Participatory Politics Foundation

David & Maryam from PPF will be at PdF 2014 this week – my tenth year at this leading tech-politics conference, how about that.

We’re actively seeking charitable funding support for our non-profit work – here are some of our current projects:

AskThem.io – our major project, a version of “We the People” for every U.S. elected official.

• I’ll be participating in a PdF breakout session tomorrow around how the web is changing local politics, hope you can make it if you’re around.
• We’re building partnerships with participatory budgeting groups, grassroots net neutrality campaigns, and many more local issues.
• Questions-and-answers with every U.S. elected official and any verified Twitter account – help us keep AskThem up and running through the Nov. 2014 elections, for greater online public dialogue.

Proposal for NYCCouncilmatic.com – a new transparency and engagement site for NYC government.

• We’ve partnered with DataMade in Chicago to write this open proposal for funding a re-write of the open-source Councilmatic – one that looks & feels like ChicagoCouncilmatic.
• PPF will launch a version in NYC and use our network in city government to roll it out as a two-way engagement platform with the NYC Council, open-source and open-data.
• Councilmatic can be deployed by local developers in at least 17 more U.S. cities in the short term, and any future Code For America Fellowship / Brigade city in the future, and any other city that writes scrapers, and any city that publishes in the OpenCivicData standard.

Loomio community project on municipal broadband in NYC – one of the first public discussion groups of the free & open-source Loomio platform – join us!

• Recent rollbacks of net neutrality rules and the demand for high-speed internet means that more cities are examining options for municipal broadband.
• NYC Mayor de Blasio announced the formation of an NYC broadband task force to achieve affordable, universal broadband, to which we seek to develop five community-generated proposals.
• Some expert members of the Open Technology Initiative (of New America Foundation) are volunteering to help inform our proposition development. We’ve also gotten great input (over Skype & in-person yesterday) from Ben Knight of Loomio, who will be at PdF as well.

Proposal: #YesAllWomen, harnesing hashtag activism, and open data for communicating with government

• An idea with huge potential: an open CRM for Congress and every level of government. Data-rich & public dashboards of constituent sentiment, questions, expertise, and more.
• For the first time, make it possible to capture actions taken on social media – such as the #YesAllWomen hashtag – and deliver them to government offices as open structured data (in an XML standard).
• The distributed swirl of feelings and news and personal stories on Facebook has an open-data hook into the legislative process, for public accountability and a more-liquid representative democracy, increasing trust and engagement in the political process. (In some cases, such as net neutrality, mitigating the corrupting influence of campaign contributions and lobbyists.)

Please support our public-benefit work on civic engagement! We’re easy to reach and eager to chat. Let’s build more open-source tools for everyday political participation. Email me for copies of our non-profit funding prospectus, david at ppolitics.org.

Last, go Fight For the Future, our sibling non-profit, Holmes & Tiffiny are PPF co-founders – tomorrow’s intro main stage speakers!