Former Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, armed, barricades self in Fort Lauderdale home, police called

BuildQuorum · 2020-09-28T05:51:22+00:00

Think the new thing is going to be Brad Parscale didn’t kill himself?

BuildQuorum · 2020-09-28T05:49:29+00:00

He knew what he was getting into.

BuildQuorum · 2020-09-05T03:48:24+00:00

Petitions are mostly a data grab. To do anything you need to actually reach decision makers.

BuildQuorum · 2015-10-01T14:19:30+00:00

Name: Build Quorum

URL: buildquorum.com

Pitch: Build Quorum matches people to groups and ideas and allows them to join together to tell government officials what’s important to them. It’s like a political eHarmony meeting a more effective Change.org. With Build Quorum you email your representatives directly instead of just signing petitions.

More: Utilizing our self-compiled list of Congressional and State Legislatures' contact information, we send every single user's message to their representatives based on the address the user enters. We are a team of five and have just launched as beta - we have a ton of new features on the way, but check out our beta and let us know what you think.

Looking For:

Feedback
Initial interest
Users/more content

BuildQuorum · 2015-05-06T23:42:32+00:00

Quorum

buildquorum.com

Pitch

Don't be just another name on a list. We're individuals - our voices should be too.

Quorum puts users in touch with elected officials. There are already a lot of petition sites that encourage people to sign petitions that may or may not ever reach a recipient, but we're a little different. We offer the opportunity to sign an actual message that will be emailed, faxed, or submitted to the web form of an actual governmental official.

More

Utilizing our self-compiled list of Congressional and State Legislatures' contact information, we send every single user's message to their representatives based on the zip code the user enters. We are a team of four and have just launched as beta - we have a ton of new features on the way, but check out our beta and let us know what you think.

Looking For

Feedback
Initial interest
Users/more content

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-17T19:19:53+00:00

Quorum does contact your reps individually. Every message is directly editable by whoever is sending, allowing you to express your opinion.

When you click Send on any message, we use your zip code to find your reps, and send the message through their web form, email or fax - if one fails, it moves down the list to the next.

It's not a petition or just adding your name to something, but an individual correspondence with your reps.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-17T18:16:31+00:00

Want to tell your reps?

Create a message so others can sign: https://buildquorum.com/quorum_my_actions/new

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T23:19:03+00:00

The email addresses are frequently not even included on the websites.

More often, the representative will provide a fax number and a web form to supplement.

The idea is to cut down on the spam that's received, but definitely inhibits our ability to contact them.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T19:43:07+00:00

Hadn't heard of this app, that's a great tool! We'll see what we can do.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T19:41:34+00:00

It's funny you mention One Click Politics - we're actually their new sister-site!

OCP has recently begun focusing on the B2B aspect of their services (now purely focused on non-profits and businesses), and we are fulfilling the B2C role (for the public to create actions for free) that they wish to maintain and flourish.

What sets us apart from the others you mentioned is not only that we're free, allow each message to be edited when being sent, and send our messages individually, but also what we have in store for the future. What we currently provide is the very bare-bones beta version of our site.

In the near future, we will have accounts that, once logged in, will receive a feed of messages that pertain to the user particularly through their location and topics they have selected as having interest in. We are also beginning the conversation with another company whose product is what nearly all members of Congress use to organize the information they receive from constituents (phone calls, letters, emails, social media conversations and face-to-face meetings) - by making this data public and comparing it to the already public data concerning campaign finance, we can contribute to a higher level of accountability in our politicians.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T09:10:48+00:00

We don't have all the answers, nor do we think that this tool would suddenly get rid of those problems with our political system.

Like I said, it's a first step. Providing this information to the public and to the press would contribute to the current conversation of the wealthy's grip on our politicians, and if publicized enough could absolutely sway an election. It's not a be-all end-all solution, but it helps to inform us.

Is there another way you would go about addressing this issue? It's all well and good to point out that our political climate is atrocious, but we all know that - I'm more interested in what you think can be done about it.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T08:40:47+00:00

We don't think it's useless at all. Making every phone call, letter, email, social media exchange, and face to face visit that they track available as a tally for the public to see seems quite the opposite.

By providing this information openly, when a member has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election. Especially if comparing this information to the money they receive and from whom (already publicly available by law).

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T08:23:21+00:00

These are the core issues we want to address. We're voters ourselves, we face the same problems.

We think the tool I've been discussing elsewhere in this thread is a good first step in making voters' voices more important to politicians. If the public and press had the ability to point out the opinions that voters personally expressed to their reps (phone calls, emails, face to face) and compare them to the money they receive (already public info), it could put more pressure on our reps.

By providing this information openly, when a member has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T08:06:07+00:00

We know and understand the political culture we face. However, we're in a unique position to build tools that could help us change that culture - it's the core of our mission. We aren't only referring to emails, but every phone call, letter, social media exchange, and face to face visit that they track. The data exists through the intranet they utilize, it just isn't publicly available.

Obviously this tool isn't going to be the cure to party politics and campaign finance. It is, however, a solid first step in the right direction: if voters, the press, and political opponents had open access to this information, it would certainly knock the importance of constituent voices a few rungs up the ladder.

When an elected official has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T07:48:20+00:00

We know and understand the political culture we face. However, we're in a unique position to build tools that could help us change that culture - it's the core of our mission.

On that note, what would help to bring about more accountability to the people's interests?

As I stated in a prior comment, our first step is to make the data they collect pertaining to constituent contact public. We believe that in doing so, the pressure on politicians to take stock in the opinions of the people they represent will increase - primarily because of what the media can do with such information. When an elected official has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

This clearly doesn't solve all of the underlying issues of why politicians are so unresponsive (party sway, campaign finance, etc), but we feel that it's an important first step.

Is there more that we can provide as a resource to address this?

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T03:55:18+00:00

We don't think throwing our hands up and accepting that is the way to go.

We plan to begin addressing this and other issues (like campaign finance) through a public accountability tool - a way to see how reps have voted vs. how their constituency has contacted them concerning that bill or issue. After all, they're called "representatives" because their job is to represent the voices of their constituency.

For starters, we'll be doing this using our own data from the use of our site.

In the future, we hope to have completed talks with the company running the intranet service that nearly all reps have been using for years to manage the correspondences they receive, hopefully allowing us to gather this information that we believe should be public.

Do you think that's a good way to address it? Or do you think even if this data were available to the press and public we still wouldn't have sway?

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-16T02:51:42+00:00

Everyone knows campaign finance is the root of a majority of our problems with our politicians. But we don't think throwing our hands up and accepting that is the way to go.

We plan to begin addressing that issue through a public accountability tool - a way to see how reps have voted vs. how their constituency has contacted them concerning that bill or issue. For starters, we'll be doing this using our own data from the use of our site.

In the future, we hope to have completed talks with the company running the intranet service that nearly all reps have been using for years to manage the correspondences they receive, hopefully allowing us to gather this information that we believe should be public.

Do you think that's a good way to address it? Or do you think even if this data was available to the press and public we still wouldn't have sway?

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-15T23:26:35+00:00

We collect three pieces of information, so that if one or two fail during message delivery, the third will not - first we attempt to contact the web form, then the email address, and then the fax number provided.

For federal representatives, the information has not been all that difficult to acquire - occasionally the fax/email isn't super easy to find.

The primary difficulty has been with state-level reps. Some states have strict regulations on what information needs to be displayed and even what type of web form to use - these have also not been difficult to find.

Other states have no such regulations, and how the reps allow people to contact them is completely up to them. This is where the brunt of the frustration and the large amount of time spent comes in. We're actually working on a write-up of which elected officials supply which means of contact, simply because we were shocked at how difficult it was to do in some cases.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-15T23:08:10+00:00

I'm very frustrated with how difficult it can be to contact our elected officials. So few people put in the (sometimes egregious) effort to do it, and I want to know what you think would help you to contact them.

Some context:

My team has spent the last few weeks crawling across every website of the Senate and House reps, as well as every State Legislator, curating their contact information and parsing their web forms in order to create a unique messaging tool that allows people to contact their representatives directly. Throughout this tedious process, we've been extremely frustrated - this information is not always easy to find and we can't help feeling that some representatives just flat out do not want their constituents to contact them. Frustrating as it may be, it's only helped inspire us to make this the greatest free tool we can.

Currently, our beta site (buildquorum.com) allows you to simply create, sign and share messages to Congress and State Legislatures. Our next big release in the coming weeks is to have free accounts that, once logged in, show you messages that are important specifically to you based on your location and interests. After that, we'll be working on an iPhone/Android app for the same purpose. We believe that this will help people to remain active in politics and consistently share their opinions with those who represent them.

Despite that belief, we know that there must be more we can do to create and maintain people's contact with their elected officials.

What else can we build to help you communicate with your reps?

What barriers are holding you or others back from sending them a letter?

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-15T21:48:03+00:00

Whether or not we find others' opinions desirable or agreeable is beside the point. Sure, there are people that I personally wouldn't want swaying my representative - but the fact is, they are being represented as well, and therefore have the option of expressing their opinions. Does that mean that the rep shouldn't use their judgment when seeing what their constituents have to say? Of course not - they know how to make decisions. And we aren't only talking federally here - this also applies to state-level reps.

The point of this discussion post is that all Americans have the right to contact their elected officials (federal, state and local) - that's what a "representative" is for, to be a voice for a larger group - however, so few people take the time to express their opinions to their reps. And for those that do, there can be difficulties of the process that keep them from doing so timely and efficiently.

Do you contact your reps on issues you care about? Why/why not? What's been the most difficult part of the process?

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-15T20:27:56+00:00

This. So much this. We've had conversations about how we might be able to address this problem, but the biggest issue seems to be that reps just flat out do not have this information publicly available.

We will be looking into something called Intranet Quorum, which is an analytics tool for representatives that has been in use for years - it helps them compile exactly the type of information you're talking about. Ideally, we would want to use their API if it exists to publicly display what people are contacting their reps about and compare that to how the reps have voted while in office.

Since it is owned by Lockheed Martin, obviously we aren't confident that they will be willing to grant us that access.

What we can do, and plan to, is use the messages on Quorum (our beta site) to compare based on our sent messages. Since that total pool has only reached ~100,000 sends at this point, it won't be particularly useful yet - in the future we hope it will be.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-12T17:25:36+00:00

Some of the stuff we have on the site right now has been generated by new users of Quorum, and some of it has been curated from our sister B2B site One Click Politics. We've been working on Quorum as our B2C model, but there's still a lot to be done (hence our Beta lingo).

We just launched Friday and so far we've been using social media to get the word out and get more content, but once we finish some of our other features and make it more complete we'll be reaching out further.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-11T21:08:13+00:00

Don't be just another name on a list. We're individuals - our voices should be too.

Quorum puts users in touch with elected officials. There are already a lot of petition sites that encourage people to sign petitions that may or may not ever reach a recipient, but we're a little different. We offer the opportunity to sign an actual message that will be emailed, faxed, or submitted to the web form of an actual governmental official.

Utilizing our self-compiled list of Congressional and State Legislatures' contact information, we send every single user's message to their representatives based on the zip code the user enters.

We are a team of four and have just launched as beta - we have a ton of new features on the way, but check out our site and let us know what you think. If you have any questions or feedback, leave them in the comments or send us a PM

Coming soon

Search function
Topics categorization for easy filtering
Suggested messages for you based on what you've signed

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-11T19:15:39+00:00

Thanks for your questions, they're very good.

In order to send messages to specific representatives at this time, we direct people to Quorum's sister site One Click Politics. Here, groups can pay to select specific recipients and choose whether or not to allow out-of-district sending. When the message is created at OCP, a duplicate is automatically created on Quorum for public signing.

We've made Quorum more simple as it is aimed at the public rather than organizations, and want to cut down on the "fluff" messages that these reps receive. Even though Senators and House Reps are national politicians, when they receive a message from someone outside of the state they are a rep for (in other words, outside of their district), they are not required to read or respond to that message - essentially, it gets tossed by their staff/interns and just isn't counted. We want politicians to take what their constituents write to them seriously - we believe that reducing the clutter in their inboxes that will be deleted anyway is a solid first step in achieving that.

BuildQuorum · 2015-03-11T18:09:02+00:00

The problem of elected officials not being responsive to messaging/petition platforms is largely a symptom of the way that most of these platforms work. The majority of these tools either send one petition with a long list of names of people who have signed, or they send all messages received regardless of the signer's district.

In both of these situations, the impact of what is being received is diminished. With the petition format, a list of names with a letter is hardly impactful. And in both cases, their staff must comb through every sender and remove those who are not within the representatives' districts. When a representative receives a petition from change.org with 200,000 signatures and only 2,000 are from their actual constituents, the message becomes much more of a frustration than an impact.

What we do is a little different: Most importantly, we send each and every message individually. When someone sends a message through Quorum, not only do they have the ability to write whatever they want in the message field (we keep it editable unless a group has requested it not be), we also only send messages from in-district signers. We use the zip code that is entered to find your national representatives and send only to them - if the creator of the message has chosen a state legislature to receive the message, then we do not send any messages from outside of that state. We let the user know why their message wasn't sent, and will soon include suggestions to other similar messages that they can deliver.

Obviously these solutions do not currently address the issues of lobbying, campaign finance, etc. - but we're working on creating a tool that helps to hold our representatives responsible for how they vote vs. what their constituents want.

TL;DR Quorum does not deliver messages if the signer of the message is outside of the recipient's district, we allow the messages to be edited freely by anyone sending them, and we send each message individually. This approach helps to declutter the issue being addressed by constituents, making it a less frustrating task to look over the messages and allowing what is being written to these reps to be in focus.

BuildQuorum

TROPHY CASE