Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help | Hacker News Reader

Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help

eff.org

334 pointsfrostmatthew54 comments

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/

Repo seems to be gone?

Edit: intermittent GH issues.

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.

Well I hope I'm not late. Just home from work but this looks too awesome to resist jumping into

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 USA. Maybe it is time for some open source system that can be rolled out to everywhere from The Hill to Burkina Faso.

Let's also be honest about those people in congress - do the current batch of revolving door military/corporate oldies that sit there really deserve to be taken seriously? Does anyone believe they understand concepts such as reasoned argument, being fair, the common good, progress, listening instead of speaking, telling the truth instead of lying? Even if they do appear genuinely for the good it can be just an act, as per that person you Americans have for 'President'.

So, to invite participation from the rest of the world and get some enthusiastic input from those that think that the current batch of congressmen are deserved of being Guantanamo-ed, the EFF should think bigger. They should link up with groups that have made progress internationally and work towards a tool for democracy that can work everywhere.

Write To Them is open source and is already being used in multiple countries:

https://github.com/mysociety/writetothem

The EFF is already working in the UK to repeal their new censorship laws and to stop the UK government from jailing people for tweets.

Hi, I work at EFF on our international team. I was also one of the people who hacked on the anciente parent of writetothem.com, faxyourmp.com. Don't worry, we still stay in touch with the MySociety folks, who are all wonderful. It's a small circle of people doing the work on these tools, though now thanks to this post, it's larger by over 100 people now.

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.

Agreed. I was trying to package some Python files yesterday, so I could easily install them via git / pip. That took a lot of commits before it actually worked.

I guess a better measure of contributions would be number of distinct features implemented and number of bugs fixed.

We could also do PRs accepted, or issues closed, or other things a little less squishy than commits. But either way - it'll probably be fine.

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!

Thanks for the feedback!

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.

The US House of Reps is almost done with development for an API (that was spearheaded by outside organizations like CMF) for 'campaign' communications (communications where the majority of the messages are 'similar') from third party advocacy organizations. After this occurs, the hope is that only messages sent via web forms are completely unique messages sent from constituents without the assistance of a third party. The project has been slow (10 years in the making?) but its near completion. Achieving 100% adoption amongst the 440 member offices is a different question though, although 100% adoption has been mandated.

As far as I understand, the Sergeant at Arms can enforce IT mandates upon the various offices, no?

I think it's really great that the EFF is reaching out to the community like this. I reached out to donate time and I encourage you to do the same.

I'll also point out that Sina (sinak) has been spearheading this effort, and while he has a job title at EFF, he's primarily independently coordinating the volunteer efforts of folks like us through https://taskforce.is

I'd love to see more civic works projects done this way.

> Secure Connection Failed

> An error occurred during a connection to www.eff.org. The OCSP server has no status for the certificate. (Error code: sec_error_ocsp_unknown_cert)

Anybody else getting this?

Got it briefly. Tried again and it worked.

I get that error too. Reloading doesn't work for me.

Here is a very effective german platform for not only contacting, but also making the answers to questions visible:

the site - http://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/ the code - https://github.com/parliamentwatch/parliamentwatch

the site is in german, but you might guess the content with a little help from an online translator. It is very popular and linked to from the biggest german online media. It might be an indicator for it's success that several conservative politicians tried to fight this site with all kinds of tricks, but they still did not succeed :)

Unfortunately the code is drupal, it certainly would be much better to convert this to some more flexible framework like pyramid or django, but it works.

It might be a much better alternative to make questions to congressmen publicly visible than just sending stuff into spam-folders of people that do not have interest at all in being contacted by "the people".

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?

You fire up the bookmarklet on the MOC's site, point it at a form, and it extracts the input fields and marries them to the parameters for email, zip etc, or lets you marry them. produces YAML for their cucumber'esque system etc. Quite a cool tool/idea.

They really need some copy editing done on everything for this project.

If you have suggestions on fixes, please feel free to submit a pull request. theunitedstates.io/contact-congress is on the gh-pages branch [1]. I wrote the instructions page and realize there are a few grammatical errors, any help fixing them would be really appreciated.

https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress/tree/gh-pag...

Have been completely engrossed in this most of the day. Hope it's done soon or I'll have to go cold turkey.

"How technical do I need to be?" - not very.

Sorry, what?

"You should be comfortable using Github, having basic programming proficiency in at least one language and have a reasonable grasp of HTML and Javascript. Experience collaborating via IRC is handy, but not critical."

So... very technical?

Okay, we'll remove "not very" from that paragraph :).

Sarcasm on their post :) I wish that I had the karma to downvote!

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 technical and does require some background, but it's appropriate to say "a bit technical, but you don't need to be an expert".

They don't teach HTML in physics or stats. Most people also don't take an intro to computer programming course.

They may not teach HTML, but my alma mater taught python to freshman physics students. By senior year, you would have at least learned two additional languages. That's just from the physics courses - if you decided to take an intro to cs course (which most did), you would have learned a fourth (but probably not a FORTH).

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.

A lot of the work here is parsing contact forms from sites using a bookmarklet. Lots of details here: http://theunitedstates.io/contact-congress/

Not very. Watch the two videos and you should be able to complete the tasks without a problem. Only snag that you may run into the common error where the first form HTTP and the second form is HTTPS, but the workaround is listed in the instructions (complete each form individually, merge results manually).

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"

1. US laws can have a huge impact on foreigners, especially if they are Internet-related

2. you can help a good cause without directly profiting from it

Why should the EFF discourage assistance from Non-US citizens?

AFAICS, this is all about accessing and describing publicly available web forms. You don't need to be US citizen to do that.

I'm a canadian student and I give money to the EEF each month because they're one of the strongest defendant of the web out there. I don't care if they're focused in the US; I care they're there to protect us.

Congress doesn't serve you, that's true, but a bad and out-of-touch congress will certainly make your life worse.

So basically, what you guys are trying to say is that a foreign organization that can lose control, can possibly (and likely does) harm me whether I have direct involvement with them or not?

That sounds like terrorism (ironically). Then again, if you try to point out a different view on HN concerning some subject ... aah forget it.

An organization that I had hope in, posts something like this for captcha breaking and subtle bullshit. Really? Is this HN or ODesk?

Just to clarify, we're not trying to break any captchas - any system that implements the open data format in contact-congress would need to return captchas to users for them to fill out. We're simply making it possible for third parties to create simpler, unified interfaces for sending emails to someone's member of congress.

I was pretty surprised to see the EFF's naive take on the Tea Party [1] in "recent deeplinks" underneath the linked article, which seems not to recognize it as pretty much an astroturf instrument of the neo-bircher Kochs [2], [3].

Of course co-opting TP sympathizers around a common goal of opposing overweening government surveillance to unknown purpose is a Good Thing, but unless the EFF, an org I've respected for ages, is unaware of the spurious "grassroots" provenance of the Tea Party, which seems very unlikely, I'd expect a less nakedly revisionist approach from them.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/tea-party-taxes-and-wh...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0

[3] http://www.astroturfwars.com

How is this even vaguely relevant to this submission?

Argue with their attempts to appeal across the bases somewhere else. Write a blog post. Raise awareness if you're so incensed.

Don't attempt to hijack this thread.

I think it's worthwhile to discuss. Out of the blue, they're suddenly promoting a political party at the same time that they're asking for technical assistance. That can definitely influence one's decision to offer said assistance.

If you want to move the discussion elsewhere, I opened a separate thread when I first saw this last night:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7596182

If you're trying to get self-identified Tea Partyers on board, a great start is not alienating them. Appealing to the aspects of their ideology we can all agree on is a great idea to garner allies. The Tea Party's "grassroots" origin may be spurious, but the sense of injustice that fueled its adoption by ordinary folk is real enough. As I understand it, a lot of basically normal, non-frothing people now believe that the Tea Party basically stands against government overreach, and as such are sympathetic to it. Might as well channel that. We might even see an evolution of what the Tea Party means.

This. We don't have to agree with them on everything. We do have to respect them enough to use their language (think ./English/politics/Tea Party/ in contrast to ./English/tech/.) when communicating our shared ideas to them.

I found the piece to be a very (actually surprisingly so) savvy bit of strategic outreach from EFF, even if it was quite blunt in its tactical approach.

Yeah, but aligning your organization with a political movement that's - let's say "divisive" - and largely has nothing to do with your core goals is also a good way to alienate a good portion of your base that doesn't agree with their politics. I've donated to the EFF in the past and I was shocked when I saw this.

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