Contact Us - We're Easy To Find
Contact our Team
- To give OC-specific feedback, volunteer to help, or report a problem: writeus@opencongress.org
- General questions, partnership inquiries, or media requests: David Moore, Executive Director: david@ppolitics.org.
- Technical questions, volunteer to help with web development or systems administration: Carl Tashian, Director of Technology: carl@opencongress.org.
- Questions about the OpenCongress Blog, insider tips, link suggestions: Donny Shaw, Outreach Coordinator: donny@opencongress.org
Donors and Charitable Foundations - Fund Our Work
OpenCongress is a leading example of how open technology can educate the public, empower diverse communities, and create transparency in government. We have a good start, but really, we've just begun. The Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, is actively seeking funding partners for the maintenance and development of OpenCongress, OpenGovernment, and other free and open-source public web resources. Currently, our tools are used by a variety of individuals, political bloggers, journalists, and issue-based groups for collaborative watchdogging of Congress. With additional funding, OpenCongress and OpenGovernment can become far more powerful platforms for political participation, both online and offline. We seek to add new data sources about money in politics, build innovative new open-source web features, and expand our non-profit web development team to better meet the needs of our large user community. We have big plans.
Towards these ends, our development wish-list is extensively documented, publicly transparent (yes!), and ready-to-go... we simply need more resources to start building. Are you in a position to give $1,000 or more to help us create some amazing new open-source tools? To start a conversation about how our work can address your personal giving interests or your foundation's program areas, please get in touch with David Moore, Executive Director: david@ppolitics.org.
Digital Contact Deets
- Jabber / AIM / Skype :: davidmooreppf
- IRC: #opencongress on freenode.net
- Social networking: PPF prefers free software -- while we await the development of new projects such as Diaspora and other community efforts towards open-source, open standards, privacy-aware networking, we hold down an official Facebook group.
- Micro-publishing: PPF prefers free software -- we're boosters of Identi.ca, a service based on the open-source StatusNet, where you can find us @opencongress, but we also hold down an outpost as @opencongress on the closed Twitter service.<>/li>
- Congress Watchers list on the Twitter machine.
- As above, @ppolitics on Identi.ca, and @ppolitics
- Mail: PPF, 220 Lafayette St. #2 / New York, NY 10012<>/li>
Building the Open Web
PPF strongly prefers free software, but as you can see, we maintain some outposts in closed, proprietary, commercial corners of the Web too. We look forward to a medium-term future where all the technology we use in our daily lives is free, open-source, open standards, and supports the public good. (This has been articulated before in deeper ways, but the open Web is itself a complete social network, if we build it together instead of falling into short-term traps of using proprietary services that don't place an equal value on openness.)
More to come here on the major virtues of free software -- remember, use of social media by elected officials is neither necessary nor sufficient for full public transparency in government. You may have noticed that our mailing address is in NYC, but to be clear, PPF is a web-based organization, and our team members work remotely from all over the country: Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco, CA; Holyoke, MA; Brooklyn, NY; Austin, TX; and more. None of the PPF team is based in Washington, D.C. -- we are proud to maintain our independence and critical distance from the Beltway conventional wisdom and its cocktail party circuit. We're interested in comprehensive, not compromised, electoral reform. Many dedicated non-profit and advocacy organizations have been working for decades towards this cause of reforming our democracy -- we view our role as being agile, open-source developers of user-friendly software. Get in touch: writeus [att] ppolitics d0t org.