Jason Aaron Kiesel

I came across this blog post randomly, and I had to share it with you all. Now, I know we’re in hard time, but this seems a bit ridiculous to me. Apparently, the City of Philadelphia is going to charge it’s residents to have a blog. This article on sports blog BroadStreetHockey has some very interesting insight as to what’s going on in the City of Brotherly Love. Not so much love, would be more appropriate, I think.

I know cities are hard up for cash. We’re all hard up for cash. But come on people! I’m just glad I don’t like in Phily right now. I’d have to pay them $600 / year (this blog plus my MySpace account – every MySpacer would have to pay $300 / year as they include a blog for every account). No thanks.

And I’m going to have to keep an eye out for my city on this one. I definitely don’t want them sneaking this one by.

After reading a great article by the Sunlight Foundation on the failure to date of data.gov, I wanted to express my personal view on the matter. I’m a huge fan of openness and information being freely available. That was one of the main reasons I founded freedomspeaks.com and its corresponding set of APIs. After reading some of the comments to the Sunlight Foundation’s blog post, I was amazed at the faith people have in big government. I, personally, am not surprised one bit in the government’s inability to produce. In fact, I pretty much expected as much. If history has shown us anything, it’s that government, when left to its own devices, can’t produce anything viable or useful to its constituents (with the sole exception of a military and defense). The federal government’s answer to a downloadable dataset is a .PDF of a scanned document. While technically this is a “digital” document, and it would have the data contained therein, it’s pretty much worthless for someone trying to do anything of value with it. You might as well line the bird cage with it – you’ll actually get more use out of it that way. This is pretty much what I expected out of Uncle Sam. Which is why I’m a firm believer that it’s a private company that will succeed in this endeavor, that endeavor being, of course, FreedomSpeaks.

UPDATE: Also, I’d like to express my extreme discontent with the $17 Million use of proceeds to revamp the whitehouse.gov website. Ask any web developer, their site could have been developed in less time with only $170,000. This is a wonderful example of how the government constantly mismanages our taxpayer dollars. Honestly President Obama, do you know how much $17 Million would be to a internet startup? My gosh, that would be an unheard of Series A!

So my partner, Kurt Daradics, has lined up some really strong power intros into the California Republican Party (which is pretty insane, if you ask me). We had a great lunch with Matt Robbins, their political director, on Wednesday and he’s asked us to come up to their first annual tech summit and speak as to what we’re up to with FreedomSpeaks. We’re both really stoked on the reception our product is getting, and we’re excited to be an integral part of this new “Government 2.0″ initiative (cheesy, I know). Supposedly, there are going to be some heavy hitters at the summit tomorrow – Newt’s Director of New Media, the NRP’s Director of Media, and a handful of others. I’ll let you all know how it goes!

On a similar note, we’ll be pushing out our CitizenCamp concept soon – probably middle summer launch (maybe July 4 ~ish). The elevator pitch on that one is “online plus offline equals streamlined”. We are basically trying to take the concepts of FreedomSpeaks and adapt them to the offline world – taking our online social circles offline to greater impact civic and social change. We’ll have how to’s on any number of things – from how to start a petition to getting an initiative on the ballot to strategies on getting involved. Ultimately, we want people to give a damn. It’s time to wake up the neighborhood, y’all!

Thanks for tuning in. Feel free to contact me if you would like to get involved.

I read a post on a voting system report being sealed. This seems pretty simple to me. If it has anything to do with our government (barring, of course, national security), it should be made COMPLETELY transparent and available for inspection/accountability. Why on earth do these voting machine companies want to make their technology proprietary? Government systems should be built on the premise of open source, and this is a perfect application of that.

This madness has got to stop. Feel free to write your representative on this! I know I will.

Yep, the announcement came over the wire today (click here for the formal release). I was finally able to get FreedomSpeaks' API out the door. I'm really excited about this launch, I've been working hard on it for a few months now, and it's nice to see the fruition of my work. I still have quite a bit more work ahead of me, but the API will be driving pretty much everything. Here's a list of what you can do with the API (so far):

1. Get your officials based on your address
2. Get official data based on id/screen name. 
3. Get a letter based on id 
4. Write your own letter (and send it to your officials)
5. Forward a letter already written to your officials 
6. Search our database of officials 

We also have a widget (with a couple more due out soon) that members can embed in their blog, website or MySpace profile. This widget performs the "Get Officials" action and allows visitors to their site to lookup their officials. Pretty cool if you're into getting your friends politically involved.

I don't have a forum right now for the API, so if you want to leave comments about it, or have questions, just add a comment to my post. I'll try to answer every one in a timely manner.

Spread the word – Our API is Finally Here!

Below's a sample of our "Get Officials" Widget – Get Your Widget Code Now!

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up. I have some exciting news about Freedom Speaks. I’ll be launching our API very soon! The API will have some barebones features to start, but I hope to make almost all the data on our site available through the API. Here are a couple of the features we’ll be launching with:

1. Who Represents You?
   (Enter: Your Address; Get: Your Districts + Officials)
2. Forward A Letter…
   (Enter: Any LetterId + Address; Get: Your Districts + Officials + Your Letter Sent)
3. Get A Letter
   (Enter: Any LetterId; Get: Letter + Comments)
4. Get An Official
   (Enter: Any OfficialId; Get Official + Comments)
5. Search Officials
   (Enter: Search Terms; Get Officials)

The results sets will be pretty verbose and returned as Xml. You’ll be able to pick and choose what data you’d like to display within your application.

We’re also making available a few widgets that consume our API services. Embed any one of these widgets on your own profile, and you’ll instantly enable your visitors to take action on any issue you’d like! That’s pretty powerful stuff.

Stay Tuned!

An interesting event happened last night around 6 PM. I saw an unusual amount of activity on FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM and thought I may have a potential spammer on my hands. I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was it not a spammer, buy my site had become the target of a quite intriguing blog post by WONKETTE.COM. The story poked fun at the Senator, making light of the fact that he didn’t have any friends on my site. If you follow the comments on WONKETTE.COM, I think you’ll find (as I did) the comments are pretty amusing. Some might say that it isn’t right that we add fodder to the fire of a political scandal, but politicians are fair game in my books. More often than not, they tout themselves as pillars of society. We all know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So, I’d like to give a shout out to the WONKETTE.COM. One final thought. Now that Senator Larry Craig has over 20 friends, what do we do about Senators Obama, Clinton and McCain? They don’t even come close! Maybe Senator Craig should be running for president.

Chalk up another exciting couple of weeks here at FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM. We continue to grow and
we’ve far surpassed the 5,000 letter mark sending out a total of 5,531 letters!
We’ve also been sent our first offer for financing. I won’t say any more than
that, but it’s great to be validated with a funding proposal. Be sure to tell
everyone you know about FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM – familiy, friends,
radio talk show hosts, local news, everyone. The more letters we can flood our
politicians with, the less they can ignore us.

For everyone living in the Los Angeles area, I
wanted to point out two things:

• Tonight, our
  founder, Jason A. Kiesel, will be getting interviewed by TechZulu at Makai in Santa Monica. The
  event is hosted by DigitalLA and starts at 6PM.
• A very special issue has come up due to the
  recent tragedy of Jamiel Shaw. I’ve set up a special letter that goes directly to the
  LA Mayor and City Council Members regarding the passage of Jamiel’s Law. Please take a look at it and
  forward it along. Most important, be sure to click "Send This Letter Now!".

Keep spreading the word – we can
make a difference in Washington (and our respective States)!

NEW ANNOUNCEMENTS!

• We’ll be adding petititions to the site within the next few weeks. Our petitions
  will be similar to a letter, but will be sent all at once when a threshold level
  is reached (a certain date or number of signatures). Any suggestions should be
  sent via our feedback form.
• We created a new
  type of letter on the site – a letter that targets a specific official or group
  of officials (We used this for the Jamiel’s Law letter). We will be rolling this
  out within the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!
• We’re also
  planning on rolling out more content on the site. We’ll be presenting commentary
  that represents both (or multiple) sides of an issue and then getting discussion
  on those points of view by all of you.
• We’ll be starting a live show once every other week starting
  next week. We’ll stream it live online and we’ll take your calls and questions
  on air. Our founder, Jason Kiesel, will have a guest or two and they’ll discuss
  the top letters/issues from the site. Be sure to check it out!

TOP NEW LETTERS!

1. Speak English Please!
2. A Revised Approach to the War on Terror
3. America Desperately Needs a High-Skilled Labor
   Force!
4. Illegals
5. RIGHT To VOTE

I just wanted to thank everyone for continuing to visit FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM and contributing great letters and comments. There have been some really great letters written by some of our memebers since my last email went out (see below), and I’ve added some great new features. Everyone on the site has been giving some great feedback – in fact, most of the new features come from member suggestions! Keep up the good work, and I look forward to reading your next letter!

Here are some of the new features we’ve added:

• Sending letters to other officials, even if they don’t represent you, just got easier!
  (just go to your account home, click "Send Letter", do a search for the officals you want and add them to your list)
• Letters can now be written as private – no one on the site will ever see it.
• Not happy with your screen name? You can now change it!
• State Official data is slowly trickling in. Members in CA now have their executive and legislative officials in their profile (if we’re able to correctly geocode your address). We’re working on the other states, so stay tuned!
• Improved Search now includes ALL State officials as well as Federal.
• You can now subscribe to a letter and get email alerts whenever anyone comments on it.
  (simply comment on a letter and be sure to check the "Subscribe" checkbox)
• Get a list of the most recent letters (not just most active letters)
• Check out our list of RSS Feeds – You can now stay on top of your favorite issue / topic!

Check out some of these great letters…

1. Medical Marijuana: in defense of a voter approved measure.
2. Reduce the Gas Tax and Provide Relief to All Americans!
3. Its Time to Balance the Budget!
4. Reinstate Proposition 36 – "Treatment Rather Than Incarceration"
5. Same-Sex Marriages – Protect the Rights of Homosexuals