IAmA former House staffer who hacked the US Capitol's radio-frequency alert system to track votes in Congress. My new app lets us identify new political candidates and crowd-lobby Congress on any issue, from increasing NASA funding to legalizing w...

Why can't I register using email?! I don't necessarily want my political beliefs attached to my work (LinkedIn) and I flat out refuse to use facebook.

I'm right there with you.

Hi u/TheBreadAgenda I just wrote Waiting_for_Merlot about why we use Facebook and LinkedIn to verify. Please take a moment to hear us out, but just to clarify, verification isn't a requirement to use the vast majority of the app, but it is a requirement to VOTE.

Hi Merlot, I totally understand. Facebook isn't a requirement for using the app, but verifying through Facebook OR Linkedin is a requirement to VOTE in the app. There's a fine line to walk between legitimacy and privacy, and I think we do an okay job of it considering we are on a shoe-string budget. We wrote a whole blog post about it that you can read here.

Even if you do choose to verify with Facebook or Linkedin, we do not scrape your data from facebook or share ANYTHING back to facebook. We only use it to verify that you are one person, who gets one vote. Just like you have to verify to vote in real elections, it's important that we verify you are registered to vote too, and this process let's us do it without asking for far more sensitive data from you like your social security number. Thoughts?

A few weeks ago Alex Ebert (aka Edward Sharpe) and I encouraged Reddit to hack democracy by trying out several civic engagement apps.

Waaiit. The founder of the app finds it convenient to use a pseudonym, but you demand your users give you something that links back to their real name, and could be used to dox them?

Anonymity has been an integral part of American politics since Tom Paine published The American Crisis under the pen name "Common Sense", even before "Publius" authored the Federalist papers. You're making a mistake to ignore that tradition.

Incorrect, everyone in the app can use a pseudonym. Even if you choose to "register to vote" by verifying through a social network, we still don't save your name and it doesn't link back to your profile at all. As I say, "be as anonymous as you want to be."

Can you email my Congressman once a week to let them know how poor a job they are doing? Or can I click a button in the app to send them a note showing how their voting record compares to mine?

Yes. Once you've created an account, you can view your representative. If you've weighed in on any issues, you can see how often their votes match yours, and there's an option to contact them directly or to view their own website.

There are already so many form letters, etc, that you can auto send to Congress. What would be cool and perhaps more influential is if you could compare how the voting record for a group of constituents matches their Congressman's record.

As a former Legislative Correspondent (LC), I believe form letters are not only a waste of time, but a drain on legislative resources. Congressional offices are so awash in junk mail, that Congressmen don't have time to considerately respond to the real mail individuals personally took the time to write.

Form letters are really a way for an organization to help their members express a sentiment for or against a specific legislative issue. What we do in Capitol Bells is let anyone select a bill then explain why they are for or against it. When other users upvote that post to express agreement, they will also adopt OP's vote on the bill.

By helping each other vote, we can make it easy to automatically generate personal voting records for everyone that we can compare, apples to apples, to the Congressman's own official positions. Then, like you suggest, we can group everyone up at a district, state, or national level, and quantitatively display how well that politician is actually representing his constituents.

Do any elected officials use the app?

Yes, hundreds of congressmen use the app to follow votes.

if the app is anonymous, how do you confirm that?

By installing it on their phones myself in many instances.

Duuuuuude.

How does it feel to make a redditor very happy?

Do I want to know how happy?

What is something you know about Bernie Sanders that we don't?

My girlfriend ate lunch sitting next to him once! Does that count?

not really, but what restaurant?

It was just at work... uhh I hear he flies coach unlike basically every other Member of Congress who always flies business.

Hill staffer here--I've seen many other Members in coach. They fly so many miles that they are usually eligible for upgrades due to frequent flier plans, so it's not accurate to imply that most MoC's pony up extra taxpayer money for nicer seats.

Fair enough!

What kind of lunch did they eat? and what did they do afterward?

They read each other passages from the Communist Manifesto.

Did you release the radio-frequency alert system as a publicly available API? If so, where can I find it and start using it? If not, would you consider doing so, so that others can build apps with the information?

Yes, the API endpoint is public. You can find it here: https://capitol-bells.appspot.com/_ah/api/floor/v1/status/now

Is there documentation for that somewhere?

Hi again Swkoll, I haven't written any documentation for it, but I should. It is just the single endpoint though, and what you see is what you get.

Can't appear to create an account on my nexus 5X, when I go to login on facebook it gives me the error:

urlsafe must be a string; received {u'anon': True,u'onboarded': False, u'personKey': u'ahFzfmNhcGl0b2xiZWxsc2luY3ITCxIGUGVyc29uGlCAglDmh-UKDA'}

Do you know how I could fix this error or when it will be fixed?

Hey Swkoll! Thanks for pointing this out. We are fixing this right now, and the fix will be up in the next couple days. If you delete and reinstall right now though and try to log in it should work for you.

Do you see the app used by special interest groups to lobby the people's support? or mainly individuals?

Well, the app puts everyone on the same footing, whether you are from a special interest group or you're joe the plumber. Many special interest groups have great ideas. In this setting the ideas have to win out on their own though, not because they have a personal line to the Senator's chief of staff.

I downloaded the app and I love what you guys are doing! I recently just updated it to the newest version, and it seems like there's a lot going on inside the app. As a user, how do I quickly find what's going on in Congress and see what my Representative is doing?

Tap on your profile button, then tap on your district, and it will show you your representative's profile, including how closely he votes with you, how you compare on votes you've taken, and even what other people from your district are posting about!

Have you seen a disconnect between the issues generated by the masses and the issues in mainstream media?

It's hard to answer that because we don't have an active community of constituents using Capitol Bells yet.

I think a lot of young people really do want to make a difference in the world, but they don't necessarily trust politicians and therefore don't vote. What is your plan or idea to get young people to vote again and trust government officials?

This is a big step in my plan. Let's make it accessible and let's help each other understand what's going on collectively, and let's make it easy to take action together. Legislation and government is really obtuse, dense stuff. I don't think the answer to unlocking is in getting pundits to tell us what to do. I think it's about getting involved as a group, and I think doing it socially is a great way to make it more accessible to young people.

How many watch lists are you on?

Probably a few, but I don't mind!

Do you see different participation on the app based on party affiliation?

I leave party affiliation out of all my apps. I want ideas to win out over team loyalty. Even in our anonymous social network for the Hill called Cloakroom, there is no place to mark party affiliation. It's easier to cross party lines when you don't know where the party lines are to begin with.

surely it comes up in the conversations on the app, especially as people lobby for support of one issue or the other?

For sure. Free association is vital to a healthy political discourse. The app itself just doesn't prompt people to identify themselves that way. Instead the focus is on the issues.

So how does this proposed Super PAC work then, if you're asking for candidate support but not tracking political affiliation?

That would be up to the individual! You don't need to have a party affiliation to run for office, but in most cases you won't get anywhere without one in the current environment.

So essentially what you are saying is we should vote for Vermin Supreme? I can fucks with that.

I think that Vermin Supreme should be the norm, rather than the exception. Representatives are supposed to be representative of their communities, so our choice of representatives in elections shouldn't be limited to the political elite.

How do you see this app making an impact on the problems we have in government?

Frankly, I’m tired of the dysfunction in Washington. Part of it is due to our corrupt campaign finance system of bribery. But part of the problem is our fault too; we don’t participate in our own government enough, resulting in a lack of data about what we the people actually want. The result is a Congress that works for special interests instead of us, and an electoral system based on popularity instead of on how well these establishment politicians will actually represent us as lawmakers.

The more we can help each other understand what our government does, engage, and get our positions on the record (especially in the form of structured data), the more ammunition we have as constituents to hold politicians accountable to us FIRST, not to the people giving them money. At the end of the day/their term in office, despite all the billions being "donated" to politicians, they still need our votes. Forget whether the dude is a democract or a republican. Are you going to vote for the guy who only represents you 5% or the time when there is someone running against him who represents you 95% of the time?

I LOVE what you advertise you're doing here... buut... why facebook?

I totally understand. Facebook isn't a requirement for using the app, but verifying through Facebook OR Linkedin is a requirement to VOTE in the app. There's a fine line to walk between legitimacy and privacy, and I think we do an okay job of it considering we are on a shoe-string budget. We wrote a whole blog post about it that you can read here.

Even if you do choose to verify with Facebook or Linkedin, we do not scrape your data from facebook or share ANYTHING back to facebook. We only use it to verify that you are one person, who gets one vote. Just like you have to verify to vote in real elections, it's I totally understand. Facebook isn't a requirement for using the app, but verifying through Facebook OR Linkedin is a requirement to VOTE in the app. There's a fine line to walk between legitimacy and privacy, and I think we do an okay job of it considering we are on a shoe-string budget. We wrote a whole blog post about it that you can read here. Even if you do choose to verify with Facebook or Linkedin, we do not scrape your data from facebook or share ANYTHING back to facebook. We only use it to verify that you are one person, who gets one vote. Just like you have to verify to vote in real elections, it's important that we verify you are registered to vote too, and this process let's us do it without asking for far more sensitive data from you like your social security number. Thoughts?

As a radio nerd, I'm wondering how radio comes into play here, and how you "hack" a radio frequency alert system?

Also, are you going to make a Windows Phone app?

The vote alert system used in Congress is a network of radio controlled clocks -- clocks that receive an encrypted radio signal. There are two sets of "controllers" in the House and Senate chambers, which all the clocks respond to. We parse the signals sent from the controller and send them up to the cloud.

Cool idea. I have thinking about how to turn this country from a representative democracy to an actual democracy (the three day horse and buggy ride to the capital isn't exactly a problem anymore; now we can get rid of the representatives), and this seems like it could be the start.

However, using the app I see the largest problem is deciphering the sometimes intentionally obtuse wording and many layers of references to other laws, bills, subsections, etc. The bill title is often misleading, as are the summaries, you have to dig into the actual bill and follow all the references to get the gist.

So do you know of any effort to provide an unbiased plain English unpacking of the dense and obtuse wording in bills? Seems like a great need. . .

Hi da5id! YES! That is one of the biggest problems Capitol Bells is specifically designed to address! Because the wording of bills is so obtuse, our solution is to rely on each other, the crowd, the unpack the definitions. You don't want me to be the one to tell you what all the bills mean, because who's to say I'm not biased or uninformed and giving you bad summaries?

Any user can comment on any bill to ask questions about it or explain what it means to them. Plus, any user can "whip a vote" on a bill, where they explain what the bill means to them and why they are for or against it. It's up to all of us to determine who's summaries and positions we trust, and whose we don't. I think we can do that better collectively than by hiring pundits to tell us their own opinions.

Huh, well if that is a goal of your app, you have a lot more work to do on reputation and UI. As you may have noticed a vote to the top with no reputation persistence (Reddit style) is extremely poor at actually diving into the info and getting correct info promoted. I was thinking more along the line of interactive annotation and summarizing if you want the crowd to do it. Even so, I think a better method would be a public institution, crowd funded, to pay lawyers to do the unpacking. We could even have competing partisan institutions providing their own perspectives to their constituents.

You should build it. We need more people trying more ideas to hack democracy.

How are you still free?

I don't think there is anyway Capitol Bells makes sense as a paid app. Our whole mission is to increase accessibility, transparency, and accountability in democracy. That said we are going to need a lot of support and user-growth to keep this going.

Hey there! We are a social polling app, so a lot of our issues come from folks concerned with the political process. Did you create Capitol Bells out of any frustration you had in congress? Was the experience of working there something that enraged you or inspired you?

Working on Capitol Hill is a unique and inspiring experience. The dome of the Capitol Building and the Statue of Freedom looms high overhead everyday as you walk up to your office. The stuff you see on the news everyday is happening right around the hall from you. You are surrounded by countless intelligent people who are truly there for the public good.

That said, it is super frustrating too. You are part of the machine, and the machine is broken. I decided to work on Capitol Hill after receiving my masters degree thinking I could lend unique perspective to the policy process as someone with a science and engineering background, and that I could help make better policy. The reality is there are tons a smart people, consulted by experts in every field, drafting great legislation every day. But because the political process is broken, and partisan rancor fueled by our electoral system stops them from working together, the best legislation never sees the light of day.

How is it that you are not in jail?

I didn't break any laws!