I wanted to announce that in conjunction with my day-to-day job as Outreach Manager at Creative Commons, I’m now working at Eyebeam (a digital arts space in Chelsea) a day or two a week as a research associate with Michael Mandiberg and Patrick Davison. Michael and Patrick and I are developing a project called “One for the Commons” for Eyebeam’s Open Culture group which will help contemporary and notable (notable as defined by Wikipedia’s hive mind) artists release their work into the commons. We’ve done a lot of work to prepare the project, but there’s still a bit more to do before the site launches; you should see something here about it soon.
When I was developing my thesis project, Cause Caller, for my masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, I was routinely confronted with the idea of including a feature allowing ordinary citizens to have access to the auto-dialing capabilities that normally only telemarketers and political campaigns use.
In other words, should I have created the functionality where users can “robodial” politicians similar to how politicians harangue citizens? The technology is still trivial to implement — users could simply record one message and have it sent to every politician on a list automatically.
The Federal Trade Commission just passed a law “basically outlawing” similar telemarketing calls. But the twist is that the law seems to specifically protect prerecorded political robocalls:
However for those who have called on the FTC to help eliminate the other phone scourge - political robocalls - the new rule will not help. Calls from political campaigns are considered protected speech an FTC representative said.
In other words, political robocalls are considered speech (where business solicitation isn’t?) and cannot be regulated by a trade commission. While this does give me better legal footing to launch such a feature, I’m still not thrilled about adding it.
Part of what makes Cause Caller fun (and effective, I think) is because citizens are obligated to verbalize their ideas to politician’s offices in their own voice, repeatedly. This has the effect of bringing them closer to the democratic process, because even if they are simply reading a script, they are interacting with another citizen about an issue they care about. By removing that human element I would effectively remove the core element that makes the exchange meaningful. Cause Caller would annoy politicians offices and that is about it.
Great news, Google has picked up Cause Caller to help encourage citizens to contact their representatives about the problem of wasted wireless spectrum resources.
Remember that fuzzy static between channels on the old TVs? Today more than three-quarters of those radio airwaves, or “white space” spectrum, are completely unused. This vast public resource could offer a revolution in wireless services of all kinds, including universal wireless Internet. The FCC will soon decide whether to open this unused spectrum for general usage, and your voice matters — a lot. So if you agree that freeing the white spaces represents a vote for the future of the Internet, please sign our petition and help spread the word about this campaign. Learn more
A lot of people have asked me if I’m planning on setting up Cause Caller as a Facebook app. This is something I’m definitely interested in — adding a “Phone Bank for Me/My Cause” feature to profiles is definitely enticing, but I’m not exactly thrilled about digging through Facebook’s walled garden to get it all set up. But I will start investigating this.
So until then, I’m using Facebook as a means to promoting Cause Caller (an early Cause Caller fan suggested this). So I’ve setup a “Page” about Cause Caller that you can be a “fan” of. What the difference between pages, notes, posts, groups, and causes, is beginning to blur for me, but if you like Cause Caller, and you want to help me promote it, please consider making yourself a fan of our page.
When starting up this project I was investigating ideas for hosts. While ITP had generously hosted Committee Caller (in its various incarnations) on their own machine, I decided that Cause Caller would need a more dedicated home — I didn’t want my site taking down the box with everyone else’s projects on it if it crashed.
So I had heard good things about Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute service and heard that you could even run Asterisk on it. So I poked around and found this post, which was informative, but didn’t contain enough information for my purposes (it just explained installing the necessary packages, not actually running Asterisk from the cloud) so I dug around on Amazon’s developer forums. It turns out running Asterisk from the cloud required a special kernel and some other tweaks, but it was definitely possible. I told a couple of people around ITP that I had successfully brought up Asterisk ‘from the cloud’ and they expressed interest in hearing more details. So I wrote a page on the wiki explaining, step by step, how to install Asterisk, and more importantly, get it running on a box in Amazon’s EC2.
Cause Caller is a virtual phone bank web app powered by a Semantic Media Wiki. If that sounds like total greek (or geek) to you, then you should watch the little video on the front page as it explains Cause Caller’s basic functionality, or just click here. There is another video about how to create a cause, as well as plenty more documentation on the wiki.
I came up with the idea of automating call queues for phone banks while trying to organize one for myself, it was a total hassle to find everyone’s phone number on a particular committee, so I built CommitteeCaller last semester. Over the last couple of months I’ve worked with several local causes to develop the idea into a generalized activist tool that is my thesis — Cause Caller. The result is a fully extendable, platform that drives a “live” VoIP application that hopefully takes a lot of the hassle out of phone banking.
Right now Cause Caller is a bit of a blank slate — while I have almost all of America’s federal politicians (Congressional representatives, Senators, etc.) in the database, I am really interested in building state level politicians into it. Causes also need to be added as right now there are only two: the demo cause and SolarOne’s I Heart PV Cause. This is where you can help — if you are or you know any activists looking to organize phone banks, please forward this to them! I’m going to be presenting this project for my thesis at ITP on Friday, May 9th at 12:20pm, so I’ll be incorporating feedback I receive over the next week into the “results” section of my presentation. Obviously, it’d be wonderful if you could make it, but I’ll also be showing it at ITP’s Spring Show the following week on Monday and Tuesday evening.
Please check out the app, kick the tires, tell me what works, what doesn’t work, and let me know if you have any ideas!
