New tool for the Washington State Grassroots

Written by: Chad Lupkes on Feb 11, 2007 10:49 PM EST

The Washington State Legislature website has a lot of really good information, and they have all the basic data to enable some wonderful grassroots communication.  But their focus is getting that information out to the public, not necessarily making it actually usable in a way that meets our needs.  Which is why I spent some time over the last few weeks playing with some code that Ray Minchew gave me for use on DFW a while ago.

You know how you can use MoveOn or Working Assets to write letters to congress, and the reply from staff comes back to you?  They've spent a lot of time building tools for us to use at the grassroots level that does most of the work for us.  There are a LOT of people working to build similar tools for Washington State.  I'm just one guy.  Like Goldy says, nobody has a complete picture of what the NetRoots is building.  Nobody.

Have you ever wanted to write a letter to all members of the Government Operations & Elections committee in the Olympia Senate, but all you could find is one email at a time that you had to laboriously add to the To: line in an email?  Annyoing, isn't it.

Try this instead:

http://46dems.com/larc/contact.senate.php?com=go

It gets better.

 

At the bottom of the page is a set of links to ALL of the Senate committees.  Just click the one you want to contact, and you're there.

The form has validation, and the email that goes out will include your name, address and phone number so the Senator will know who it is from.  (Please try and break this so we can make the validation stronger.)  And the email comes from you, not the website, so you get the reply.

I'm working on the House and Joint Committees.  I'm not a database expert, so every page is hand coded.  Not super efficient on the server side, but my goal wasn't to put together a beautiful piece of php code, it was to make something usable before this session ends.

Oh, and it still gets better.  Want these forms to work on your own website?  Contact me, I'll give you the code, or I'll show you an even easier way of doing it.  Check these pages out:

http://pdcw.org/legislation/contact.senate.php

http://democracyforwashington.com/tools/contact.senate.php

Look familiar?  It's the same page, with the PDCW or DFW wrapper around it.

Please ask questions, and have fun!

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Location: WA