Fred sez,
I've just completed building the 2.0 version of Committee Caller for my master's thesis. It's called Cause Caller and it is a virtual phone bank web app powered by a Semantic Media Wiki.
I came up with the idea of automating call queues for phone banks while trying to organize one for myself, it was a total hassle to find everyone's phone number on a particular committee, so I built CommitteeCaller last semester. Over the last couple of months I've worked with several local causes to develop the idea into a generalized activist tool that is my thesis – Cause Caller. The result is a fully extendable, platform that drives a "live" VoIP application that hopefully takes a lot of the hassle out of phone banking.
Right now Cause Caller is a bit of a blank slate – while I have almost all of America's federal politicians (Congressional representatives, Senators, etc.) in the database, I am really interested in building state level politicians into it. Causes also need to be added as right now there are only two: the demo cause and SolarOne's I Heart PV Cause. This is where you can help – if you are or you know any activists looking to organize phone banks, please forward this to them! I'm going to be presenting this project for my thesis at ITP on Friday, May 9th at 12:20pm, so I'll be incorporating feedback I receive over the next week into the "results" section of my presentation.
Have fun getting in touch with democracy!
(Thanks, Fred!)
