Comments on: Help Lobby Congress on S. 482!

By: PiterKokoniz

PiterKokoniz — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:27:20 +0000

Hello !!!! ;)
I am Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that I like your blog very much!
And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
Sorry for my bad english:)
Thank you:)
Piter.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:13:48 +0000

What about a tweet management of sorts?
What about using a hashtag like James said, but then sending the senators a running tally of the message count in favor, so that they can check out the hash themselves to see the specifics, but then they only get a tweet per hour about how fast the response is building. That way they know beyond a doubt that people are reacting, but it is in a format that is not overloading and statistical so that they can use it in conversations with other political members.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:33:49 +0000

Can we come up with any other options? Would it maybe work to Not tweet directly @ these people, but have everyone tweet once per “type” of target in general prior to some point in time and then have the Sunlight Foundation (or other designate) send a search link or something to the representatives?

I don’t know… slamming their streams might be more dramatic, but a summary / petition type of approach might be more polite

By: Ellen Miller

Ellen Miller — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:49:17 +0000

Some people are expressing concerns the TweetLobby amounts to “spamming” Members of Congress who are on Twitter. Well, a genuine message of concern about a pending bill can’t be “spam,” as most of us understand that term. It is Members’ job, after all, to pay attention to public opinion as they wrestle with the issues before them.

That said, we can understand if you prefer the time-tested method of calling http://sunlightfoundation.com/pass482 or writing your Members, and prefer to save Twitter for other kinds of communication.

We also understand the concerns that some folks, including our friend Ethan Zuckerman http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/03/11/politics-and-new-media-or-should-i-really-tweetspam-congress/, that “twobbying” Members by sending them direct messages via Twitter may eventually cause them to stop participating in using this two-way medium. Well, it IS a two-way medium, isn’t it? Members of Congress who adopt social media can’t expect it to work like top-down media.

That said, there is a larger point here for all of us to ponder, as we foster greater transparency and participation by embracing interactive communications technologies. We are going to need better tools for filtering and managing mass participation, as these media are adopted by more and more people. Right now, it’s pretty cool that Members of Congress are experimenting with Twitter and personally paying attention to the tweets landing in their inboxes. This situation probably can’t last. It’s incumbent on all of us to figure out what comes next.

By: Jon P

Jon P — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:35:53 +0000

Seriously? this is just embarassing.

Sunlight is a great org. and it seems like 75% of the people there get technology but why in the world would they encourage people to do what amounts to spam?

I met a lot of sunlight’s tech staff and they all seem like people who get it, developers and designers they of all people should understand the importance of not turning these social networks into mechanism for spam.

I hope that this is the first and last we see of this nonsense and that Sunlight listens to us on this as they can very easily lose the rep that they’ve built these last few years.

By: jay

jay — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:04:30 +0000

For anyone who wants to help but is frustrated with the technique of copy-paste, I’ve written a script to accomplish this;

http://my.shelv.us/suntweet/

None of your login information is stored on my site (it and all the data) goes straight to twitter.

By: Colleen

Colleen — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:17:08 +0000

I was just wondering how you verified that these are the real twitter accounts for the senators. We found one, for example, for Dick Durbin that’s not listed here, and I don’t know if the ones you have are verified or not. Any info on this would be great!

By: ksclarke

ksclarke — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:22:37 +0000

For those that automatically follow those who follow them, you could Twitter DM them without the spamminess concern. I’m not sure if following those who follow them is the norm though.

By: Nisha Thompson

Nisha Thompson — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:06:14 +0000

Jay

You are correct there are only 2 Senators on Twitter. We have corrected the mistake.

Nisha

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:21:15 +0000

Sorry. I’d be posting 15 nearly identical messages to the public timeline. This is not an appropriate use of @ messaging.