Parental leave civic hacking pt. 1: an updated 5 Calls app is out sporting a new “Inbox” tab with important votes and messages from your Reps!
I’ve always wanted to build ”DMs from your reps” for 5 Calls and I really solidified my belief that it was important earlier this year when, again, hundreds of thousands of (mostly young) people found the app through insta and tiktok as a way to express their frustration on the war against Palestine.
These young people have made an effort to contact their reps about an important topic to them, how do they know if their rep is doing what they asked? Inbox closes the loop for people who don’t read political news every day, and gives them a tangible reason to vote for or against their rep in the next election.
The other thing 5 Calls has always been pretty good at is curating important topics. We don’t write up every bill that’s introduced in Congress and that gives the uninitiated a sense of what is impactful to call on. Similarly, you can get push notifications for every Congressional vote from lots of places, we‘re offering a view into the important stuff that makes or breaks your opinion of their work (and ties it back to stuff you’ve called on!)
Curation is a lot more work than sending a notification every time the House approves a new Post Office name, so building tools to review and summarize bills has been about 80% of the work to get this out the door. And of course if you think this work is as important as we do, you can contribute here or pitch in on some of our open source projects on github.