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Ask Your Lawmaker: Connecting Local Communities to their Lawmakers

Ask Your Lawmaker: Connecting Local Communities to their Lawmakers

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The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

How many Americans can interview their U.S. Senator or Representative? With Capitol News Connection’s Ask Your Lawmaker website (www.askyourlawmaker.org) and customizable widgets anyone with an Internet connection can keep their lawmaker accountable. Pioneering a new social journalism, CNC is mashing up traditional shoe-leather reporting with social networking to empower users to ask questions of elected representatives, vote on other user’s questions, listen to audio of a lawmaker’s response, discuss and share the results. Ask Your Lawmaker (AYL) is utilizing the interactivity, customizability and viral nature of Web 2.0 to connect citizens to their Congressional lawmakers and shine a light of transparency on the political process. It is our experience that asking questions other media avoid can help change policy.

Teaming with news staff at local public radio stations and an active citizenry, CNC plans to extend the AYL service to cover state and municipal governments. This includes further customization of the AYL website and widgets so that they allow users to choose between national, state and municipal views, and enable local citizens to get and upload lawmaker or local candidate answers. CNC also intends to create a hyper-personal version that displays a citizen’s own questions and answers. Users can harness a Drupal-powered website, embeddable Flash widgets customizable by state and issue, Google maps and other APIs – in addition to CNC and its 200+ partner stations’ accredited access and editorial experience to create original news stories that build on user dialogue and lawmaker responses. User-created content will be featured on Ask Your Lawmaker, www.cncnews.org and myriad other blogs and sites, as well as broadcast on local public radio stations nationwide. Utilizing new widgets, AYL users will be able to share, discuss and promote the questions they asked of lawmakers as well as the content they created based on those answers on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and via SMS on cell-phones.

The aim is to build user communities that exist on the local, regional and national level are linked to each other via social networking sites and Ask Your Lawmaker. By publishing and tracking individual and group questions for lawmakers, coupled with the ability to create and publish new content based on those responses, Ask Your Lawmaker is a living example of how local voices can truly set the news and legislative agendas.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

Ask Your Lawmaker draws its information from three primary sources: user-generated questions and comments; lawmaker responses to user questions; and CNC exclusive news reporting as informed by users of AYL widgets. Because widgets are customizable by state and issue, CNC reporters have a better understanding of local concerns and issues. The plan is to team with government transparency sites like Maplight.org and Open Congress, bloggers and issue-based sites and social networks such as Care2.com to provide AYL users with raw data necessary to inform questions and evaluate answers towards active and effective citizen engagement. We want to build APIs that link to supporting information from other sources, encourage collaboration and allow sites and blogs to build on the answers via partnerships with citizen journalists site such as Helium.com. where API would allow debate around lawmaker answers to continue and translate talk into action. We want AYL users to create and collaborate on news stories or follow-up on original CNC coverage by mashing up audio of lawmaker responses with supporting or contradictory data provided by partner sites, bloggers and public radio stations and first hand experience based on user comments.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

Capitol News Connection’s mission is to ensure voters are engaged and lawmakers accountable towards an informed democracy. CNC is an innovative and independent nonprofit news service that brings politics ‘home’ to almost 2 million public radio listeners each day with exclusive investigative coverage focused on the local impacts of national decisions and interactive segments that connect citizens to lawmakers. CNC empowers voters to be more active and effective civic participants, raises the level of discourse, and shines the light of transparency on the political process. CNC gives citizens a voice in their future: It helps shape policy by asking the important questions other media avoid to bring to lawmakers’ attention problems, challenges and solutions. News reports, features and shows are heard in 200+ markets. It was first public media organization in 12 years to win the national Joan S. Barone Award for its exclusive reporting on the Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay scandals.

Cause Area:
- Public & Social Benefit
Cause Area Tags:
Previous Prize Tags:
- n2y3mashupchallenge
Project URL:
http://www.askyourlawmaker.org
Financial support?:
No

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

Funding from the Sunlight Foundation, Park Foundation and Corporation for Public Broadcasting got Ask Your Lawmaker this far with this first iteration of the site and widgets. Now the nonprofit CNC is looking for support to take this project to the next level. There are three main areas help and resources would be most beneficial: 1/ Funding for web development, outreach, and daily operational costs from hosting to support for the journalists getting questions answered in local communities; 2/ Advice, feedback and donated or reduced-rate coding and design help from Drupal and Flash developers; and 3/ partners to work with us on site-specific APIs.