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In the UK, we have TheyWorkForYou, which is developed by mySociety, a charity that exists to provide useful tools for voters. They also run a few related sites, including WriteToThem, which provides an easy way of identifying and contacting your elected representatives.

If you want to improve the state of your government, then donating to an organisation like them is probably a much better idea than giving the money to any party.

Have you SEEN his rider agreement? Sure, that's for speaking, rather than remote interviews, but the rider for giving a simple speech includes such gems as "If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it."

His consistent accuracy in predicting the consequences of disregarding Freedom is a great example of why you should listen to him.

And if you want to listen to him, here is the instruction manual on how to do so: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html

This is hilarious

http://gizmodo.com/5853729/please-do-not-buy-richard-stallman-a-parrot-and-other-rules

Richard Stallman is leader of the free software movement and father of GNU. Naturally, he's in demand as a speaker. And so NATURALLY he has a completely ride-the-orangutan insane tour rider.

"Ridge the orangutan" insane is such a great phrase.

From the link

https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007701.html

Andrew, I read all of Richard Stallman's email that you forwarded.
Don't book him. His rider is hilarious.

RMS winning friends and influencing people as usual.

RMS won't be happy until the entire planet lives in hippie communes. You can't satisfy a person like that.

Of course you can satisfy RMS.

As long as you don't have cats, or dogs that bark, but net access with ssh-connection, and maybe a parrot to talk to, he might even find your house an acceptable place to stay

"That's the borderline insane part. " i don't think it's insanity..
is a simple failure to recognize social norms. think about what you do in your car (dig for gold) at a stoplight. you forget you are in a little glass box where everyone can see you.

i've seen women applying makeup, men shaving, people flossing.. BUT those same people (hopefully) don't do that at the fucking dinner table.. RMS is just in his car ALL THE TIME.

brilliant guy, but the social graces of a mountain fucking gorilla...

have you seen his requirements for a personal appearance? I don't think the biggest Hollywood diva's get this specific:

"Above 72 fahrenheit (22 centigrade) I find sleeping quite difficult. (If the air is dry, I can stand 23 degrees.) A little above that temperature, a strong electric fan blowing on me enables me to sleep. More than 3 degrees above that temperature, I need air conditioning to sleep."

complete list: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html

Just like Steve Jobs then.

"That's the borderline insane part. " i don't think it's insanity..
is a simple failure to recognize social norms. think about what you do in your car (dig for gold) at a stoplight. you forget you are in a little glass box where everyone can see you.

i've seen women applying makeup, men shaving, people flossing.. BUT those same people (hopefully) don't do that at the fucking dinner table.. RMS is just in his car ALL THE TIME.

brilliant guy, but the social graces of a mountain fucking gorilla...

have you seen his requirements for a personal appearance? I don't think the biggest Hollywood diva's get this specific:

"Above 72 fahrenheit (22 centigrade) I find sleeping quite difficult. (If the air is dry, I can stand 23 degrees.) A little above that temperature, a strong electric fan blowing on me enables me to sleep. More than 3 degrees above that temperature, I need air conditioning to sleep."

complete list: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html

Of the type of non-conformist individual with considerable hacking skills who should be a hiring target.

You could still make the quiz (there's one for the Republican primaries, which I didn't notice before -- there may well be one in a few month's time for the US election).

Politicians not doing what they say they will do is a different problem, and I'm not sure how you could solve that one. Possibly if a new, small party can really concentrate on one area and actually win, do good things on a local level (and show a decent voting record nationally), it could later win other areas. That's not easy with the winner-takes-all voting system, but unless on of your two main parties splits, I don't see how you'll get any more diversity of opinion, leading to pressure to actually implement a "platform". Perhaps direct action and a general strike -- but that could be difficult, when things only gradually get worse it's difficult to motivate lots of people. Better, non-corporate media?

A group of geeks in the UK have made a series of websites, one of which is TheyWorkForYou. It parses the official record of proceedings in Parliament (called Hansard, no idea why) and present the voting record, list of speeches etc for each member. The Prime Minister is here: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/david_cameron/witney . I get updates about every week or so when my MP speaks in Parliament -- since I signed up for them, she's not said much that's interesting, but I intend to write to her if she does.

The charity behind that website has other projects too: http://www.mysociety.org/projects/

I don't care what people think of RMS. I love him even when I disagree with him. His quirkiness always makes me laugh:

The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the kernel Linux.

Reference:
https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html

I believe it's nearly time to upgrade our old outdated operating system controlling our laws when we ourselves can't vote each day, like checking e-mail on whatever's current, old outdated laws and reform them, and of COURSE future laws as 360,000,000 North Americans (330 America, 30 Canada, keep it simple. :D)

I'm just a garbageman but Love Firefox for web browsing.

Then I loved Ubuntu Linux for an operating system.

Just figured the next step along the path of:

What's important to me?

I could give a shit about a vote every 5 years, most likely rigged, and once in WHOEVER it is, even the "good ones" are most likely given 2 choices, briefcase full of money, and, well, you don't want THE OTHER ONE. ;)

So in tribute to Linux I made a crappy website, http://www.opensourceg.com/

I'm not sure it could handle slashdotting but I think the cause is just. I've posted it on torrent freak, http://torrentfreak.com/ , cbc (deleted or buried in oblivion of other people, ALL SCREAMING AT YOU, WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN??? DAMNIT! AHHHHHHHHHHHH

:P

So ya, the very laws we obide by are in no control over. It's messed up with all this Internet we don't got an organized government to do daily online polls. Surely there are white hats up to the challenge (and black hats to cause troubles. :D, i'm sure everyone'd still get paid, lmao, point is everyone then "has a say" on a national website, federal white hat guys. I don't even KNOW, I just know Firefox and Ubuntu ROCKED.

Ubuntu's got a live add remove programs for God's sake! The swarm is the most powerful. More then anything. Even p2p can't be shut down even if the guys buying the laws say it's illegal.

So I spent 15 bucks and thought the idea was great. Rather pick Open Source distros then politicians . The ground rules should be set like Linux stuff is. You guys will get it (if anyone has, it's been a crappy website for so long and a buddy helped me get a blogging feature so I can rant in a corner of the Internet)

Far as building a voting site, don't think "I'd" be able to. I'll sure as hell link to it if one get's built.

Closet things I found in my quest were: http://www.opencongress.org/ - American one, just liked the voting, just kinda wish a 3rd party does it, like, "here, were not rigging those electronic numbers". Protect a country militarily but the management needs an upgrade. Doing all THEY can in a restrictive environment. Imagine the 1 GOOD congressman pretending to be bad just to TRY and help their country? (or maybe they are all good and just fighting each other instead of the issues)
http://www.mysociety.org/ - UK based, they fix road problems or organized a nice "email your politician" thing.

Granted I'm a complete idiot who shouldn't even vote, I'm pretty ignorant to current politics b/c of lack of faith. No public trust from me. Enhancing people's lives instead of beating them down would be a GREAT start.

Kinda like sending out an email to get Google doing real tv. They are big enough to make it happen and I just want some smart dude to make the ir remote work as standard on websites. :) Anyways trying to get them doing it b/c they COULD and maybe make ad money, voip the cable tv market even. I just want things done by people willing to exploit me for money. Here's my 200 bucks/month, where's my fiber optic options? I'm alright /w being a slave. It's cool. Just pimp my slavery already.

Any way to port Linux to our govt? Format whatever junk was on the drive, install, reboot (once, ever, :D). I'm sure all KINDS of awesome ideas could be done. I'd like to at least link to em.

Yahoo Answers, the 2 that replied both said no. Wouldn't work f

Have you seen how many websites there are for this already?

http://www.metagovernment.org/
http://www.democracylab.org/
http://www.mysociety.org/
http://zelea.com/project/votorola/
http://www.govit.org/
http://www.freegovernment.org/
http://usavotes.org/
http://www.senatoronline.org.au/

And more. Look around, people.

TheyWorkForYou, which I work on, has much nicer transcripts, a much better search engine, and now speech-matched video of the House of Commons from the BBC too (though we need your help! :) ). I've written three technical posts on the technology behind the video timestamping, which I guess someone might be interested in: http://www.mysociety.org/2008/06/12/theyworkforyou-video-the-flash-player/ is the first.

Just announced yesterday: mySociety's House of Commons video site. Crowd-source some video timestamps today!

Why might the government seek to close the site down? After all, aren't mySociety "the biggest single catalyst for political change in this country"? (Lord Gould of Brookwood, House of Lords debate, 15/6/06)

Well, they may be, but they may have fractured, or at least bent, a copyright law or two.

You see, Parliamentary video exists under a draconian copyright license under which it "must not be hosted on a searchable website and must not be downloadable", apparently for fear of naughty citizens making humorous or satirical use of it; or indeed any use at all.

To which the mySociety guys and gals seem to have said a collective, "Well that's silly," and gone ahead and done it anyway. Good on you, people.

Seriously, do your bit for democratic transparency and go and timestamp a few videos now. It's curiously addictive.

Sure it is. Besides, if MPs or Congressmen accept emails but don't respond to them, wouldn't that also be a way of "merely keeping the populace happy"?

Interestingly enough, the same people who built this petition system for the government also created WriteToThem — write your message in a text box on the site, and they email/fax/post it to your MP. This has the advantage of them being able to spot when an MP is ignoring people and they've published league tables and other statistics about how responsive MPs are.

One of the big problems in politics is communicating with and informing the general population. Not only does the Internet itself make it easier than ever to do so, but offshoots like mailing lists, wikis, etc help to organise people and information. We already know these things have the ability to coordinate efforts to build things as complicated as operating systems. Why not apply that experience to other problem domains?

We've already seen the beginnings of this. TheyWorkForYou.com publishes and indexes what MPs say in the Houses of Parliament, and notifies people when something they are interested in is discussed - with all the source code for the website available and a web service too. A few days ago, the same team launched an open-source online petition system backed by the UK government (sign the "fair use" petition). The same team also have a number of other projects in the same vein, such as mailing lists for MPs. Some MPs now have weblogs. Across the pond similar work is being done in the USA.

The real problem is that current MPs mostly grew up without the Internet and haven't gotten to grips with it. This is why MySociety's work to get them on board is so important. For instance, it took me thirty seconds to find out that my MP "replied within 2 or 3 weeks to 73% - 96% of messages sent via WriteToThem.com during 2005, according to polling data -- well above average amongst MPs," and I can sign up to get an email every time he speaks in Parliament.

Far from fuelling a crisis in politics, I think the web can be incredibly beneficial. Unfortunately, there is incredible inertia amongst government to adopt new strategies like this.

One of the big problems in politics is communicating with and informing the general population. Not only does the Internet itself make it easier than ever to do so, but offshoots like mailing lists, wikis, etc help to organise people and information. We already know these things have the ability to coordinate efforts to build things as complicated as operating systems. Why not apply that experience to other problem domains?

We've already seen the beginnings of this. TheyWorkForYou.com publishes and indexes what MPs say in the Houses of Parliament, and notifies people when something they are interested in is discussed - with all the source code for the website available and a web service too. A few days ago, the same team launched an open-source online petition system backed by the UK government (sign the "fair use" petition). The same team also have a number of other projects in the same vein, such as mailing lists for MPs. Some MPs now have weblogs. Across the pond similar work is being done in the USA.

The real problem is that current MPs mostly grew up without the Internet and haven't gotten to grips with it. This is why MySociety's work to get them on board is so important. For instance, it took me thirty seconds to find out that my MP "replied within 2 or 3 weeks to 73% - 96% of messages sent via WriteToThem.com during 2005, according to polling data -- well above average amongst MPs," and I can sign up to get an email every time he speaks in Parliament.

Far from fuelling a crisis in politics, I think the web can be incredibly beneficial. Unfortunately, there is incredible inertia amongst government to adopt new strategies like this.

One of the big problems in politics is communicating with and informing the general population. Not only does the Internet itself make it easier than ever to do so, but offshoots like mailing lists, wikis, etc help to organise people and information. We already know these things have the ability to coordinate efforts to build things as complicated as operating systems. Why not apply that experience to other problem domains?

We've already seen the beginnings of this. TheyWorkForYou.com publishes and indexes what MPs say in the Houses of Parliament, and notifies people when something they are interested in is discussed - with all the source code for the website available and a web service too. A few days ago, the same team launched an open-source online petition system backed by the UK government (sign the "fair use" petition). The same team also have a number of other projects in the same vein, such as mailing lists for MPs. Some MPs now have weblogs. Across the pond similar work is being done in the USA.

The real problem is that current MPs mostly grew up without the Internet and haven't gotten to grips with it. This is why MySociety's work to get them on board is so important. For instance, it took me thirty seconds to find out that my MP "replied within 2 or 3 weeks to 73% - 96% of messages sent via WriteToThem.com during 2005, according to polling data -- well above average amongst MPs," and I can sign up to get an email every time he speaks in Parliament.

Far from fuelling a crisis in politics, I think the web can be incredibly beneficial. Unfortunately, there is incredible inertia amongst government to adopt new strategies like this.

Or perhaps your site is crap. I just tried to pledge. I live in Oakland, CA. I entered "Oakland, CA" and was taken to another page listing about 100 other Oaklands. The listings shown were of the form "City, County, State" so I enter "Oakland, Alameda County, CA" and promptly get: Sorry! Something's gone wrong. HTTP error 500 calling http://gaze.mysociety.org/gaze Please try again later, or email us for help resolving the problem. So let me ask - what sort of message does this send? Perhaps that the OLPC folks are possibly well meaning but less than competent at the basics of what they are doing?

Here is Jamie Reed's MP page on My Society's excellent TheyWorkForYou project.

And here is the screen scraped debate, that you can comment on like a blog.