The Back Story

Committee Caller was born out of frustration at trying to partake in the American political process. After spending hours dialing every member on the Education and Labor committee, I realized that contacting particular committee members individually should not have to be so laborious. Indeed, the act of repetitively dialing phone numbers into my phone seemed one that I ought to be able to automate. Asterisk, the open source PBX that I was learning was the obvious choice for a development platform for this application.

Unfortunately, attaining access to a database of phone numbers linked to representatives as well as their party and committee affiliations proved costly and difficult. So after some late night Unix shell scripting, I was able to aggregate a database for myself containing all 540 110th Congress representatives and their committee affiliations. More substantially, I created a secondary database containing all 5,000 specific affiliations. I’m happy to share these databases with anyone who is interested in developing a similar application.

The Technology:

First the user selects a committee on the website. A unique call instance is created in the database containing the user’s given phone number, the date and time, and their committee choice.  A call file is then generated that triggers the Asterisk server to instantly call the user and welcome them to the system. The linked tables on my database are then queried to see which representatives are on the requested committee. After the database returns a list of representatives, we query the database again to retrieve the relevant data of those members. This includes phone numbers, names, districts, and their legislative director, if they have one. The retrieved database data is then fed to an Asterisk AGI instance that is controlling the channel that called the user. The user is then asked to confirm they wish to call the first representative in the committee.

The first representative is then called and afterwards the user is asked to rate the call – data that I hope to use to rank representatives’ offices approachability and telephone etiquette.

The process is repeated until the user reaches the last member of the committee.

This is my final project for Shawn Van Every's Fall 2007 Redial class at ITP at New York University.

FAQ

Is Committee Caller free?

Do Committee Members know who I am?

Are you recording my calls?

Isn't this spamming politicans?

Why don't you have state governments on here?

What if I don't want to give you my phone number?

Why is this page hosted on a Asterisk server on NYU? What's with the funny redirect?

What happens if the representative that I call says they won't listen to me because I'm not from their district?

Wouldn't writing a letter be easier and more effective?

How can I get in contact?

Thank You