At the time of writing this, there are 10,393 bills before the US Congress, and thousands more at the state and local levels. Only a tiny fraction of these bills are covered in television and print news media; meanwhile, the internet allows access to unprecedented amounts of civic data, but is so vast and disjointed it turns-off everyone but the most web-savvy political zealots. The result: most Americans feel overwhelmed by the political process, alienated from their elected representatives, become cynical about the integrity of the US government, and tune-out. EveryVote.org is an open-source, non-profit project in development trying to address these problems by making in-depth civic engagement as easy and fun as using Facebook or online dating sites. We believe EveryVote's ease-of-use and robust functionality can inspire younger generations to participate in elections, and older generations to participate on the internet. The primary functionality of EveryVote is to provide users with an intuitive interface that enables users to vote on bills, officials, candidates, other EV users, and organizations, and then to automatically compare their voting preferences with all other voters' preferences on the site. Other essential functions include: sending registration deadline and election day reminders; helping users run for office themselves; facilitating organized representative-to-constituent and user-to-user dialogue; providing democratic news sharing tools; and much more. EveryVote will debut hosting all the legislative and electoral API data of the US Congress available online, but any user can add their own governing body's information (with its own custom parameters) to the EV platform and make use of the same civic engagement tools. This means K-12 students can use EV to manage the legislative and electoral procedures of their own student council or mock government as part of a civics education curriculum. And if EV can help manage student councils, maybe it can help PTAs, teacher's unions, and any other organization with legislative and electoral procedures. As a user browses the site, EV automatically compares that user's voting record to the records of officials, candidates, other users, and groups, and displays the result as a % correlation next to that person or group's profile picture.* On the bills page, users can learn instantly how the people and groups they support or oppose are voting on that issue. For example, 8 of 10 groups a user supports are voting in favor of a bill, the groups/supports databox would display a green +60%; if the same amount were voting against, it would display a red -60%; and a split of 5 yeas and 5 nays would display a black 0%. Ultimately, since EveryVote is an open-source platform that allows users to add and facilitate their own government or organization's legislative and electoral processes, EveryVote's goal is to promote democratic civic engagement across the world. --- For more information about the EveryVote project, please visit our homepage and signup for the EV mailing list. Our goal is to have a limited-functionality beta of EveryVote finished by Fall 2012. If you have any questions, or would like to help create EveryVote with us, please email the EV team at contactus@everyvote.org. *(Quoted from OpenSource.com interview)

At the time of writing this, there are 10,393 bills before the US Congress, and thousands more at the state and local levels. Only a tiny fraction of these bills are covered in television and print news media; meanwhile, the internet allows access to unprecedented amounts of civic data, but is so vast and disjointed it turns-off everyone but the most web-savvy political zealots. The result: most Americans feel overwhelmed by the political process, alienated from their elected representatives, become cynical about the integrity of the US government, and tune-out. EveryVote.org is an open-source, non-profit project in development trying to address these problems by making in-depth civic engagement as easy and fun as using Facebook or online dating sites. We believe EveryVote's ease-of-use and robust functionality can inspire younger generations to participate in elections, and older generations to participate on the internet. The primary functionality of EveryVote is to provide users with an intuitive interface that enables users to vote on bills, officials, candidates, other EV users, and organizations, and then to automatically compare their voting preferences with all other voters' preferences on the site. Other essential functions include: sending registration deadline and election day reminders; helping users run for office themselves; facilitating organized representative-to-constituent and user-to-user dialogue; providing democratic news sharing tools; and much more. EveryVote will debut hosting all the legislative and electoral API data of the US Congress available online, but any user can add their own governing body's information (with its own custom parameters) to the EV platform and make use of the same civic engagement tools. This means K-12 students can use EV to manage the legislative and electoral procedures of their own student council or mock government as part of a civics education curriculum. And if EV can help manage student councils, maybe it can help PTAs, teacher's unions, and any other organization with legislative and electoral procedures. As a user browses the site, EV automatically compares that user's voting record to the records of officials, candidates, other users, and groups, and displays the result as a % correlation next to that person or group's profile picture.* On the bills page, users can learn instantly how the people and groups they support or oppose are voting on that issue. For example, 8 of 10 groups a user supports are voting in favor of a bill, the groups/supports databox would display a green +60%; if the same amount were voting against, it would display a red -60%; and a split of 5 yeas and 5 nays would display a black 0%. Ultimately, since EveryVote is an open-source platform that allows users to add and facilitate their own government or organization's legislative and electoral processes, EveryVote's goal is to promote democratic civic engagement across the world. --- For more information about the EveryVote project, please visit our homepage and signup for the EV mailing list. Our goal is to have a limited-functionality beta of EveryVote finished by Fall 2012. If you have any questions, or would like to help create EveryVote with us, please email the EV team at contactus@everyvote.org. *(OpenSource.com - http://red.ht/IqyDmU)

article for opensource.com

1) Tell our readers what EveryVote.org is.

EveryVote.org is a web platform beginning development that will help people take a more active and informed role in their government or organization. It will be an open-source, non-profit, civic engagement social network platform. EV strives to be a comprehensive yet easy to use hub of the internet's best civic engagement tools and resources.

It will debut containing all the legislative and electoral data of the US Congress available online, but any user can add their own governing body with its own rules, procedures, and data to EV and make use of the platform's utilities.

After users signup for their own EveryVote profile, it enables them to state their support or opposition to not only bills, officials, and candidates, but also other users and groups. As a user browses the site, EV automatically compares that user's voting record to the records of officials, candidates, other users, and groups, and displays the result as a % correlation next to that person or group's profile picture.

On the bills page, users can learn instantly how the people and groups they support or oppose are voting on that issue. For example, if 8 of 10 groups a user supports are voting in favor of a bill, the groups/supports databox would display a green +80%; if the same amount were voting against, it would display a red -80%.

EveryVote helps users participate in elections by providing them with an easy to scan candidate display, helping users register to vote, and sending reminders of registration deadlines and election days.

It even assists users if they would like to run for office themselves, explaining the requirements and procedures required to run for that office, adding their profile to their district's election page, helping them coordinate with volunteers, and linking users to make campaign donations on their EV profile.


EveryVote will have full social network functionality (friend requests, event invitations, messaging, etc.), optional cross-functionality with Facebook wherever possible, and free app versions for mobile devices.

It will also have a democratically driven social news aggregation platform, similar to a platform like reddit. But unlike reddit, EV will give users the ability to view only votes from supporters, opposers, or undecideds of that bill, person, or group.

Lastly, since EveryVote is open-source and encourages users to design and share their own apps for others to customize their browsing experience, we like to think there's no limit to how a platform like EveryVote can help people.

2) This open source project is currently in development and you're looking for volunteers. What sort of help are you looking for?

Right now we're looking for developers, web designers, and graphic designers, especially those with previous experience working on civic engagement and social network platforms. As development progresses, we'd also appreciate help from political scientists, statisticians, public relations specialists, and really anyone who'd like to contribute to EV's development.

If we are fortunate enough to receive sufficient grant funding or donations, we would like to expedite the site's completion by hiring a professional development team.

3) What are the civic benefits that you see EveryVote.org providing?

We see EveryVote encouraging civic engagement in a variety of forms. It will help users participate in elections, encourage civil discourse, and facilitate democratic processes. Since users can add their own governing body and manage its legislative and electoral processes through EveryVote, the site can promote democratic collaboration for organizations of all kinds.

We also believe it has educational value, as students could use the EV platform to manage their school's student council or mock government for a class activity.

4) What other open source and open government organizations are you working with to collaborate on this project?

EveryVote isn't formally collaborating with any open source or open government organizations at this time, but we'd love to collaborate with any organization that has experience facilitating civic engagement on the internet. We are definitely dependent on other organizations however, as for the US version of EveryVote we are planning on using the great API resources freely available from the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, Maplight, and other sites.

In the past couple weeks, we have submitted introductions to the EveryVote project to Stanford's Liberation Technologies listserv, Sunlight Labs message board, and Steven Clift kindly a posted an introduction on his Newswire listserv. The response EV has received has been very encouraging, but we have no formal collaborations at this time.

5) We understand you'll be at Transparency Camp in Washington, DC on April 28th. What are you looking to accomplish at the camp?

Our plan for attending TC is to: learn as much as we can about open government initiatives; introduce people to the EveryVote project; give a presentation; talk with prospective volunteers; find information on grant funding opportunities; meet interesting people; have fun :D

American democracy is broken. Let's fix it.

81% of Americans believe America is "on the wrong track." 60% of Americans think the political debate in Washington does not represent the concerns raised in their own community. Only 13% of Americans say they have confidence in Congress (Time Magazine, Harris Interactive). This is what a broken democracy looks like.

Here are 3 major issues I think we need to address:

Campaign finance
In the 2008 congressional elections, 93% of the winning candidates spent more money on their campaign than their opponents. Meanwhile, only 0.08% of the US population is responsible for over 66% of all campaign donations (Center for Responsive Politics).

Our politicians -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike -- are profoundly aware their political survival depends on securing the most campaign funding. What we have is an electoral system in place that gives our politicians huge incentive to represent the interests of a tiny pool of wealthy donors above 99.92% of America.

Let's fix it: End or dramatically limit private campaign contributions. Currently, a person can donate about $43,000 a year to support their preferred candidate and party. We should demand our politicians set this limit to a level all Americans can be expected to afford, say, no more than $100 a year. Otherwise, we need to do away with private funding altogether and convert to a publicly funded system, which would give all eligible candidates the same amount of campaign funding.

The 'Revolving Door' When a politician or government regulator leaves office to take a position as a lobbyist, or for a company they were previously in charge of regulating, they move through what is called the revolving door. This process presents our officials with incentive to bootlick for companies and special interest groups while in office,  with the understanding that they will receive an extremely lucrative position with one of these companies or groups after they leave office. According to Legistorm, nearly 5,400 congressional staffers have gone through the revolving door in the past decade.

Let's fix it: Support a bill like Colorado Senator Michael Bennett's, which would institute a 6 year ban on lobbying by congressional staff after leaving our government, and a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress.

American voting format
Al Gore would have defeated George W. Bush in the 2000 election had Ralph Nader not run for president. A majority of Americans wanted a liberal president in 2000, but Bush won because Nader -- a candidate with no conceivable chance of winning -- absorbed many of Gore’s would-be votes.

We've all heard the expression "don't vote independent, you'll just throw your vote away." But the truth is far more troublesome than that. As evidenced by the Gore/Bush presidential election, voting independent is actually a vote for your least preferred candidate.

Let's fix it: Instead of our current "one person, one vote" system, which promotes the Democrat/Republican bipartisan stranglehold on our democracy, demand our government start using an approval-based voting system, which allows you to vote for multiple candidates.

---
Come 1%, Come 99%! Occupy DeKalb is meeting at First and Lincoln every Friday @ 5pm. Like us on Facebook for ODK updates!

Researching the Medicinal Applications of Prohibited Substances

Some compelling studies have emerged over the past decade that have linked prohibited substances -- including MDMA (Ecstasy), and psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") -- with significant, and sometimes profound, medical applications.

Unfortunately for researchers, studies on these substances are few and far between. As banned substances under most international law, they are extremely difficult for experimenters to obtain, and researchers assume heightened liability risks to study illegal drugs.

Regardless of these impediments, illegal substances may have superior medical benefits to legal prescriptions, and in many cases prescription medications are posing much more danger to people than illegal drugs. According to the FDA, between January 1997 and June 2005, marijuana was cited as the primary cause of 0 deaths, while medications that are often prescribed instead of marijuana caused 10,008 deaths. Meanwhile, a 2007 study by the Florida Medical Examiner's Commission found prescription drugs -- especially drugs like Oxycotin, Vicodin, Valium, and Xanax -- were directly responsible for 300% more deaths in Florida than all illegal drugs combined that year.

So why should it be so much more difficult for researchers to study prohibited substances for medicinal purposes? The astonishing results of recent experiments involving MDMA and psilocybin only make this question even more urgent. Take the following examples...

-Psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer administered 2 MDMA therapy sessions to individuals who had suffered from serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for an average of 19 years. An astonishing 83% of the MDMA recipients showed significant improvement after 2 months from the last therapy session, compared to 25% for the placebo group. None of the subjects experienced serious side-effects or long-term problems from the experiment.

-MDMA is also showing promise as a treatment for leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. Scientists have known for a few years that MDMA has cancer treating properties, but the dose necessary for it to be effective was so large it would kill the patient. As of this year, scientists have developed a modified version of MDMA that has none of the psycho-activity of ecstasy, but is 100x more effective at killing white blood cell cancers.

-A recent study out of Johns Hopkins University showed long-lasting personality change for the better in nearly 60 percent of subjects who were administered a single dose of the psychoactive component of "magic mushrooms," psilocybin. Researchers discovered significant increases in the personality trait "openness," which is related to qualities like compassion and patience. Both participants and their family and friends reported improvements in a participant's relationships, mood, and general well-being more than a year after the final psilocybin session.

So, can we conclude that some illegal drugs have significant medical uses? Generally, no, because there has not been enough research done to draw sound conclusions. But one conclusion is safe: decades of scientific research on these substances have already been lost, thanks to the US led War on Drugs.
---
Come see Dr. Roberts, NIU professor emeritus of psychedelic studies, at the next Students for a Sensible Drug Policy meeting! Tuesday, 10/18 at 8:00pm in the HSC, Room 405.

'We the People' Petitioning and Occupy Wall Street

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions
 
'We the People’ appeared online September 22, 2011. It allows anyone to submit a petition online for any proposal they would like. The petition must privately earn 150 online signatures before it is publicly viewable on the website. When ‘We the People’ debuted, if a petition received 5,000 signatures within 30 days of that petition appearing, the White House said they would publicly respond to that petition. As of October 3, 2011, the White House has increased the petition threshold to 25,000 signatures within 30 days.

I think it's some kind of cosmic serendipity that Occupy Wall Street and We the People happened to spring up within days of each other. I think everyone who aligns themselves with the Occupy Wall Street movement could further the cause by joining We the People and voting for petitions they support, and encourage as many people as possible to participate. Occupy Wall St on Facebook already has about 90,000 members, many of them extremely active users. It should be easy for us to get approval for petitions month after month, forcing the White House to acknowledge our voices each time. Sure, they could dismiss our petitions, but every time petition signers see their proposal ignored, those signers will feel slighted and even more energized to raise awareness to their cause.

I'd like to see OWS members, when interviewed, make mention of the We the People platform. When interviewers challenge us with the, “what does this movement represent?” question, we can still preface our explanation with “well, I can’t speak for everyone involved…” but then go into “but I personally encourage everyone to sign up with We the People at whitehouse.gov/petitions, and to tell the White House directly what proposals they want passed...the petitions I personally support right now include…” This way, everyone who is interviewed can keep true to the integrity of OWS as a decentralized, leaderless movement, while allowing some members to comfortably articulate to interviewers and the rest of the world what specific proposals we as individuals want to see addressed.

I'd like to bury this ‘Occupy Wall Street protesters don't know what they want’ criticism as best we can, and move on to whatever the next challenge will be. I think the We the People platform is a handy resource for applying pressure to the government, while allowing articulated proposals to organically emerge from OWS. It is so easy to use and accessible to anyone with computer access, so I can't think of a good reason not to try to use this to tap on the windows of the White House.

If you like this idea of spreading a 'We the People' meme through Occupy Wall Street, please pass it on!

Peace!

More scattered details on a civic engagement social network...

Ok, here's some more developed ideas for the functionality of such a system...

Users should have to register an account with an email address, to avoid people spamming with votes. Having their email addresses in the system could also help with optional email updates of what is happening in the thread. You could probably make these updates desirable with user-customized charts that display the trend of that proposition in the previous week or so. Having a user account also means that users could be reached by other members, allowing people to share ideas and potentially vote differently after debate.

Without question, spamming, and attempts to hack or rig the system would take place, but the moderators (or whoever is at the end of the day paying the bandwidth bills) would have to do their best to keep the system running smoothly. I would be interested in knowing what strategies reddit, Wikipedia , etc. use to minimize hacks, system rigging, trolls, etc.

A fascinating system of organization and metric analysis tools could be integrated, and extremely easy to use. You could see just what propositions the most people voted yes on, or just the ones that the most people voted no on, or a combination of the two, or where people are who voted against it, or what religion or self-described race or age or height or weight etc etc etc. These metrics could be integrated into appealing maps, charts and graphics.

Also, I have to point out that while Facebook only lets you Like stuff, a democratic legislation proposal system would have to let you vote Yes or No (For or Against) or No Vote, just as you would if you were a member of Congress. This means that we might OWS supporters/sympathizers have to open up our ideas to a public consensus gathering system, and possibly find that we are actually in the minority on certain propositions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't participate just as enthusiastically on the behalf of the 99% (technically, the 100%, anyone can vote in the system). I just think we shouldn't encourage popularizing a forum for civic engagement: where people of all ages and languages can engage in meaningful discussions and feel their voice is being heard more democratically than they are used to.

There's other interesting possibilities too. Maybe you could have some metric system that rates users online credibility as voted on by other members, so those users would have a more heavily weighted vote on a different chart of data. Like, what do the most civic-ly engaged people say should be done about this proposition? This could cause problems though so I mention it only as a possibility.

You could read a user's profile and see (if they choose to share it) how they voted on different issues, and you could try to reach out to them and see if they could be persuaded otherwise. This system could also make it easy to see how the way you vote matches up with famous users or persons in power that choose to participate. (I bet Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul would participate.) Imagine that, you could have your profile show you immediately how many points of agreement and disagreement you have with some real political leader. Or Snooki.

Let's take it further, the actual propositions that are trying to be pushed through Washington should be on there for the global community to vote for or against or not at all. Every politician should be urged to participate. It'd make it real easy to see who has been voting with you and who has been voting against you.

I think a functionality that shows how politicians vote on different issues would be the most exciting feature of this system. You should be able to have your profile collect all your different votes, for or against or indifferent, and then click on a politician, and see how they voted on that particular legislation. For example, you might find that Barrack Obama voted just like you 56% of the time and Rick Perry 37% of the time, and then see exactly what propositions they agreed and disagreed with you on.

Doesn't it suck when you go to the voting booth, and you see a zillion names and you have no idea what they really stand for? All of us want to vote for the person who would most vote like ourselves if we were in office. Wouldn't it be cool to have an app we trusted on our phones that would quickly and easily show us which politicians in this election have voted the most like you in the past, and claim they will vote the most like you in the future? Cut through the rhetoric. Cut through the commercials. Just get the facts: does this politician's votes represent mine or not?

At the end of the day, the system needs to be intuitively easy to use, minimally embellished, but have room for vast sophistication. When you click on a proposition, it should open a thread of dialogue and/or a forum on that proposition. To keep people interested and to the point, these discussions should probably be aggregated in a reddit style as well, so people can find what viewpoints have garnered the most interest or debate recently and historically, so they can get the most pith out of their debate participation. There's no reason why this program can't have a fun Facebook side of it.

There could of course be no advertising, and everything would have to come through donations. There would be a donate now button, but nothing else. No-one keeping the platform running can ever be paid for doing so. All money given to the organization would be spent on keeping the servers running. Any civic engagement site whose operators directly make money from the site should be shame shame shamed out of existence.

I think Occupy Wall Street should align with the development of one (or many, like a Facebook, I think one would just rise to the top) of these systems, to boost civic engagement by the disenfranchised 99% of the world, who can't walk in to Congress and cast a vote, who can't impeach their political leader, who in their busy lives can't remember the details of all the times they've been helped or screwed over by those voting on their behalf.

If something like I'm describing already exists, then great! I think members of the OWS movement should try to attract attention to these platforms for civic engagement. There are people all over the world who would like to be with OWS on the street in NYC or any other major protest, but they just physically can't be there. We have electricity and internet, they don't need to be there! Sure there are people who can't participate because they don't have E & I, but all the more reason to design this online civic engagement system, and vote for the proposition to declare E & I a basic human necessity in the 21st century ; )

Thanks for reading, I'd like to hear what anyone thinks for or against, or take suggestions.

Peace!