"Wiki Your Town Council - New effort seeks a database on all U.S. elected offi... - The Diigo Meta page

• 29 Jan 09
  

  Yule Heibel

  Article about American Solutions, "a national grassroots group based in Washington, DC, that was founded by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich but describes its Internet effort as nonpartisan, is preparing to launch a site that will, at first, allow people to enter basic contact information on all local officials. Then future users can enter their full nine-digit zip code to find the local officials who represent them."

  wiki local_government open_source politics mit_techreview american_solutions

  • Over the following several months, American Solutions plans to build ways for users to rate the officials on job performance, create social-networking functions around local issues, and let users make free Internet-based phone calls to the officials.

  • Existing online platforms share data about the more powerful elected officials, such as federal and state lawmakers. Congresspedia allows wiki-style editing of pages about members of Congress, while OpenCongress allows several ways for users to interact, including writing blog posts about specific bills.

    
    

    And for detailed information about lobbyist activity and campaign contributions, there are sites that track such spending, including one for members of Congress and another covering major state elected officials. Such databases attempt to better organize information that is already available for public scrutiny but is cumbersome to obtain.

  • 3 more annotations...
  • • Below upper-level elected officials, though, lies a great mass of elected public officials but no central way to find them, share information about them, or approach them online. Search engines only get you so far with, for example, local municipal officials. Assuming you know these people's names, there's still no guarantee that typing them into Google will yield relevant hits. A central site could solve that. Kralik says that the largest such database currently available includes 44,000 elected officials and is accessible through sites such as votesmart.
    • "It seems useful to aggregate dispersed information about elected officials and make it easy for citizens to find that information," Weinberger says. "And because it's impossible to predict all the different sorts of information that might be relevant, a wiki is a good choice. A wiki is also a good choice because it distributes the chore of building and maintaining a site with ambitions that stretch from the national to the hyperlocal."
    • "In the best case, communities of engaged citizens develop around the site,"

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