directed by a programming language called Asterisk, this project proposes to extend this behavior to connect users' phones to their representatives. As mentioned above, I have already demonstrated the possibility for the combination of website interaction and Asterisk VoIP functionality on my project at www.remindingtoremember.org.