MyAmerica: Democracy 2.0

MyAmerica.gov would connect citizens to one another and to their Members of Congress in order to make participation easy. The site would combine popular social media features like "friend" and "news feed" with features like forum discussion, blogs, votes, polls, surveys and petitions that would facilitate mass constituent input. Most importantly, our design is unique from visiblevote.us, voteiq.com and other "civic networking" dot coms emerging in 2010 because it would tie users' accounts to their true life identities through government-issued passwords derived from, but in no way traceable to, the SSN system. This way, citizen participation could be centered around site pages for each district and state while representatives could be certain that all input on their district/state page is exclusively from constituents. The end product would thus be a public good operated by the GSA Office of Constituent Services and Innovative Technologies as a .gov to improve citizen participation and Member of Congress accountability. Our team of five is currently operating out of Silver Spring. We have begun building the prototype and wish to simply give the product to the government to implement in hopes of revitalizing American democracy by offering a more convenient, open and gratifying option of contacting one's congressman than letters, phone or email. The Maryland General Assembly comes into session for three months beginning mid-January. One prominent state senator likes the idea and said he may be willing to introduce a bill to fund a Maryland pilot of MyAmerica, but echoed the same point made by others--that we first need to build a prototype. Thus, while our plan of action involves meetings with federal and state decision-makers, our top priority is building this prototype (see http://cymbit.com/MyAmerica/). Unfortunately, building even a simple civic networking site is not easy and with no budget, we have been unable to get the back-end database help necessary and are stuck. Once we recruit (or hire) a new member who can handle our back-end programming, we hope to build a clean, functioning prototype. Then we will give a series of presentations to the Maryland General Assembly, members of the federal government, non-profits and foundations as we seek to find support for a Maryland pilot or (if we can convince the right people) nationwide implementation.