A message from Capitol News Connection:


CNC Reporter Yanmei Xie 

Think about being able to use your iPhone, Blackberry or cell phone to hold lawmakers to account!

 

Can't get your U.S. Senator on the line? 

Whose call does your Congressman take: yours or the deep-pocketed lobbyist's? Democracy suffers when citizens have little meaningful access to or influence over elected officials.

 

That's why we're asking for...

your vote ... online, right now!

 

Help Capitol News Connection build a mobile application ofAsk Your Lawmaker interactive widgets in this year's N2Y4 Challenge. NetSquared's Global Challenge will award$60,000 to the best mobile applications for social benefit.

CNC Reporter Elizabeth Wynne Johnson 
Learn more about N2Y4 and participate!
VOTE now!

It's easy...it only takes a minute!


Create an account or login at www.NetSquared.org

 

Add Ask Your Lawmaker to your ballot. Then visit theProject Gallery to add between two and four more projects.

 

Double check that 'Ask Your Lawmaker' is one of your chosen projects. Once you have three or more Projects added to your Ballot, you'll see the "Cast Ballot" link. Click and you're done! Thank you!

CNC Reporter Matt Laslo 

The N2Y4 Conference taking place May 26 & 27 in San Jose, CA at Cisco Systems will bring together the 14 Projects selected in a NetSquared Community vote along with project teams from previous years, developers, nonprofits, corporations, funders, and others interested in the intersection of technology and social good. Last year 'Ask Your Lawmaker' was a finalist.

Don't forget to tell all your friends!

Use this link http://tinyurl.com/coootw to Twitter it, send it to your Facebook or MySpace friends.

 

How will your vote help us? 

Your support will let citizens can question their lawmakers directly from their cell phones and vote for the questions they most want answered.CNC reporters in the U.S. Capitol will be notified when users submit questions and again when each question gets enough votes. With their accredited direct access and regular 'face-time' with Senators and Representatives CNC reporters get citizen questions answered, and upload the audio and text directly to the web and the original questioners' cell phone, Blackberry or iPhone for them to listen, read, comment on and share with their friends.

 

Giving citizens a powerful voice

It's hard for a Senator or Representative to sidestep a question asked by 18,932 people in 26 states! Ask Your Lawmaker gives citizens a powerful voice, and with iPhone, cell and Blackberry applications, anyone will be able to participate anytime - any place - without need for a laptop or desktop.

CNC Reporter Sara Sciammacco 
Whether submitting a question via SMS, finding out who your Congress person is via GPS or a street address, mapping a question, recording audio of your question on an iPhone, listening, sharing or 'truth-squading' an answer, CNC's proposed suite of mobile solutions will make lawmaker's ears as accessible as the phone in your pocket.


110 Maryland Ave NE Suite 201 | Washington, DC 20002 US

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And now, back to your usual blogger...

As usual, I would like to make a full disclosure of financial relationship. I hope that everyone is 100% clear that I am beating the drum for one of my esteemed clients:  Capitol News Connection (CNC), the nonprofit nonpartisan news agency. However, I am not just a consultant - I'm a fan.   

CNC recently launched the "Ask Your Lawmaker" widget, and I am very enthusiastic about this mash-up of new era geekiness with a fine old American tradition.

The basic equation is:

In other words, everyone in the United States should have a role in holding our elected officials accountable, and professional journalists should make use of interactive web-based tools to enlist all of us in this enterprise.  Fortunately, CNC's founder and bureau chief, Melinda Wittstock, has the experience, the credentials, and the vision to make an outpost of any computer that has internet access.

But wait, there's more! 

As more of us rely on phones for news, information, navigation, and communication, it's become clear there's a need to develop web applications that are well-suited not only to desktop computers but also to mobile devices.  (Fortunately, Melinda has been tracking this closely.) Organizations such as MobileActive have been innovators in the field of activism, advocacy, and organizing, and NetSquared, with its emphasis on "remixing the web for social change," has also become an important leader in this field. The latter has now sponsoring a Mobile Challenge, and Ask Your Lawmaker is in the running, along with an exciting array of other projects.

Ask Your Lawmaker is a somewhat unusual candidate here, in that many of the projects in the Mobile Challenge are pointed toward a specific kind of social change.  Most of them are designed to further specific causes (health, environmental sustainability, human rights) or to eradicate specific social evils (human trafficking, sexual harrassment, violence against children).  In contrast, Ask Your Lawmaker upholds an ideal of journalism in the public interest and provides a conduit for a crucial exchange between elected officials and those they serve. It seeks to strengthen journalism in the service of civil society, rather than to advance a particular cause, ideology, or agenda for action.

My contention is that responsible, innovative journalism is one of the factors that makes it possible for a  responsible public to demand transparency from its leaders, and to deliberate on what policies are in the community's interest. 

If you agree, please vote for the Ask Your Lawmaker Mobile Application!




To vote, you'll need to login or register on the Netsquared web site. (Registration is free.) Once you've registered, just go to the Ask Your Lawmaker Mobile Application project description page, and vote.