Adding support for state-level senators, other nations and international democracy.

[dluxcru]

I love how democracy.io makes it easy to write your senators and house reps. But it would be even better if it offered the options of sending mail to your local and state representatives. Digging up the names and contacting each of them about an issue can be just as annoying as contacting federal representatives.

Similarly, it would be great to expand democracy.io to offer support for, local, state, and federal representatives in other countries, as I'd imagine that the U.S. is not the only one where getting a letter to your representatives is cumbersome. I've also seen EFF do advocacy on international issues like trade agreements with bad copyright laws. Perhaps adding some support for contacting the right people about those issues would also be an important step forward in those fights.

Are there any plans for these features? If not, is it reasonable to implement them?

[hp4k1h5]

I think this is a great idea. The national conference of state legislatures has an index of all state legislatures' homepages and you can find your state legislators using this http://www.ncsl.org/aboutus/ncslservice/state-legislative-websites-directory.aspx. It might require a special scraping tool for each state to get the correct email addresses for the members.

[dluxcru]

My question is how to get EFF's attention on it so that it becomes a development priority. This idea has been here for a while, but I haven't seen it get any official comment from EFF or another developer who has the time/knowhow to implement.

[sinak]

Hi there! I agree it would be a great piece of additional functionality for democracy.io, but unfortunately we don't currently have the developer time available to take this on.

The easiest way to do this would be to use the Google Civic API to fetch email addresses for local legislators, however EFF's privacy policies mean that we can't go this route. Doing it from the ground-up and maintaining a dataset for the representative's contact details as well as figuring out the boundaries of local districts make this both an engineering and data-collection intensive project.

[dluxcru]

What in the EFF's privacy policies prevents you from using the Google Civic API?

[sinak]

With a few exceptions listed in our privacy policy, we generally don't share user data with third parties. Sending the addresses of constituents who are trying to contact their legislators to Google would definitely be problematic.

[dluxcru]

I'm not surprised - that kind of privacy policy fits you guys. I wonder if an opt-in option which allowed you to choose whether or not your data was sent (and unfortunately being unable to contact state/city level legislators without doing so) would satisfy the policy as is or with some updates? That's a question that would probably have to be addressed within the internal departments of EFF itself than here, so I'll leave you guys to debate that question, but I hope you encourage someone to take a look at the possibility. Maybe it's even possible to get Google to legally agree not to store address requests that came from democracy.io.

[dluxcru]

There may also be other API tools that work in a similar fashion, and might agree to not store data if Google wouldn't take such an agreement. This might be a good example.

[hp4k1h5]

@dluxcru are you on slack's WeAllJS team? they have a civic-hacking group that could maybe get something started. im not sure about hosting, but getting a working module going for at least one state would be nice.