Project name - Represent

Motivation:

1. We are interested in creating awareness around Americans can voice their concerns in a productive manner such as calling their local reps over voicing over facebook / twitter / protests
2. Many issues such as climate change is considered important by general public but disproportionately ignored by media and politicians. We are interested in creating a medium that is directed towards politicians to emphasize that general public cares about these science related issues more than it gets attention. We can also leverage this platform for other global issues after launching the platform for science issues

Objectives:

1. Create awareness around advantages of calling your rep over posting facebook messages / protesting about issues that we care about, specifically related to science
2. Create an easy-to-use website or an app that helps people to easily contact their rep
3. Create standard scripts around issues such as climate change, nuclear power, NIH funding, research & development …??
4. Create standard guidelines on appropriate frequency of calling reps about various issues (weekly / monthly / daily etc.) Overall - To leverage existing resources such as UCS to create a platform for science related issues first and expand to other issues in the future as it makes sense.

Additional details:

Role of UCS:

1. Team to reconcile with UCS not necessarily being aligned with their vision
2. Team to utilize their schedule, (possibly from API), get templates, etc.

Motivating people:

1. Include a Facebook or Twitter post: I just called my representative. You can too. For more information, this is the link. Giving scientists a voice.

Questions:

1. How effective is calling reps?
2. Do we have any stats?
3. Do we have any testimonies?

End goals:

Technical

1. A platform that outputs contact details of a rep at a local level for an individual
2. A platform that is able to see a standard script for the issue we want to contact our rep

Usage

1. Being able to create more awareness / motivate people to call their reps
2. Being able to have X (>4) number of people call their reps

Next steps:

1. Ritika to create a first draft of a quick survey for team’s input
2. Ritika to create quick communication slides, which will help in presenting our idea to communities such as UCS when we pitch our idea
3. Shuyi/Kristine/Sam:
4. Find tutorials for Python/pyramid framework, Android Developer Kit, JSON/ API interfaces
5. Once we make a list of tutorials, each go through tutorials.

App - Key technical capabilities:

Front end:

1. Ask user for address information, store locally (#1)
2. Access APIs, grab JSON, LOCAL STORE API output, display it
3. Anonymous send user info back to server to be stored in SQL
4. Ping server and ask for JSONs which have information of each issue

Back end:

1. Python / Bottle
2. All of the JSON files
3. Index of them
4. Code--sends JSONs, retrieves information, puts into the SQL database
5. SQL database for user info

Additional:

1. Utility to interface with Facebook
2. Scheduling assistant: when you should call

Profile: Keep track of which issues you v’e called about and when

Info blurb, part of APP: Who can call, why you should call.