The OSDF

So I'm interesting in making some sort of political difference and stumbled onto this subreddit. Like much of Reddit political activism it appears Redditors are more inclined to absorb content rather than become actual activists.

Anyways I'd love if you guys shared your experiences on your successes and failures.

Mueller’s recent testimony reinforced the threat of other countries trying to hack our elections. This raises the question, what is congress going to do about, and surprisingly enough, the answer is, a lot of things. This video looks at the main proposals going through congress right now to see which ones are the best solutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj80-uk0DoE&feature=youtu.be

Hey :)

I'm part of the Pirate Grouping on /r/MHOC, a simulation of the House of Commons online. We stand for individual freedom, net neutrality and the liberalisation of intellectual property law. We're currently having an election, and we'd greatly appreciate it if you would consider voting for us. It'll only take a minute of your time, and it would mean the world to us. You don't even have to be British to vote!

The Pirate Grouping are standing the following candidates:

/u/AlmightyWibble, Pirate-Labour, East of England

/u/strideynet, Pirate-Labour, East of England

/u/hazzyjosh, Pirate-Labour, East of England

/u/m1cha3lm, Pirate-LibDem, Central Scotland

You can vote here

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a nice day :)

Cheers, /u/AlmightyWibble

Hello everyone. We are the Democracy Foundation (but still, open source) and we are developing resources for direct democratic communities. We are crowdsourcing an open constitution for direct democracy, and we would like anyone to take a look, and share his ideas. The format is on Google Docs so anyone can type in directly just as a word document. Here is the webpage, you can find the link inside. I'm looking forward to your feedback ! http://democracy.foundation/constitution/

Amendment XXVIII

"The proposal would create Amendment XXVIII to formally establish a fourth branch of Government, the Populace Branch.

Section 1: All Populace powers herein granted shall be vested in the entire voter population of the United States, which shall consist not of representation, or formal organization, but of a granted federal power to direct proposal of and referendum on bills pursuant to the actions of the three other branches.

The responsibility of the Populace branch is to raise issues and allow for popular vote on important issues that wouldn't so easily be proposed or discussed in the Legislative branch, as a form of unbiased, money-less, voter-based lobbying. All issues/bills must be proposed with at least a 2,000,000 person pledge of agreement to raise it as a formal issue. From there, the proposal may be directly passed to the House of Representatives where they may be discussed and solutions be made, and/or directly to national referendum under the Populace Branch. Any proposals to be held for national referendum, will be voted on quarterly: the third Wednesday of March, June, September, and December of every year, to allow for both Legislative debate and for voters, the Populace branch, to be well informed and prepared to vote on the issues. If a vote on the issue in a national referendum is passed by a 2/3 vote by the Populace branch, the bill is taken directly to the Senate, directly past the House, where the Legislative process continues as is.

The House of Representatives may, of course, have resolved the issue and passed their own bill to the Senate after the initial Populace proposal, by which national referendum would not be necessary.

To allow for higher voter accessibility, as well as creating a more involved, more powerful voter culture in America, the voting process of the Populace branch will now include the implementation of technology, where necessary, including heavily-secure and protected internet databases where votes may be balloted, held, and quickly counted, as well as application and mobile phone support.

The goal of this Amendment is to define a succinct and clear link between voters and the democratic, legislative process. No powers of the Legislative branch, Executive branch, or Judicial branch will be infringed upon, remaining exactly as they were. However, the Populace branch, the voter population, now has a platform for introducing, discussing, proposing solutions to, and, if necessary, voting on issues not limited to the agenda of the Legislative branch, strengthening their voice."

Tl;dr: Populace Branch of government where voters can raise issues for Congress and vote on them in a national referendum.

I'm very frustrated with how difficult it can be to contact our elected officials. So few people put in the (sometimes egregious) effort to do it, and I want to know what you think would help you to contact them.

Some context:

My team has spent the last few weeks crawling across every website of the Senate and House reps, as well as every State Legislator, curating their contact information and parsing their web forms in order to create a unique messaging tool that allows people to contact their representatives directly. Throughout this tedious process, we've been extremely frustrated - this information is not always easy to find and we can't help feeling that some representatives just flat out do not want their constituents to contact them. Frustrating as it may be, it's only helped inspire us to make this the greatest free tool we can.

Currently, our beta site (buildquorum.com) allows you to simply create, sign and share messages to Congress and State Legislatures. Our next big release in the coming weeks is to have free accounts that, once logged in, show you messages that are important specifically to you based on your location and interests. After that, we'll be working on an iPhone/Android app for the same purpose. We believe that this will help people to remain active in politics and consistently share their opinions with those who represent them.

Despite that belief, we know that there must be more we can do to create and maintain people's contact with their elected officials.

What else can we build to help you communicate with your reps?

What barriers are holding you or others back from sending them a letter?

CGPGrey explains the problems of First-Past-the_post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Also gerrymandering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY

It seems if people were more aware of these issues, we could better push for election reform and get a government that ultimately better represents us?

[ Removed by reddit in response to a copyright notice. ]

I typed this up as a response to a reply on another subreddit. I'm x-posting it in a few other subreddits because I hope to obtain a broad spectrum of responses rather than a single upvote and a "lol yeah" or something.

I chose this subreddit because on the surface it seemed relevant to the subreddit's subject matter. I apologize if I unknowingly break any specific rules of your forum, I did read the sidebar. :)

I like the way Gen X is looking as they're on the cusp of taking over, but they're still straddling the gap between the pre and post internet world. They learned to live in a time not fundamentally that much different than the Baby Boomers as far as technology is concerned. Though, they were still very young when the world as a whole was first being introduced to the internet. The gap they straddle isn't like the gaping expanse that Baby Boomers are having to leap over, and so aren't stuck having to rethink their worlds halfway through life.

Our true hope lies in the Millenial Generation, as they've only ever known a world with instant global communication and a heavy reliance upon technology within everyday life. To today's High School freshman, 9/11 is something that can only be experienced through history books and world of mouth from older generations. I have a tendency to be overly optimistic about the future, but I really do hold hope that not having experienced the "dark ages" before the internet, or the general lack of democracy that the internet has made obsolete through direct and uncensored global communication between actual people, will result in this generation having difficulty imagining a world where a solitary voice cannot make an impact.

The Millenials have a lot of advertising and misdirection to wade through on their way to power, and the status quo of the Baby Boomers will see to it that they make every use of their opportunity to bend the minds of the Millenials toward their viewpoint on their way out, but I believe that the percentage Millenials that actually do take action and end up in politics and business will end up being a much more productive, cooperative and understanding class of world leaders than the set of leaders that we have today; just by having grown up in the world in which they did.

Of course, this all hinges on things going as they currently are, and doesn't take into account a HOLOHYPERNET 3.0 or whatever coming along and dismantling the only world that the Millenials know. Or maybe electricity as we know it stops functioning or something, and we're all forced to resubmit to our cranky, wrinkled, bigoted Boomber overlords once again and go back to when men were men and "the coloreds" never tried to start any trouble. Then we can all get back to sitting on our asses in front of a TV and judging people.

It seems trivial that you can read a paragraph written by a black man expressing his point of view, and just plain ridiculous that this was almost impossible for the average person 15 years ago. But unless you subscribed to Jet magazine (or whatever) or watched BET on television, the great majority of people (in America, at least) could go through their entire lives without ever having been exposed to the actual thoughts of someone from another social class or subculture. Sure, everyone had friends outside of their race or culture, but you would have to be really close to someone in order to hear their private thoughts because the conversation would be taking place face-to-face or voice-to-voice. You weren't going to just scroll down your facebook wall and see what your minority friends write to each other about when they feel at ease to speak their minds.

As commonplace and overlooked as it is today, this is an extremely important development within the history of human society. As much as this power is wasted on youtube videos and twitter posts about boobs or whatever, the very fact that a single person's voice can be heard by millions of others has changed the nature of humanity for the rest of our existence as a species.

We seem to know with certainty what a planet is composed of with just looking at it through a telescope.. How is this possible?

(512) 463-2000

This is the phone number to Governor Rick Perry's office. It may be busy, but keep trying. When the sweet woman answers the phone, say you are calling to oppose a second special session. She does not take any information and simply adds it to the call count. Make a call and add to that count.

[EDIT]

Related to the failure to pass Texas SB5 (abortion) last night thanks to the 11 hour long filibuster by Wendy Davis and outbursts by the activists in session, for those that missed it.

Seeing a post like this one inspired the question.

For a while, I was trying to develop a StackExchange community for involved-citizenship. Not how to become a citizen, but what you do with the citizenship you have. This group seems to pose some of the kinds of discussion that could percolate into an answer that others would find valuable in search / browsing of topics.

Any thoughts?