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Change the World Social Network

Submitted by: henkk
Created: Jun 2, 2007, 12:32 pm

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The Idea

Instead of writing letters to corporations or politicians about something that you care about, e.g. Genocide in Darfur, Global Warming, Animal Rights, simply:

1. Download a small program,

2. Upon installation, check the topics you care about most / groups you want to join, each with an online profile explaining what it does and who the campaign moderators are.

3. The program automatically download "letters" about your topics periodically, and sends these to the relevant recipients. E.g. corporation CEOs, congressmen, etc.

4. The program then sends the email directly from your computer

This will make it easy for internet users to effect change without writing letters, starting petitions or picketing outside buildings.

Notes:
a) The letters can be written by a 'core' group of the network and selected by the community
b) Before an email is sent from a user, they will by alerted and can review the message.

I thought of this idea when I was...

debating about the Free Bandwidth Campaign (http://www.fbc.org.za), a campaign aimed at protesting against the incumbent Telco in South Africa by downloading a small program that would USE lots of bandwidth in order to show that the Telco could cope with more bandwidth.

Comments Posted

micco Posted: June 7, 2007, 8:07 am

The easier you make it for people to submit opinions to leaders, the less weight those leaders give it. US legislators tend to pay very little attention to email, especially templated form letter email sent by special-interest site members. On the other hand, they put a lot more weight on physical letters and personal visits. In most cases the letter/visit won't get personal attention, but a staffer will relay a lot more to the legislator than just a count of emails received.

It's kind of a catch-22 that the more you use a program like this to enable people to be involved, the less weight that involvement will have.

henkk Posted: June 7, 2007, 1:35 pm

micco, I'm not sure about the US, but I know in many countries certain departments act on the amount of complaints they receive.

If they receive 10,000 complaints through the proper channels, each of those complaints have to be acknowledged and treated as legit.

In the case that the text is essentially the same, they will only register it as one complaint (or "case") and note that there are 10,000 people who have the same complaint.

The drawback is obviously that one does make it easy for the idiocracy to campaign as well...

saigon Posted: June 11, 2007, 10:33 pm

Sounds like someone's idea regarding opinion...but if the end is the same as t o make a peaceful World to live in..I beleive this would be better if collaborated on Rizal's business PEACE COMMUNITY. ( Doymarn am not hyping ok?)

jill Posted: June 13, 2007, 9:46 am

If you had real names and addresses attached to the letters generated, I think they would carry some weight with some decision makers.

Some decision makers ignore everything that is received electronically!

But if 10,000 emails came in from people whose names and addresses could be verified, I think that would attract attention.

The idea of registering 10,000 and sending a note saying that 10,000 were registered seems very efficient and smart.

Go for it ;-)

Hello!

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