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Cause Caller: An Empirical Test of A ParticipatoryDemocracy Technology

www.causecaller.com

Fred BenensonInteractive Telecommunications Program

Tisch School of the ArtsNew York University

[email protected]

ABSTRACTThe promise of a truly participatory democracy has neverbeen clearer than digital media has made it today. Theunique distributive nature of the Internet provides a plat-form that has the potential to deliver on this promise byfacilitating better group action at lower cost, thereby en-

couraging actual participation in democracy. There havebeen many meaningful developments in bringing better in-formation to citizens looking to use digital networks to servetheir political needs, but many useful tools and databasesremain proprietary and costly while others remain too gen-eral or ineffective for political action.

This paper will highlight some of those achievements, butmore substantially, it will discuss potential for future devel-opments in facilitating a participatory democracy throughCause Caller.com, a Semantic Media Wiki and Asterisk basedvirtual phone bank application. I hope to show that a toolsuch as Cause Caller.com represents a new kind of platformfor participatory democracy; one that can not only enablespecific applications like virtual phone banking software, but

also one that can cultivate a participatory democracy onlineand off.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsK.4.1 [Computing Milieux]: Computers and Society-PublicPolicy Issues

General TermsParticipatory Democracy

KeywordsAsterisk, Semantic Media Wiki, Semantic Web, RDF, Wikis

CC This work is licensed under the Creative Com-mons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United StatesLicense. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ orsend a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street,Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA..

1. INTRODUCTIONBy lowering the cost of action the Internet has fundamen-tally transformed the nature of speech, society, and govern-ment. These consequences are not unlike those of demo-cratic revolutions; a significant corollary that has lead toan innumerate amount of conversations, papers, blogs posts

and books parading the virtues, achievements and structuresof the Internet as being in-line, if not synonymous with thoseof democracy.

The hope is that the Internet will actually bring us one stepcloser to a participatory democracy and there is substan-tial areas dedicated to this service that Ill take a look at inthis paper.

The first area is the creation and maintenance of reposito-ries of information relevant to democratic action. The sec-ondary area regards specific actions performed by distinctgroups using technological tools; actions which we can con-sider instances of participatory democracy, but which aretoo narrow to enable to a larger scale participatory democ-

racy. The third and final area that Ill examine is that oftools which enable distinct instances of participatory democ-racy, but which are too general or too ineffectual to beseen as specifically delivering on the promise of a participa-tory democracy through technology.

Ultimately this paper will argue that the needs of a par-ticipatory democracy are just beginning to be fulfilled, andprojects utilizing open standards and software will bring useven closer. I hope to demonstrate that my thesis project,CauseCaller.com and its underlying wiki is one of thoseprojects and will help deliver on the promise on a partic-ipatory democracy.


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2. HISTORYBenjamin Barbers Strong Democracy describes strong democ-racy as a distinctively modern form of participatory democ-racy.1 For the purposes of this project, it is worth high-lighting Barbers most basic points about strong democracywithout going into too much detail for it better illustrates hislater perspective on technology and its promise for democ-racy.

Barbers essential point is that a strong democracy shouldbe a response to a thin democracy, whcih is the state hehad observed ours to b e in while writing the book. A strongdemocracys intentions are informed by the original moti-vations and goals of pure democracy as instantiated by theancient Greek polis. Barber believes that strong democracyis at odds with representative government and the instru-mentalism of a liberal democracy. To Barber, the politicsof liberal democratic pluralism are nothing more than thechambermaid of private interests.2 He goes on to arguethat transformation is at the heart of a strong democracyand that a public language needs to be created that can re-align private interests in terms of public good. He believesthat a strong democracy can be the only remedy for the

perils of modern politics.

Barbers argument ends with the basic imperative that pol-itics must become more direct in order for a strong democ-racy to be realized. We must ween ourselves off of a rep-resentative democracy and replace representational politicswith direct, citizen-to-government involvement. Each actionand responsibility of a given citizen should, in Barbers opin-ion, bare consequence on each other so that politics becomesa way of living, not just a way of life.3 One of the ways hebelieves this is possible is through investment in telecom-munications infrastructure. Barbers ruminations on howtelecommunications could benefit a participatory democracyare his most significant contribution to a current survey ofparticipatory democracy, and considering the date at which

he made them (1984), his most prescient.

In a section titled Institutionalizing Strong DemocraticTalk Barber bemoans that a uniform nationwide system oflocal participation has [n]ever been instituted or even con-sidered.4 He then explicates how neighborhood assembliesshould be introduced as a way to bring democracy closerto citizens every day lives. He outlines a multi-phaseddevelopment for these assemblies, where the second phasewould have the assemblies become .. voting constituenciesfor regional and national referenda ... and possibly act ascommunity units in systems of civic telecommunications.5

Barbers predictions of the effect of telecommunications ina strong democracy are both grandiose and shortsighted almost all of his ideal scenarios depend on democracy asmediated through television and cable networks. While theInternet existed at the time of his writing, it was in its in-fancy and few had begun to explore its potential for democ-racy. This doesnt stop Barber from understanding a more

1Barber, 1172Ibid.3Ibid., at 1184Ibid., at 268.5Ibid., at 270

general point about technology: the capabilities of the newtechnology can be used to strengthen civic education, guar-antee equal access to information, and tie individuals andinstitutions into networks that will make real participatorydiscussion and debate possible across great distances.6 Oneparticular prediction Barber seems to be quite certain of, orat least quite interested in realizing, is a process that wouldlater be named E-Rulemaking. The idea of giving citi-zens direct access to creating legislation is a simple and easy

manifestation of a strong democracy. Given Barbers feel-ings towards representative democracy as essentially a co-cospirator of private interests, it comes as no surprise thathe distrusts the current legislative process. Direct influenceby citizens on the rulemaking process is a realistic solutionto ending the corruption that he sees endemic within democ-racy.

Over 20 years later Cary Coglianese of the University ofPennsylvania Law School wrote an article revisiting andevaluating techno-optimist predictions of the future ofdemocracy as mediated by technology. Coglianeses focusis Barbers specific prediction that E-rulemaking would be-come a feasible and realistic model for participatory democ-

racy but Coglianese remains unconvinced of its viability. Heconcludes that ..even with the Internet significant barri-ers to ordinary citizens engagement in rulemaking will re-main.7 Coglianeses point, though multifaceted, is essen-tially a simple one: rulemaking, and the legislative processin general is too sophisticated, complex, and confusing forthe average citizen. The knowledge and skills required tocompetently draft legislation remains an expertise for thosedeeply entrenched in the field.

But Coglianese still believes technology holds much poten-tial for the future of democracy, just not in the ways orig-inally predicted by Barber. Under the auspices of plu-ralism, Coglianese believes technology can help individualand independent groups inform regulators in valuable ways.

He gives the intuitive example of a local sanitation engineercontacting with the EPA to give better insights on futureregulations relevant to his work. While technology may notbe able to advance a strong democracy for any random se-lection of citizens, Coglianese believes it can certainly facili-tate better action by individuals who are interested in givinginput on particular issues that they know and care passion-ately about. He concludes by arguing that [a]n open andnetworked regulatory process can thus expand the potentialinformation that comes to regulators attention.8

In developing Cause Caller Ive focused my attention onCoglianeses exact point that technology has the ability tohelp varied interests inform the democratic process ratherthan constitute it itself. While once I shared Barbers op-timism that laws could be drafted in the very same waye-mails are on the Internet, eventually my optimism gaveway to Coglianeses skepticism. Giving citizens the tools toparticipate in democracy, even if it is merely as simple asmaking a telephone call easier to dial, or an e-mail easierto write, is at the heart of a participatory democracy. It

6Ibid.7Coglianese at 238Ibid., at 25


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is with Barber and Coglianeses perspective in mind thatI feel Cause Callers functionality demonstrates a commit-ment not just to strong or participatory democracy, but tothe institution of democracy in general.

But before I introduce Cause Caller and explore its impli-cations for participatory democracy, it will be worthwhileto identify some current projects in the space that seek toinstantiate Barbers optimism coupled with Coglianeses re-

alism.

3. THE STATE OF THE UNION: PARTICI-

PATORY DEMOCRACY NOWThere are numerous projects that are generally consideredto be part of the movement to create tools for a participa-tory democracy. As Ill argue below, most of these tools areill-suited for general activism for a number of reasons. Thefirst set of tools comprise information repositories. Theseare sites that host vast database of publicly available infor-mation about politicians, laws, and records. While these aresome of the most valuable resources available in a participa-tory democracy, it is wrong to thing of them as fully robusttools for a number of reasons.

The second set of tools are highly effective, but relativelyclosed for general purpose activist work. These includecampaign-specific tools as well as tools that are prohibitivelycostly to most activists and campaigns.

The third and final set of tools are those that we are alreadyfamiliar with but whose scope is too general for true politicalactivism.

By outlining these various projects successes as well as theirdeficiencies, I hope to demonstrate that there is a legiti-mate demand for specific tools that allow citizens to notjust be mere researchers or spammers but to participate in

democracy as be activists using digital networks and media.Ultimately Ill show that while all of these projects have in-dividual characteristics that will help define a participatorydemocracy tool, not one individual project exhibits all ofthe characteristics that we should look for in participatorydemocracy tools.

3.1 Information RepositoriesFor the purposes of this paper Ive chosen to evaluate thevarious information repositories in the participatory democ-racy space across a number of criteria. Ill first look at thedata served by the particular repository, and then the for-mat in which that data is presented, how it is maintained,and finally, the freedom of that data and its software. Ul-

timately, Ill analyze how much closer a particular projectbrings us to a participatory democracy.

While there are many projects being developed in the par-ticipatory democracy space, Ive chosen only a couple thatI believe highlight the successes and challenges faced by thecurrent set of tools offered to citizens interested in digital ac-tivism and participatory democracy. I believe that each oneof these projects demonstrate features that Ive attemptedto combine into Cause Callers fundamental makeup as wellas deficiencies Ive tried to avoid.

3.1.1 GovTrack.usFor most intents and purposes GovTrack.us is the most sub-stantial effort in the current participatory democracy space.Joshua Tauberers site contains data about virtually everypolitician to ever grace the halls of the House or the Senate,as well as full text analysis of every bill considered, votedon, or made into law within the last decade. GovTrack.usalso makes its information available under what Taubererconsiders Web 2.0 principles and open data.9

For the most part, GovTrack.uss data is up to date andhighly reliable as it is automatically harvested from the fed-eral governments official legislative database called THOMAS10

that is run by the Library of Congress.

Since computers are rarely as competent as humans are atdistinguishing good or valid information from bad or non-sense information, this leads to the potential of noise in Gov-Tracks signal. Trauberer is the first to admit this potentialproblem and acknowledges that there may be errors in someinformation available on the site. He points out that is thisis largely due to the fact that the US Government has yetto make it easy to fetch the information using automated

processes. He subsequently urges users to contact the main-tainers of THOMAS to encourage adoption of standardizeddata formats.

Understanding the need for standardized data has obviouslylead Trauberer to create the robust services available onGovTrack.us. Data on the site is available in a number offormats including RSS, XML, and RDF.

For example, for any given bill on the GovTrack.us system,Trauberer has created a RSS feed for information about thebill. This RSS feed is updated at any point informationabout the bill changes, such as when it becomes law or whenmodifications are made to its text. This functionality is alsoprovided for any legislator in the system.

GovTrack.us also provides a sophisticated backend for usersto interface applications. Along with supplying a GoogleMap interface of congressional districts, GovTrack.us pro-vides a SPARQL11 query interface so that users can extractRDF data from the sites database. RDF is a particularkind of XML file that is designed to be a part of the se-mantic web. Each serialized XML entity in a RDF file isa triple12 relating a subject to an object via a predicate.RDF files on GovTrack.us contain triple statements similarto Politician Y voted for Bill X or Bill X is up for voteon Day Z.13

GovTrack.uss SPARQL query interface allows powerful query-ing of information about the congress using knowledge state-

9Trauberer, Joshua. About Us. GovTrack.us. 8 May 2008http://www.govtrack.us/.10Library of Congress, THOMAS. 8 May 2008 http://thomas.loc.gov.11SPARQL is the SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Lan-guage. Its a standardized query language designed to enablequery of RDF data.12A triple consists of a subject, predicate and object thatdescribes a relationship between the three.13An RDF file is a serializd XML file containing triples


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ments. Trauberer supplies some interesting examples demon-strating what is possible when using SPARQL, such as look-ing for every bill that senator John McCain has sponsored,or more complexly, the population of every state sorted bysenator. 14 The database boasts over 13 million triplescovering 8 years of political data, and though the SPARQLendpoint is not updated often, Trauberer makes the RDFdata available to download and use freely.15

Most impressively, Trauberer has offered all of the code thatGovTrack.us runs on to the public under the Aferro GeneralPublic License 16 through a subversion repository. This al-lows anyone to download any and every piece of code usedby the site and use it for their own purposes, so long as theygive attribution to GovTrack.us and give away the modifi-cations that they do make.

Despite Trauberers tremendous effort in freeing congres-sional information, his site remains a static repository ofinformation that even he describes as a research tool morethan anything else. Visitors to the site are greeted withan enormity of valuable, high quality information and codethat lives in open formats, but the sites contribution to

participatory democracy ends there. If an activist had usedGovTrack.us services to find out information about an up-coming bill there is little more that they can do on the siteother than know that information and go elsewhere toact on it. More specifically, actual contact information re-garding a particular politician or committee doesnt existanywhere on GovTrack.us and the site only provides super-ficial directions on how to acquire it. a The sites structureis also problematic in that its dataset requires constant at-tention from one source. Whether it is Trauberer himself,or the scripts that he writes, the public facing data on Gov-Track.us is necessarily maintained and bottle-necked by asingle entity. This means that if any given user finds an er-ror in the sites data, the best they can do is report the error,as they do not have access to fix it themselves. In theory an

extremely dedicated individual could download Traubererscode and databases (over 12gb in size)17 and recreate thesite with the corrected data. This solution seems needlesslywasteful of computing resources as well as ultimately inef-fective it is reasonable to assume no set of data that largecan be singularly maintained by any one entity.

To evaluate whether GovTrack.us really contributes to aparticipatory democracy, we must look past the informa-tion that it makes available and ask whether that informa-tion is easily actionable. For the most part Trauberer hasgone to great efforts to make the information usable, and itis actionable to the extent that it makes data available forother applications freely, but within the site, there is littlemore that typical users can do than research. Moreover, thestructure of the site is largely top-down and dependent onTrauberers continued stewardship of his scripts and data.

14Trauberer, Joshua. SPARQL. GovTrack.us. 8 May 2008http://www.govtrack.us/sparql.xpd.15Ibid.16Free Software Foundation, GNU Affero General PublicLicense. The Free Software Foundation. 8 May 2008 http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html17Ibid., 14

3.1.2 OpenCongress.orgOpenCongress is a specific example of a project using dataand resources from Trauberers GovTrack.us.18 It combinesdata and updates from GovTracks with Google News up-dates in an easier to use website. OpenCongress was built bythe Participatory Politics Foundation. The PPFs statedmission is to build software tools and websites that createnew opportunities for continual engagement with govern-ment.19

OpenCongress structured data exists in RSS feeds per bill,per politician, and per issue. The site also contains manymicro-blogs that highlight issues as they relate to other ob- jects on a site. OpenCongress offers a Facebook applica-tion that allows users to attach bills that they are interestedin to their Facebook profiles. Bloggers can also use Open-Congress to attach widgets to their blogs that express asimilar interest in watching the congress.

Since OpenCongress data is largely derived from GovTrack.usrepository it is safe to assume that its re-useable and clearfrom any legal obligations, to the extent that it could be.20

But this is also a risk: all of OpenCongress data relies on

Trauberers collection and maintenance of GovTracks repos-itory. If a user finds an error or bit of irrelevant informationon OpenCongress site they have few options for correctingit. Not only must they determine that GovTrack.us is theoriginal supplier of such information, but they would have tonotify Trauberer, not the administrators of OpenCongressabout the error.

While OpenCongress succeeds on many user interface lev-els that GovTrack.us doesnt, its not clear what more theproject brings to the table of participatory democracy. Userscan register and discuss and rate bills in ways not possi-ble on GovTrack.us, but in terms of actual advocacy or ac-tivism, OpenCongress offers only a little more participationin democracy than GovTrack.us.

3.1.3 CongresspediaThe basic idea behind Congresspedia, which is also a projectfunded by the Sunlight Foundation, is to mimic the Wikipediamodel of information maintenance and retrieval. The site isbuilt upon the same software as Wikipedia, Media Wiki,and allows anyone who has registered to edit or create newarticles on the site. 21

This is a significant departure from projects like GovTrack.usand OpenCongress (as well as almost all other projects inthe participatory democracy space) in that it makes thedata about politicians editable by the public. This allowsany user to maintain the database of information in a way

that GovTrack and OpenCongress cannot. Where previ-ously users were largely a tertiary consideration in the main-tenance of data in a participatory democracy project, Con-

18Open Congress, About. Open Congress. 8 May 2008http://www.opencongress.org/about19Ibid.20Copyright does not apply to factual information or listingssuch as telephone numbers and contact information. SeeFeist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service21Congresspedia. SourceWatch. 8 May 2008 http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Congresspedia


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gresspedia allows for robust interaction and participation bythose users.

Many of the edits to Congresspedia are ones that fix in-formation about politicians or bills that was otherwise bro-ken.22

This feature is not without its risks, as Congresspedias datahas the potential to be hijacked by any individual with ma-

licious intent. Of course this is the very same issue facedby Wikipedia, a larger project with hundreds of millions ofeditors and hundreds of millions of edits.23 In fact, vandal-ism on Congresspedia is handled much in the same way asvandalism on Wikipedia: through talk pages and arbitra-tion. Though there the rules are less codified than those onWikipedia, Congresspedias editors have developed a richunderstanding of their power and exercise it responsiblythrough reverts and moderation.

It looks as though Congresspedia brings participation backinto the participatory democracy scene, but there is onecaveat. The data that lives on Congresspedia is largely unus-able by anything other than a human. Where GovTrack.us

and OpenCongress.org excel in providing structured datathat can be reused by other applications, Congresspediascentral limitation lies in the fact that it is a standard wikiand as such does not supply structured information. Thisis mostly due to Media Wikis default limitations; wikis aredesigned as places to hold text that is human readable andeditable, and are not usually thought of as databases.

So while Congresspedia is noteworthy due to its wiki basedformat and philosophy, it is constrained by the limitationsof what is essentially Web 1.0 software. Its output is variedin terms of quality and quantity, and for the most part, onlyreadable by humans. While users may find this useful to doresearch, building sophisticated applications on Congresspe-dia is largely impossible.

One final limitation that plagues all three projects is theirscope: all purposely focus on the federal congress and thesenate, and exclude local level p oliticians. While this keepstheir datasets relatively uniform and congruent, it preventscitizens from doing research on local representatives. Theseare the politicians who are regulating issues that are mostlikely to affect a given citizens life and are thus most per-tinent to their participation in democracy. By necessar-ily excluding local and state level politicians, all three ofthese projects (as well as most other participatory democ-racy projects) fail to bring politics to the level where it reallymatters in terms of participation: the local level.

Ultimately, these projects are necessary resources for theparticipatory democracy ecosystem, but they are not suffi-cient to wholly define a participatory democracy online oroff. In other words: were not there yet. Access to struc-tured, open data that is easily reusable, editable, and main-tainable by communities should be just one of the goals at

22Congresspedia SourceWatch. 8 May 2008http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nancy_Balter&curid=56459&diff=315541&oldid=315540.23Wikipedia Stastics. Wikipedia. WMF. 8 May 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

the heart any project self-described as part of our participa-tory democracy. These are the values expunged by democ-racy itself: the dissolution of hierarchical systems dependenton individual leaders in favor of distributed action coordi-nated by members of interested communities. While theefforts of Trauberer, et. al are commendable and have cer-tainly advanced the state of the art, it should be clear thatthey do not wholly satisfy the demands of a participatorydemocracy.

3.2 Specific ProjectsIn this section I will detail projects that while prima fa-cie appear to be meaningful contributions to participatorydemocracy, but are too specific or too cost prohibitive forcitizens to actually use. In short these tools are highly effec-tive for their particular campaigns or candidates, but faceserious obstacles for generalized use, thus preventing themfrom being considered true components of a participatorydemocracy.

3.2.1 Barack Obamas Get Out the Vote Call SystemDuring the 2008 primaries Barack Obamas campaign de-

veloped a particular reputation for effectively utilizing tech-nology and the Internet. One particularly interesting andsignificant feature of his campaigns website is the Get Outthe Vote call system.24 Essentially an easy-to-use interfacebuilt on top of a database of registered voters names andphone numbers, Obamas web application encourages vol-unteers to make calls on his campaigns behalf. Users aregiven a simple list of names to choose from and then a phonenumber to call. Users must use their own telephone and dialusing their own fingers.

A significant feature of Obamas site is its easy to use feed-back mechanism. Users are presented with two categoriesof responses from their calls, one where the user was able toreach the callee, and another where the callee did not pickup.

After clicking on one of the possible responses the system re-sponds appropriately with more scripts and/or more namesto call.

While a flawless integration of technology for advocating ademocratic cause (a particular campaign in this case), weshouldnt consider Barack Obamas system as a legitimateconstituent of a participatory democracy for a number ofreasons. The most significant is that it is relegated to onecandidate and useful for one race. This means that anyusers interested in using the system to contact anyone (cit-izens and politicians alike) for reasons relating to anythingother than Obamas candidacy will have a difficult time re-purposing its core functionality. While it is plausible toassume callers might use Obamas voter registration liststo campaign for other politicians (including opponents) andcauses, this use is almost certainly outside the terms of use ofthe site and therefore could not be relied upon as an generaltool for citizens.

It should also be noted that Obamas technology is aboutas closed as it gets: users dont even run the software ontheir own machines, the output is delivered across the web

24Get Out the Vote. Barack Obama. 8 May 2008 http://my.barackobama.com/page/contact/call


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in the form of static HTML. There is no structured dataavailable, and the database that powers the campaign ishighly proprietary and costly.25

Theres also the consideration that this kind of phone bank-ing has little connection to participation in democracy. Thoughit is essential for campaigns to organize and canvass votersin a democratic race, citizens spend very little time partic-ipating in actual democracy: they are shilling their views

to other voters on behalf of a candidate who is not yet inpower and consequently have little interaction with seatedpoliticians or legislators.

We should view Barack Obamas phone banking service asmerely a demonstration of what a well organized and de-signed web application can do for a campaign, rather thanan instance of an actual participatory democracy tool. It en-gages and encourages volunteers to work for Obama in a waythat requires little overhead when compared to the analogrequirements of traditional phone banking, but in the enddoes little to advance a true participatory democracy.

Part of my goal in designing Cause Caller was to mimic

the ease of use of Obamas site but also to create a gen-eral tool that anyone can use for their particular campaignrather than one for a particular candidate that they may ormay not support. Later in this paper Ill discuss how CauseCaller goes even farther than Obamas phonebanking appli-cation in removing the obstacles when organizing volunteersto participate in democracy.

3.2.2 MoveOn.orgs Call for ChangeMoveOn.org made headlines during the 2006 mid-term elec-tion when they claimed to have organized over seven mil-lion calls to voters in key districts and states.26 The cam-paign utilized a program called Call for Change that di-rectly linked MoveOn volunteers to voters using a voice-over-

Internet-protocol application. Though accounts of how theprogram actually functioned are now scarce, the basic usecase scenario went as follows: A citizen visits the site, typesin their phone number, and then MoveOns application au-tomatically connects them to a sequential list of constituentsin MoveOns database. This application went even fartherto remove some of the hassle associated with phone bank-ing as users wouldnt even have to dial or keep track of thenumbers themselves.

If we are to take MoveOn.orgs claims seriously then theirapplication had a tremendous effect during the 2006 mid-term election. But where is the Call for Change applica-tion now? Is MoveOn using it for any more campaigns?

Unfortunately there is scant information available aboutthe project so its inclusion as general tool for participatorydemocracy is unlikely. Not only was Call for Change re-stricted to one campaign (and arguably, one political per-

25Clinton Aides Databank Venture Breaks Ground inPoliticking. The New York Times 12 04 2008 May 82008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/politics/12vote.html26Move On Political Action Call for Change. GrassrootsCampaigns. MoveOn.org. 8 May 2008 http://www.grassrootscampaigns.com/MoveOnC4C.php

spective or party), but it no longer seems to exist. DespiteMoveOns progressive stance on most political issues, theirproject remains proprietary and perhaps even discontinued.

3.2.3 Mobile CommonsMobile Commons is the final application that I believe hasrelevancy to my project, but for reasons that will be clear, isnot suited for general activist work in a participatory democ-

racy. Mobile Commons27

is a New York City startup withbig ambitions to change the way that people and organiza-tions interact with their mobile phones.28

Designed mainly as way to organize people using SMS,29

Mobile Commons has a suite of products designed to en-able organizations to mobilize large groups of people to doparticular actions. Organizations can import their contactdatabases into Mobile Commons system and use it to targetindividual people who might be interested in an offer, issue,or product. Individuals targeted by a campaign through Mo-bile Commons will typically receive an SMS directing themto call a politician, write a letter, or get informed about anissue.

The biggest consideration we should make in evaluating Mo-bile Commons is that their products are not available fordirect use by the public: an organization must hire thecompany in order to execute a particular campaign. Thismeans Mobile Commons is basically ineligible to be a gen-eral tool for participatory democracy. All campaigns mustbe organized by via a top-down agreement with a for-profitorganization and all data remains proprietary if it is evereven shown to the public. Any given citizen is unable toengage with democracy through Mobile Commons as theymust wait to be included in a campaign organized by thecompany.

It is then clear that while there are some tools that exist tohelp citizens directly and effectively participate in democ-racy as opposed to simply research about it, but they aretoo specific for general use. The average citizen who wantsto organize around an issue and does not have a substantialbudget to do so (or a campaign backing her) is left fantasiz-ing about the possibilities of a participatory democracy asmediated by digital networks, and will most likely resort tothe final set of tools that Ill investigate, those that are toogeneral or ineffective for participatory democracy activism.

3.3 Suboptimal Tools

3.3.1 E-mailMost people at some point have been the subject of a po-litical campaign as organized by their friends, family, or as-

sociates. Usually this takes the form of a mass e-mail thatis sent to hundreds, if not thousands, of people at once, im-ploring them to take action on a particular issue. Whilee-mail is a useful tool for contacting that many people, theresponse rates are unfortunately quite low.

27Homepage. Mobile Commons. 8 May 2008 http://www.mcommons.com28About Us. Mobile Commons. 8 May 2008 http://www.mcommons.com/about-us29SMS stands for Short Messaging Service also known astext messaging


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Regular Internet users can expect anywhere from 1-2 e-mailsa day all of the way up to thousands and it is easy for in-directly addressed e-mails30 to get lost in the fray of day today personal correspondence. Moreover, embedding direc-tions inside e-mails to do something democratic can resultin tedious work for the e-mails author, as well as needlesssteps for the recipients. Combined with the torrent of spamthat most users must endure it is easy to see why e-mail issuboptimal for encouraging participation in democracy.

Moreover, e-mail exists as a relatively static medium. Mes-sages are dispatched, but there is little more interactionusers have with a given message than merely reading andprocessing it. Sometimes links are clicked, sometimes mes-sage bodies are forwarded, but for the most part, it is dif-ficult to make e-mail more participatory than it alreadyis. Besides direct correspondence with representatives, it ishard to imagine how e-mail could further facilitate a partic-ipatory democracy.

So while e-mail is an essential tool in any activists chest,mere reliance on the medium as an ends for a participatorydemocracy is shortsighted as digital networks are capable of

more powerful communication and organization techniques.

3.3.2 CausesIn the wake of Facebooks opening of their platform fordevelopers to create new applications, an application calledCauses emerged as a fashionable way to integrate par-ticipatory democracy into the ever-growing social network.Causes allows users to organize and donate money for non-profits supporting particular issues. While the initial promiseof Causes was clear, the network has yet to deliver substan-tial results, and has yet to demonstrate its indispensabilityfor participatory democracy.31

The main problem behind Causes on Facebook is largely dueto the fact that the application has a hard time distinguish-

ing itself in users minds from Groups, a feature alreadybuilt into Facebook. Even though users have the ability todonate to a real non-profit with Causes, there is not muchpractical differentiation between joining a group and joininga Cause on Facebook as most users avoid donating.

Moreover, non-profit organizations with resources that arealready stretched thin must spend time maintaining and pro-moting their Cause on Facebook, time that could otherwisebe spent raising funds through offline interaction and corre-spondence.

While Causes certainly has the potential to grow into aparticipatory democracy platform, the actions it asks of its

users (to join and to donate money) seem misplaced insidea social network and have yet to demonstrate their effective-ness.

4. METHODOLOGY30Indirect E-mails are ones addressed to users via the CC orBCC field or to multiple recipients.31The Network Neutrality cause on facebook has raised lessthan $1000 despite it one of the more popular causes onFacebook with over 10,000 supporters.

4.1 CommitteeCaller.comCause Caller is essentially an evolution of a previous projectsimilarly named CommitteeCaller.com that I had built fora Shawn Van-Everys Redial class during the Fall of 2007.CommitteeCaller.com was a simple application that allowedsequential dialing to every member of a particular committeein the House or Senate. CommitteeCaller.com was designedto take the hassle out of calling every politician on a partic-ular committee. Whereas previously an activist would have

to organize a list of phone numbers themselves, Commit-teeCaller.com could call their phone and patch them throughto each politician without them ever having to look up aphone number. While CommitteeCaller.com worked wellfor the purpose that I built it for, it had several severe limi-tations that prevented it from being used in general activistwork and thus could only superficially be considered a toolfor participatory democracy.

First, it forced users to choose a committee in the house orsenate to call. While this limitation may appear to b e thepoint of the project, it constrained the number of causes andsubsequently citizens that wanted to use it. This is becausethere are many issues and causes that are related to politi-

cians that do not share membership of an individual commit-tee. For example, if a user wanted to call all the politiciansrepresenting a particular state (the two senators and variousrepresentatives) they couldnt use CommitteeCaller. Whileit was possible for me, the projects maintainer, to create anew pseudo-committee containing all of the politicians in aparticular state, it wasnt possible for users to easily do thisthrough the front end of the site.

Another reason CommitteeCaller.coms functionality was lim-ited was due to its internal database structure. While builtupon publicly accessible data, CommitteeCallers databasewas hidden inside ITPs MySQL server. This meant thatusers might not even know the phone numbers they wereconnecting to, and if those phone numbers didnt connect

or was the wrong number, their only recourse would be torate the call a 0 out of 5 when replying to CommitteeCallersvoice prompts. This left little room for feedback and com-munity maintenance of CommitteeCallers database.

More substantially, this also meant that users could notcontribute to the database. After repeatedly showing theproject to a number of interested activists, I noticed manyhad similar questions for my project. Almost all of themasked me if I had state level representatives in the database,a feature I unfortunately hadnt considered. I found myselfsheepishly offering excuses about how large that databasewould be, and how difficult it would be to maintain or howexpensive it would be. I eventually concluded that includ-ing state level politicians would be a feature I would haveto incorporate into the next version CommitteeCaller.

One final limitation on my project was that CommitteeCaller.comexisted as essentially a static page. Individual committeeswere not addressable and did not have their own URLs andwere therefore un-shareable to others interested in contact-ing a particular committee.

With all of these limitations in mind, I set out to createa better and more generalized version of CommitteeCaller


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that could enable anyone to create virtual phone banks tocall politicians for any cause. I would rename the project,too, no longer would calls be limited to Committees, theywould be defined by their cause.

The new project, Cause Caller, would also incorporate akind of framework to allow editing and maintenance of thedatabase by users, not just myself. Causes, or call queues,would be able to be created by users and I could avoid having

to do one-off additions to the database. More importantly,I wanted the data created by users to be shareable and not just useful for Cause Caller.

During my preparation of Cause Caller I received an excitinginvitation to be a part of Eyebeams32 FEEDBACK exhi-bition. The exhibition featured numerous works of contem-porary art focused on issues surrounding the environment.Eyebeam wanted gallery patrons to feel some way that theycould participate in feedback after absorbing the art inthe show and felt that CommitteeCaller would be the idealproject to enable their goal. After coordinating a bit withthe curators at Eyebeam we decided to focus on three localcauses who could benefit from having gallery patrons phone

bank on their behalf. The causes chosen were:

SolarOne33

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest34

Transportation Alternatives35

During the first couple of weeks during March 2008 I workedclosely with these organizations to develop a list of politi-cians and scripts that gallery goers could use to phonebankon their behalf. I also spent some time rebuilding Commit-teeCaller so that it would work only over the phone. (See

Figures 1, 2 3 4 for photos from the exhibition.)

Working with local causes on their particular issues provedto be an invaluable experience for me during the develop-ment of Cause Caller. One of the most important realiza-tions that I came to was that each organization wanted tomanage their cause in a different way. Transportation Alter-natives was interested in having citizens contact all membersof the New York State Senate, whereas SolarOne wantedmembers to contact a number of city level politicians, andNew York Lawyers for the Public Interest wanted New Yorkconstituents to contact New Yorks federal senators.

These differing demands posed an added complexity to myproject as the cause simply wouldnt be able to share the

same database of politicians. Moreover, I would have toconvert lists that the organizations provided me into my owndatabase format. While I was happy to put this relativelysmall amount of labor into these three causes, I knew thiswouldnt be viable option to scale the project.

32Eyebeam is a non-profit art and technology space inChelsea33http://www.SolarOne.org34http://www.NYPLI.org35http://www.TransporationAlternatives.org

I knew that deciding on a particular framework would shapeCause Caller from its beginning and would be a very impor-tant decision so I wanted to incorporate the experience andideas I had garnered while developing the Eyebeam instal-lation and working with local causes.

I finally decided that Cause caller would exist as essentiallytwo separate but linked applications. The front end applica-tion would be the interface most users would interact with

and would contain basically the same functionality of Com-mitteeCaller. A citizen could visit the site, type their phonenumber in, and begin iterating through the list of politicianssupplied. The other half of Cause Caller would consist of aneditable database of politicians, phone numbers, and causes.This database would be managed by the users themselvesand anyone could enter their own cause or new politiciansin.

I decided that user accounts would only be needed for main-tenance of the database as most front end users can beuniquely identified by their phone number as there is anincreasinly 1-to-1 correspondence of people to cell phones inthe world.36

A wiki might be an ideal form to set this project up on, but Iknew the problem with wikis was that they were bad aboutoutputting structured data.37 So while using a wiki mighthave helped my users research information, it wasnt goingto be easily interfaced with my VoIP platform. I needed away so that the data created by users could be easily ac-cessed and retrieved by not only humans but also by appli-cations.

Having recently toyed with Students For Free Cultures Se-mantic Media Wiki38, I realized that the Semantic MediaWiki extension for Media Wiki39 would be an ideal toolfor collecting and sharing structured data that Cause Callercould use. The basic premise behind Semantic Media Wiki

is to imbue wikis with the capability of creating semanticstatements that can be later queried by a machine. Seman-tic statements in this case take the form of RDF triples.Where normal text in a wiki would remain only human read-able, text in a semantic media wiki could be machine read-able as well, ideal for an application like Asterisk. Thiswas the very same insight that Joshua Trauberer had re-garding GovTrack.us, that his project should not only putout machine readable data, but data that conforms to thepre-established standard of RDF. Unfortunately Traubererdid not include contact information in his RDF output soI would be unable to use his data as the source for CauseCallers wiki.

I decided that Cause Caller would run on top of a SemanticMedia Wiki so that when users would add or update in-formation they would (knowingly or not) be also creatingmachine readable data that could be used by my Asterisk

36Though there are instances of many phones related to oneperson, there are less instances of many people related toone phone37As mentioned above, Congresspedia lacks the ability tooutput structured data despite it being a wiki.38http://www.freeculture.org/wiki39http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org


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Figure 1: The phone banking station

Figure 2: A happy Committee Caller user

Figure 3: Chris Neidl of SolarOne

Figure 4: Three phones total


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application. This machine readable data would be useful forother causes as well as anyone else developing applicationswho could use this data.

This capability would push Cause Caller into uncharted ter-ritory in the participatory democracy space. Not only wouldit function as an information repository (complete with in-formation that would be shareable across platforms in theform of RDF data) but it would also be a generalized tool

that citizens could use to create specific actions. CauseCaller could bridge the gaps between the information repos-itories, the too specific tools and the too general tools.

Cause Caller would differentiate itself from other projectsin the participatory democracy space because it would bea live application that could enable direct and immediateaction. While projects like Barack Obamas Call applicationand MoveOns call for change arguably existed as live ap-plications they were bound to a particular campaign or can-didate. Cause Caller is generalized enough to work for anycause whose organizers want volunteers to contact politicalrepresentatives, but is specific enough to excite and engageaudiences in a new way. Instead of vague commands to do

something cause organizers could now point to a very realand very easy application that citizens could use to partici-pate in democracy.

In the next section Ill explain how Cause Caller works andwhy I think it is successful in achieving this goal.

5. THE NEW KID: CAUSECALLER.COM

5.1 Basic OverviewCause Callers front page bears the following description:

Cause Caller is a new way to power participatorydemocracy. It takes all the hassle out of creatingphone banks and contacting politicians. Simplycreate a cause, and enter the names you want tocontact. Now you can click to call immediately.Send everyone the URL, and they can start call-ing too. All calls are free and completed over theInternet.

Its easy and free.

Simply create a cause, and enter the names youwant to contact. Now you can click to call im-mediately. Send everyone the URL, and they canstart calling too. All calls are free and completedover the Internet.

5.2 User Interaction

Using Cause Caller is simple. Click the Causes at the topof the screen and click on a cause youre interested in phonebanking for. Enter your phone number into the form andclick the Start Calling button.

Cause Caller will then call you and ask you to press 1 tobe connected with the first politician associated with theparticular cause youve selected. The phone will ring, andyoull be connected to the front desk of that politiciansoffice. You wont have to worry about remembering phonenumbers or keeping track Cause Caller will take care of

all of that for you. Once youre done speaking with the firstpolitician, dont hang up on them, just press the * button.This will move you on to the second politician associatedwith the cause, and youll move down the list. Thats it!

Cause Caller will remember your phone number and cause,so you can come back at any time and pickup where you leftoff. Cause Caller does not enable politicians to contact citi-zens.

5.3 Use CasesCause Caller is mainly designed to help citizens participatein democracy by contacting their elected officials. Causes(the fundamental units of the pro ject) exist as user-generatedpages created by individuals organizing around a particularissue.

An example of a cause that might use cause caller is preciselythe one that Coglianese refers to in his article.40 Coglianeseimagines that telecommunications infrastructure (and E-rulemakin particular) could enable a local sanitation engineers to

... become aware of and submit comments on relevant reg-ulations.41 Though Coglianese is specifically discussing E-rulemaking, we can see that his example is a worthy exampleof where Cause Caller could benefit a cause in a participa-tory democracy. By using Cause Caller the local sanita-tion engineers would a virtual and permanent place to di-rect supporters to phone bank from. Cause Caller suppliesa necessary and useful tool for the engineers to get startedparticipating in democracy.

5.4 Technical DetailsCause Callers system involves several distinct free softwareplatforms communicating with one another and sharing in-formation. The entire system is hosted on Amazons Elastic

Cloud Compute Web Service which allows for dynamic scal-ing as well as on-the-fly file system imaging.

5.4.1 Front EndCause Caller is written entirely in PHP. The front end ofthe website has four basic sections, Causes, Wiki, About,and Blog. The blog is a Wordpress install that has beencustomized to function within the general theme of CauseCaller. The Causes section contains a dynamically gener-ated list of Causes as well as a short informational videodetailing how to create a cause through the site. Each causeis hyperlinked to its permanent place on the Cause Callersite.

5.4.2 Semantic Media WikiSome of Cause Callers most powerful functionality lives in-side the Semantic Media Wiki42 which is also running theSemantic Forms extension. There are two basic types ofpages inside the wiki. One is a Cause and the other is aPolitician. When a user clicks Create a Politician or Cre-ate a Cause they are taken to a basic HTML form which

40Coglianese at 2541Ibid.42http://www.causecaller.com/wiki


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instructs them to fill out the relevant information. In bothcases the forms have required information and optional in-formation. Once the form is saved the page is created insidethe database and the relevant RDF triples are created. Someexamples of the triples generated for politicians are shownin Figure 5.

Figure 5: Example of Politicians RDF Output

Cause Callers Semantic Media Wiki also allows for robustquerying of data. Users can use the Semantic Search func-tion43 as well as inline queries inside a particular page. Forexample the inline query:

{{#ask:[[Category:Politicians]][[Politician type::Senator]][[Gender::Male]][[Party::Republican]]|?Main phone

}}

Will generate a table of all Male Republican senators andtheir phone numbers inside a page.

5.4.3 Asterisk/Semantic Media Wiki IntegrationThough Semantic Media Wiki is capable of outputting struc-tured data that is machine readable, getting it to do so ina timely fashion turned out to be more challenging that Ithought. While Semantic Media Wiki does store its infor-mation inside a MySQL database, it did not maintain anRDF endpoint.44. This limitation has since been remediedin a newer version of Semantic Media WIki but whose func-

tionality has not be implemented in Cause Caller.

For now Cause Caller asks for specific RDF exports of par-ticular pages on the fly45 and then parses them using theARC2 RDF parser46 instead of using SPARQL queries. This

43http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Special:Ask44A RDF endpoint is essentially a file containing all RDFtriples contained in the database45Using http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Special:ExportRDF46http://arc.semsol.org/

increases the load (and parse time) for causes with manypoliticians (as all phone numbers must be retrieved fromseparate pages) and will not scale well to causes with morethan 20 politicians.

Once the data is retrieved and parsed using ARC2s RDFparser, Cause Caller loads the data into a MySQL databaseon the Asterisk server and the user is called.

5.4.4 Asterisk/VoIPThe unique functionality of Cause Caller that enables usersto connect to the Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PTSN)is handled by Asterisk, the open source PBX server. Aster-isk runs as a service on an independent server that handlesall of the call requests. The main logic of Cause CallersAsterisk component is also written in PHP using the PH-PAGI library. As users enter in their phone numbers into aparticular Causes page and click the button to begin call-ing, a cause instance is created inside the Asterisk serversMySQL database. The cause instance contains informa-tion about the user including their telephone number andthe cause theyve chosen as well as whether or not theyveasked the system to call them back. At the same time Cause

Caller places the selected causes politicians into a heap in-side the MySQL database.

Once the user is connected through the PSTN, Cause Callerlooks up all the callees associated with the particular causeinstance and retrieves their names, telephone numbers, andif applicable, the name of the chief of staff or legislative di-rector. Cause Callers Asterisk PHP script begins a loopthrough the list of callees and asks the user for confirmationto call each politician in the list. After each call is com-pleted the callee row is updated to reflect that the call hasbeen completed. This will allow Cause Caller to track userprogress through a particular cause and resume where a usermay have left off. Once the call queue is completed CauseCaller updates the cause instance row to reflect the changeand the user hears a good bye message.

6. RESULTSI was able to achieve my goal of having Cause Caller readya week before my thesis presentation and this has affordedme a good opportunity to observe interactions with thesite. Cause Caller was launched with only two causes inits database, the Demo Cause47 and SolarOnes I HeartPV Cause which I carried over from the Eyebeam exhibi-tion. After a moderate amount of promotion48 the followingcauses have been created since then:49

Border Control Laptop Searches

Border Control Laptop Searches - House

No Torch in Tibet

47http://www.causecaller.com/causes.php?c=Demo_Cause48Doctorow, Cory. CauseCaller one-click to createa virtual phone-bank. BoingBoing. 30 April 2008.30 April 2008 http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/30/causecaller-oneclick.html49http://www.causecaller.com/causes.php


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Save the Andrew Heiskell Braille Collection

I Heart PV: Expand Net-Metering for Renewables InNew York State

MA Campaign to Strengthen Human Services

Support Connecticut House Bill 5852: An Act to Con-trol Lyme Disease in Ct

Permit Affordable Housing in Portland

MI Equal Parenting Campaign

Save Californias Education: Really Fix the Budget

Almost all of these causes have added new politicians to theCause Caller Wiki as well.

The site has received over 6,000 pageviews in the last weekand has generated over 100 unique cause instances re-sulting in dozens of completed calls to actual politicians.Through the use of Googles News and Blog Alerts I havebeen able to track responses to the project across many blogs

and news sites. The following are some excerpted quotestaken from informal reviews of the system:

Ive been reading about Cause Caller on var-ious BoingBoing posts but havent dug deeperinto the story to see what it could do - until to-day. Its freakin awesome!Talk about the emerg-ing power of social media via the internet. -Millsworks.net - Friday, May 2, 2008 - CauseCaller50

This Cause Caller system makes mass phonecampaigns (top-down versions of which have been

in existence for decades) more efficient, more grass-roots, and easier to implement in a focused man-ner. Probably cheaper, too. - The Group NewsBlog - Monday, May 5, 2008 - Great New Tool:Cause Caller51

Im usually not one to put a lot of faith in thesystem, but this tool looks like it could be help-ful to many campaigns. - Portland IndependentMedia Center - Monday, May 5, 2008 - CauseCaller: Free Automatic Phone Banks52

So, I give to you the Save California: Really Fix

the Budget Cause Caller. Its backbone is a wikipage, so if you want to change something aboutit, just sign up for an account and do so. Callthe Governor, or the legislative leaders. Want toadd your legislator? Just sign up for the wiki

50http://www.millsworks.net/blog/2008/05/02/cause-caller/51http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2008/05/great-new-tool-cause-caller.html52http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/05/375402.shtml

and load them on there. It was getting a bittime consuming to load all those legislators, soI just went with the leaders so far. - Calitics -Wednesday May 07, 2008 - Really Fix the BudgetCause Caller53

I tried the cause caller just now. It works.Best thing since the jet engine. - Terry Savery,

Chair, Connecticut Coalition to Eradicate LymeDisease, EradicateLymeDisease.org54

While the initial response to CommitteeCaller was more sig-nificant in terms of quantity the response to Cause Callerhas been more sustained and significant in terms of quality.CommitteeCaller had thousands of users visiting the siteand very few actually making calls, and even fewer makingcalls to real politicians. Now, Cause Caller is appearing onvarious activist networks and its unique page views averagea modest several hundred a day with dozens of actual phonecalls going out to real politicians about real causes.

The fact that so many activists have visited the site andtaught themselves how to enter data and causes into thedatabase demonstrates that the short videos I created toexplain the sites functionality work well. Compared to theamount of time I spent on customizing various causes forCommittee Caller, Ive spent very little time adding or clean-ing data for new causes on Cause Caller. In my eyes, this isone of the greatest successes of the project as it establishes itas a self-sustaining community rather than a one-off projectwhose data must be maintained by a single person.

In terms of fulfilling the goal I set out during the initialdevelopment and research of Cause Caller I believe Ive un-compromisingly achieved it. Cause Caller is a free, opensystem designed a general tool that allows citizens to en-

gage in specific participation with democracy. Furthermore,the data and resources generated by users of the site ben-efits not only Cause Caller itself, but the Semantic Web ingeneral and anyone looking to build a similar tool.

7. FUTURE WORKThere are a number of features Im interested in adding toCause Caller. The two most pressing are internationaliza-tion, call ratings and RDF data standardization.

7.1 InternationalizationSince launching Cause Caller one of the more frequent fea-ture requests is to enable international calls. This is a fea-ture that, while I believe it is possible to implement, it will

not be a trivial upgrade. In addition, I am unsure as to thecost of enabling international calls to politicians outside thestates. But it is something I am actively investigating andam interested in pursuing more seriously.

7.2 Call RatingsI would like to have a way to enable call ratings for eachindividual call and each individual politician. Right now a

53http://calitics.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=580054Personal Correspondence


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user has no way to signal that a particular phone number (orother bit of data) is incorrect while on the phone. Enablinga system to track bad data, as well as call quality will beintegral for establishing a valuable metric for how well thesite works. I would also like to create a way for users to rateparticular calls on the site via an Netflix-like 5 star ratingsystem.

7.3 RDF Data StandardizationWhile Cause Caller outputs valid RDF data, all of its schemasare were somewhat arbitrarily designed by myself. Thisis problematic as it prevents Cause Caller RDF data frommerging with standard RDF data such as vCard55 or FOAF.56

More substantially Cause Caller should be using some of theschemas that Joshua Trauberer created for GovTrack.us sothat our data regarding politicians is compatible across sites.Semantic Media Wiki allows for the importation of schemas(or vocabularies in their terminology) such as FOAF andvCard so theres no reason I cant get them to work forTrauberers schemas.

Ideally all of the data on Cause Caller will be defined by

vocabularies that are not specific to the site and are definedby W3C standards or sites like Trauberers GovTrack.us.This will enable maxim compatibility and cut down scheamproliferation.

7.4 SPARQL QueriesOne final upgrade I want to make to the site is to enablereal-time SPARQL queries of the dataset. While the versionof Semantic Media Wiki I began work on did not supportthis functionality it seems to have been included in a recentupgrade.

Users will then be able to issue well-formed SPARQL queriesof the RDF data on the site without having to export in-

dividual pages RDF into a store. This will also mean thatI can use the wikis SPARQL query engine instead of hav-ing to parse RDF files on the fly for cause and politicianretrieval. This will almost certainly improve the load timesand responsiveness of the site.

8. CONCLUSIONSThe purpose of this paper has been first to survey some oftheory of the integration between participatory democracyand technology, then to show that while current progresshas been made in advancing the tools of our participatorydemocracy that there is still much more distance to cover,and finally, to argue that my project, Cause Caller, signifi-cantly contributes to that progress. While I hope this paperhas succeeded in convincing its audience of these facts, I be-lieve that Cause Caller itself stands as a meaningful andvaluable example of a participatory democracy tool thatneeds no other justification.

Admittedly there is much more work to be done in the par-ticipatory democracy space and Cause Caller is only oneexample of what can be done with free software and free

55vCard is the RDF standard for contact information.56FOAF stands for Friend of a Friend and is the proposedstandard for describing relationships in social networks.

data. As data becomes more available and easier to use(through architectures like SMW, RDF and SPARQL) wewill certainly see other applications that take democracy

Working on Cause Caller has been one of the most enjoyableexperiences Ive ever had developing a project. The data setof politicians, causes, committees and phone numbers pre-sented an almost ideal subject to classify using a SemanticMedia Wiki and Asterisks robustness and flexibility allowed

for a particularly unique development environment.

Im looking forward to the different character of causes thatwill inevitably show up in my little corner of our participa-tory democracy and plan to remain involved and committedto developing Cause Caller into the future.

9. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe author would like to thank Thessaly La Force, AsheeshLaroria, Shawn Van-Every, Dan Shiffman, and my thesissection.

cause caller thesis

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