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Comment by siphor | Hacker News Reader

I honestly think it's time to take action more than just normal protests.. Which are useless.. We need to find a way to get more than just the minority to revolt. Think about how many straight up stupid things are happening.. We make jokes about politicians and theyre decisions (see daily show) but i dont think its funny anymore. We need to change. I'm thinking about making some sort of political website, I can't decide what the best way to do it is... But just a way to show how corrupt these assholes are, a very clear interface, showing their decisions, and how common sense doesn't dictate them. It's ridiculous and I'm upset by it. Anyone have any ideas to make this thing as good as possible? Ill start it tomorrow, any designers feel free to contact me :)

The retarted amount of money our government spends on "defense" and other things... Think about how much better we can do with the worlds best engineers and 1/10th of the defense budget. Ugh

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What I've been wishing for recently is a site that has a superficially simple interface: a grid whose rows are members, and columns/subcolumns show votes cast or not cast. The votes wouldn't be just bills, but every action that they voted on, including their working arrangements.

For legislation, the columns would have gross bills, whose embedded decisions and regulations could be broken out at will. For example, the Clothing Improvement Bill could be shown on its own (great, my guy voted to improve clothing), and its internals could be broken out to show that, for example, one effect is that citizens and residents of Canadian descent are only allowed to wear red socks (oh, feh, my guy hates Canadians).

You could also ask for just the breakouts from all bills that are concerned with socks, for example.

Which would be hard, because big bills have lots of individual effects. But it would show exactly what your guy supported, on purpose, unknowingly or as a compromise. Heck, they might even like to see that, they could learn what they voted on after the fact. I'll bet a lot of them still don't know in total what they voted for in the Affordable Care Act.

Each vote would also indicate things like if the member had more responsibility than just being a member, like on the relevant committee. A no-show here should be embarrassing. Or if the vote specifically impacts his region.

Bonus points to do this analysis all the way back to the beginning of the Republic.

And by the way, voice votes for a candidate would show a match with how the vote went, regardless of official position. If you hide behind a voice vote, then you're recorded and responsible and accountable for the winning result.

I'm working with some of the folks at stopwatching.us, and we've got some cool things going on. We're currently working with some of Aaron Schwartz code that he wrote when getting involved in politics to deliver citizens' emails to congress en masse. There's a bunch of really interesting projects going on that are starting to come together these days. It's an exciting time to be a politically-active developer!

If you're interested in volunteering some dev time on some creative ways of getting involved, let me know! My email is pvnick@gmail.com :)

Create a list of representatives and mine all their data that is available on the internet and put it on your website. I think that would allow us to easily form a picture of who that person is and what he stands for, whether he's being influenced by certain corporations etc...

EDIT: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1geg2t/senators_skip_c...

CBoppert: you are hellbanned.

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http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

Saw this there: http://www.govtrack.us/about, but it just seems like gov data. Maybe instead of just mining, one could crowdsource photos/videos from people as they see them in places and get the timestamps and geotags.

Agreed. And when they complain, we could tell them if they have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear.

You may want to take a look at http://www.opencongress.org/ - It's an open source project by the Participatory Politics Foundation (http://www.participatorypolitics.org/) and I'm sure they'd take pull requests: https://github.com/opencongress/opencongress or would be responsive to any contributions you'd want to make.

Here for example is the view of Dianne Feinstein (CA D): http://www.opencongress.org/people/show/300043_Dianne_Feinst...

Her full voting record: http://www.opencongress.org/people/voting_history/300043_Dia...

You can also access their data directly or via API: http://www.opencongress.org/about/code

In my opinion the best way to raise awareness with the general public, not those who would seek out a website on their own, is to go where they are.

I would use the same technique Apple used to change minds when the iPhone was new. Come up with bite-sized ads, and play them like regular ads, many times, but instead of advertising for a product, they should educate.

The media is doing a terrible job at this. The same way Google tries to force ISPs to change with Google Fiber, we should try forcing the media to step up by putting them in a bad light, by focusing on the important problems they're ignoring.

Imagine 30 second ads that focus on non-partisan information, stats not emotions, factual information like current laws and how they're not followed, a focus on a more global picture, on something more long term, something that would make you think and be more aware.

There's a lot of misinformation out there. We know this from the numerous polls that show large number of people believing things that are factually and provably not true.

We need to correct that first.

EFF, ACLU, and other organizations like these are trying, but they're not reaching most people. We need to reach and educate the people who have been turned off by the current state of affairs.

We need Twitter-size ads that people would find interesting and that would wet their appetite to seek out more and get involved.

One thing I always wanted to do, is mine all the data I could, and produce a corruption index for each politician, it would kind of be a Facebook for bills, Bills would be friends with lobbyists through politicians, and you could try and rank each bill by who bought it.

> I honestly think it's time to take action more than just normal protests

I think you're right. The amount of abuse in the government and corporate sector has gone out of control.

We already forgot the atrocities of the 2008 financial crisis, which wrecked numerous families and households, and caused real deaths. As far as I know, none of the senior management was held accountable. Same people who invaded the market with toxic assets are still invited for dinners at the White House.

The NSA scandal will be similarly toned down and forgotten, unless we change our attitude.

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