Join us for the San Francisco Net Tuesday on September 9 featuring
Involver: How Nonprofits Can Create Video Campaigns for Social Networks. Looking forward to seeing you there!
NetSquared is an initiative of TechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
- Home
- Hear Our Pain Action Network
Hear Our Pain Action Network
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
People are fed up with quality/availability of communications services. Markets and policymakers fail to listen. We aggregate data/public pain across media/telecom services, and provide means for that pain to put weight on levers of power.
City:
Chicago
State/Region:
IL
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Our Freedom to Connect is impaired by a divide and conquer market and policy regime. We're here to change that and to transform the communications/media policy sphere.
Without data and a constituency, your cause is toast. Let the pain of your constituency be your data, and get your geographically relevant data before every public and elected official you can. Our constituency has been unnaturally divided even for each individual according to each product/service they are using and by being set apart as individual consumers rather than as having a common interest.
Communications and Media issues are important for policy makers at every layer of government/governance, in every office, elected and appointed. None of them have any real data, and none of them perceive an organized constituency. Their unit of government probably doesn't have the resources or apparent will to collect the data any more.
Our tool aggregates across all connectivity issues for every person/household and creates a public constituency data resource for advocacy at every layer of governance. We aggregate consumer pain and create community and community voice on connectivity issues dealt with under distinctly separate policy regimes: cellular service, telephony, Internet connectivity of all flavors, other broadcast or media distribution services.
We enable citizen advocates to address these issues in a comprehensive way, with locally relevant data on local communications complaints and experiences. Drop the hard data of all the complaints in a particular district or ward on the desk of any politician and ask them: What are they doing about these issues? Their priorties will suddenly be re-ordered. Ask them why they don't have data on these policy issues if they are proposing economic development as a benefit of their pet legislaton.
Do this with policymakers and public officials at every layer of government, and we'll see some big changes.
The only thing missing is the tool that aggregates this from the wider frame and provides a means for citizen advocates to connect with each other and organize their voice.
Sustainability (financial) model:
This is essentially a citizen activist resource effort.
Costs involved are:
1) hosting
2) publicity/outreach
Action depends on other organizations or citizen activists taking the data collected to their local officials. The media reform movement is growing in scope and confidence. With this sort of tool we will be more effective and potentially have greater growth.
We expect support from interested parties (foundations, friendly corporations, individual donors)
Potential obstacles:
There are workarounds, but since our intent is to have the ability to parse geographic data with political boundaries for multiple levels of government, we need a network of data providers similar to the http://civicfootprint.org API in order to offer this functionality to all geographies. Currently the CivicFootprint API only provides the geo-political data for Chicago metro area.
We need to develop means for people without Internet connectivity to register their communications issues: voice messages routed to system as audio files, other telephony means of input.
Resource Needs:
Volunteer or paid development time: database and web development. (Drupal, PHP, Ruby on Rails)
Robust hosting
Media Outreach/Publicity for tool - this needs to be publicized beyond Internet/web means for greatest impact.
Network of geographic-political data sources (later stage)
Means of connecting non-Internet input sources (telephony tone or voice messages)
Volunteers to translate to other languages.
Key Milestones:
FCC Comment Tool Aggregator established by MAIN/TCRC http://www.main.org (done)
Data Model Complete (current)
Change the Interface Model from "FCC comment" focus to new "aggregated issues Hear Our Pain" format
Interface with CivicFootPrint API for Chicago area reporting
Publicity for Tool - Chicago area launch
Documentation of Tool for replication/Network of sites
Project Summary:
Media/Telecom policy shapes our world but policymakers are largely unresponsive to the public interest. Services that any business, consumer or household may utilize are arbitrarily divided by politically determined technical categories (not science/engineering nor public interest). As a public our complaints are not heard. Consumers follow the channels of a corporate hierarchy when they seek remedy for their issue. When they feel compelled to take a complaint to government, they have no idea what formal body to take their issue to, and they have no sense that any action will come of it.
As individuals and as individual consumers we're not likely to be heard. We want somebody to “Hear Our Pain” and “Do something about it!”
Without data and a constituency, your cause is toast. Let the pain of your constituency be your data.
We're evolving the “FCC Comment” tool created at http://www.Telecommunity.us so that we can aggregate across issues, services and geography, and provide means to mobilize citizen activists on multiple political layers.
Individuals, Households, Businesses will register their complaint an be assured that Citizen Activists and Public Interest groups will use their data in a meaningful way.
We aggregate consumer pain and create community and community voice on connectivity issues dealt with under distinctly separate policy regimes: cellular service, telephony, Internet connectivity of all flavors, other broadcast or media distribution services.
This model can be utilized for other causes that have not yet been aggregated into a quality of life frame.
Comments
Great tool!
A great idea, and one I'm going to list in my favorites (and also in the Grassroots.org staff favorites, in emails we send out).
What is the potential for Democracy In Action's Salsa platform to be of use in this regard? I believe it has some capacity for CRM with regards to e-advocacy, online petitioning, etc. Could it be adapted for this?
We're integrating Salsa with our Drupal-based CMS offerings for the toolbox (Grassroots Nonprofit Toolbox), thanks to drupal module development provided by DIA. Not sure what their model for gathering local-level data is, or how that might plug in to nationwide frameworks for CivicFootprint-like data providers. Should creating the API be part of this project, to enable it to go to scale?
Good luck! I'm sure we'll talk about this some more.
Dave.