Ask HN: Political activism platform | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Political activism platform

7 pointsiamdave11 comments

After recently coming across news that representatives in my state have introduced problematic and comparatively faulty legislation in the upcoming session, I've been moved to start a bit of a grassroots effort locally to combat the passage of those bills.

I've seen quite a few sites that allow people to enter their zip code and find their representative, does anyone know how I can find, or has anyone written and open-sourced this kind of lookup implementation?

Failing that, are there any platforms that this community would recommend that would allow a simple landing page with copy text, facts and info with linked sources, and then a web form to find their representative? Perhaps even a WordPress plugin that I should look at and build on top of?

Ultimately I'm trying to avoid people leaving the page to perform the lookup since I can't guarantee that the receiving site will either handle incoming load, remain online, or even have the most up to date rep info. If someone's leaving the page, I'm hoping it's primarily to read linked sources from the "facts and info" section.

Thanks!

Are you looking up representatives on the federal or state level? Fair warning, if you're looking up state reps, a zip code lookup could return multiple (sometimes 10+) representatives per zip.

Source: In my day job, I've built many one-off issue advocacy pages on both the state and federal levels. Feel free to ping me if you want to talk about it.

State level. I'll email you my ideas, thanks!

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

https://www.usa.gov/developer

http://whoismyrepresentative.com/api

There are wordpress plugins:

https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+plugin+find+my+rep...

This map can be embedded on your website:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/map

All great resources, thank you!

Congressional info API including ability to "Look up members of Congress by location or by zip code."

https://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/

Open States API for info on state legislators:

https://openstates.org/

City council info for Chicago, Philly and NYC:

https://www.councilmatic.org/

well done! Programmers should be more involved in politics, and not on government's side, but on people's side. There are many examples what to do about it: transparent voting, list and rank all public sector employees, etc

https://democracy.io

This looks like exactly what I'd need, I'll email about their email API.

Out of interest? What state?

His bio says he's in Austin, which is in (or at least surrounded by) Texas.

(or at least surrounded by)

Ha, yeah that's one way to put it

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