Resistance is Voltage Over Current Events

Note: Posts like this are going to be a bit blurry in content and scope. I'm writing about a political tool, and I have political thoughts that I'll share on my other blog. Here, I want to talk about ResistBot's features, uses, good points, and possible points of failure.

Resistbot came to my attention about a week ago via Twitter.  Very simply, you text "resist" to 50409 and the bot will walk you through sending a fax, first to your Senators, then your Congressional Representative. Occasionally you'll be prompted to invite others, donate to the cause, or write again if it's been a day or so. There's a lot more information on the website.

What problem am I trying to solve?

Abuse

I've been concerned about online abuse and abuse of online tools for some time.  Commentors on ProductHunt point out that having the name "Resistbot" is going to turn people off, especially those who don't feel like resisting.

At a certain point this will not matter. People who are not resisting will begin to use the tool if they have not already.

Other potential abuses:

• Sending nonsense: mostly harmless.
• Jamspam - attempts to send control codes. I don't know if this will jam the SMS or fax or the sorting software, but it's something to think about.
• Sending threats - it's unknown if there is a language filter in the bot. There certainly ought to be something in the software that Congress uses. Since you're required to send a name along, there's obviously a mechanism for dealing with that, which leads to 
• Impersonation - Right now the bot asks for your name and address. At this point, you could be sending faxes to several offices with just the names on your Christmas list. 
• Filtering by phone number will not work, as people have whatever number they got with their cellphone and/or messaging service. I'm in California, and my phone numbers are from two completely different states.
• This is where the harassment issue gets very serious. Officials have to take threats seriously, and it's not hard to imaging someone setting up an innocent person to take the heat.

I don't know if any of these things have happened, but it's almost guaranteed that they will.

A thornier problem are people who have registered in their state's Confidential Address Program. Victims of abuse can register an anonymous address, usually the Department of Justice or the Secretary of State. This can make determining a Congressional Representative very tricky. There should be no reason for people to put themselves at risk by giving the bot their actual address.

Is there anything you like?

Of course! It's very easy to use, and I can send a fax to my representatives the minute the idea comes to mind, day or night. It has about a five sentence limit, so I have to think carefully about what I say.  It's a bit awkward sending things to all three reps when it might only concern the Senate or Congress, but that's minor.

What I really dig is that there is a huge potential for participation by people who have been unable to voice their concerns in the past: 

• People who don't have time to call and wait on hold and then get nervous and lose track of what they wanted to say. 
• People who can't get access to email except at a public library, and they have to use that time for things that matter more, like getting a job or doing one.
• People who literally cannot afford stamps.  Politicians have franking privileges; people should have them, too.
• People who have limited use of their hands - they can either use voice to text, or a stylus to say what they want. No stamps, and just one button to click, <send>.

I have passed this on to disabled friends and am waiting to hear back. I am a big fan of making things easy, but I'm a much bigger fan of making things possible.

Who publicizes negative results?

Some do.  I try to learn from others' mistakes so I can make original ones.  A year after the KnowWiki came into being it was time to re-evaluate things.

Some things were very successful.  Some things were not.

Good: Scanning homogeneous collections of stuff, running OCR and crowd editing transcripts turned out very well.  This was the one area where a true living collection came to be.

Bad: Collections of varied materials caused nightmares in creating metadata and in posting things online.

Changes in the environment: dSpace became a more viable solution with upgrades and custom programming; something that had not been available last year.

Feature vs. Bug: Wikis are very easy to edit and it's possible to create a system of categorization.  This means you can do nothing or you can do too much.  A few curators ran into the problem of too many options, or as the Fifth Wave cartoon called it decades ago: Toxic Option Syndrome.

Discussions about these things (and other observations) made me rethink what the questions are really good for.  Saying that they've helped me solved problems is good; others telling me the same is good, but I can't point to this and say "this is how you solve problems".

On the whole, the questions in their various contexts can be viewed as structured Active Listening.  The BRQ is a conversation starter (or stopper, sadly).

The Operational Questions are good for making you think about how something will work.  They don't help you determine how much work you're going to end up doing.  They are mostly good for risk management if used well.

The Directional Questions still tend to overwhelm people and are best answered in a backwards way: get someone else to do it for you.  Chances are you've already discussed your problem with others.  If you get someone to answer with what they'd think you'd say, you end up with a better picture than if you sat and stared at the screen for a few hours.

I'll post more on my rethinking later.

Neologism Alert!

This little gem was coined one day when yet another project was doomed to oblivion by the piling on of absolutely critical deliverables after extensive reviews.

"Yeah but"s are actually essential to a successful project.  The devil is in the timing.  If you're still working around with the direction the New Thing is going to take, you end up with scope-jacking.  If you hold it off until you're at the operational planning stage, you're golden.  That's when you call it "risk-management".

There are always exceptions - usually when you run into legal issues that prevent directions you can take.  Or invisible boundaries when you find out there's a duplicate somewhere.

But as a general rule, do whatever it takes to dodge scope-jacking.