I have voted in every presidential election, every off year election, and most primaries that have occurred since I turned 18. I have been a politically active person. And, when I was 21, I interned with a group in Washington DC, where I did worked with a senator's office on legislative issues.
And then I became a geek.
Starting with the DMCA, it struck me that this group and that group and the other group have voter guides, but my group, the geek group, don't have a senator's or congressman's voting record on the issues that I find important. I did find one for a high-tech industries group, but really, do you think that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have the same positions on these issues that Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and you do?
So, what a person needs to do -- notice how I'm cleverly not actually volunteering for this, yet -- is keep track of geek-related legislation, record votes, then set up a web page where you can say, for example, that you live in zip code 31337, and it'll tell you that that your senators are Chambliss and Isakson, this is how they voted, and this is how you can contact them. And in this environment, we know that making web pages is easy, and the hard part is collecting the data.
This is really the first step of grassroots activism, and unless and until we get a deep-pocket pro-netNeutrality, anti-DMCA, Lessig-compliant angel, this is the way we should go.
