Category Archives: Adventures in Hacktivism

‘First’ Letters to My Reps…

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Okay, maybe not the very first — I’m sure that I’ve actually written letters to politicians before at some time or another (at least I’d like to think I have), but I didn’t keep track of any of those letters and seem to have no specific recollections of them. So the experiences obviously didn’t leave much of an impact on me (or them either, most likely 🙂
Next step: to create a few customized versions of the Save Internet Radio Letter and make them available for people to print out and FAX easily.
These letters will be “customized” both in terms of who they are addressed to and what they contain (the save internet radio letter was admittedly a little out-of-date).
In particular, I’m thinking about adding support in the letter for the recently-introduced Internet Radio Fairness Act.)
I’ll link to them from here for the California folks, for starters, and then maybe I’ll try to do a state or two a day.
Feel free to jump in and help me put this table together guys! The idea is to have a “quick and easy fax table” for all fifty states with customized letters quickly available when something comes up and we need to let our Reps know about how we feel quickly…

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Confession: Still Hanging Out At Congress.org

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Okay so I’m pretty well diverted from my original goal of contacting my representatives (which I will get back to, I promise) because I’m having too much fun with the voting statistics on Congress.org.
Capital Advantage‘s motto is “Congress at your fingertips.” Let’s see how long it takes to figure out what I need. That is, of course, if I can stop fooling around long enough to get back to the task at hand…

Hanging Out At Congress.org

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Adventures in Hacktivism — Day 1:
1) I type “congress” into Google.
2) Click on the 3rd or 4th thing down (not google’s fault – ambiguous query 🙂
on something that says “Congress.org – Write to Congress, the President and State…”
— cause that’s what I wanna do – write to these guys…
3) I end up on Congress.org – which is not actually a government or non-profit operation, as I initially suspected when I entered the website. It is actually a demonstration website for a product of Capital Advantage, who provides the demo as a “public service”.
That said (that it’s an infotisement — which is a “nice” way of saying “an advertisement that informs”) I’d like to say that it’s a darn useful advertisement, and I look forward to more functional advertisements just like it in the future!
I’ll just be over here checking out voting records (by zipcode) for a while…

Join Me On My Quest To “Contact My Representatives”

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So I decided to find out who “my representatives” were so I could start writing/faxing to them and begin to research who they are their polical history etc. to see if I want to vote for them in the future (and things like that).
One of the subjects that kept coming up at the OSCON 2002 conference a few weeks ago was the feeling of helplessness among conference goers who wanted to get more involved, but didn’t know exactly where to begin.
Alas, it’s a process I myself have started on more than one occasion, and abandoned for one frustrating reason or another every time. It can be pretty complicated getting started.
Nevertheless, I’ve decided to get the show on the road, and practice what I preach basically, and figure out where my reps are and what the story is on them so that I can convey the information to a wider audience. It is my goal to set something up for California — and then perhaps others might take on the task for their states — and maybe we can get a little organization going and get something accomplished in this upcoming election.
So off I go on my little “Ms. Smith Virtually Goes To Washington.” How hard can it be to put together some lists of reps and their fax numbers? We’re a gonna find out…