Democracy.io by EFF

Hey Product Hunt! Democracy.io is the product of about a year's worth of work by our team at EFF. Advocacy organizations have had paid tools to deliver messages to Congress for years, which results in them getting millions of spam messages. But Congress really wants to hear from regular citizens, not receive the same email thousands of times over - and they use complex systems to filter their mail. But their contact forms are clunky and difficult to use; we wanted to make them much simpler and easier to use. To do that, we first had to develop an open source dataset that describes to a computer the steps necessary to submit messages via each contact form for 538 representatives. That was quite a lift, but was made possible by about 100 volunteers who chipped in. The dataset is called contact-congress, and is online here: https://github.com/unitedstates/... Then we had to create a system to fill in the forms based on the dataset. The system we designed is called phantom-of-the-capitol and it does that by firing up 3 browser windows on an AWS instance each time a user submits a message. If the legislator has a CAPTCHA, we take a screenshot and return that to the user. The code for that system is here: https://github.com/EFForg/phanto... Down the line, we're planning on analyzing responses from Members of Congress so that we can hold them accountable. We'll eventually produce reports that rank each legislator by the timeliness and relevance of their responses. Of course, since it's EFF, everything we've built is free and open source software. Really excited to have this out in public, and looking forward to hearing your feedback!