The District-by-District Organizing Tool is a full-featured social networking site that empowers users to lobby congressional representatives in order to effect change. By aggregating data from a variety of public sources, the network makes available the most complete data set possible for each representative and senator. Election years, historical results, maps of districts, words mentioned in congress, senators, and a variety of other information is made available within the context of a local dialogue. Everything is "commentable", and the service provides an easy-to-use forum for more substantive discussion. News suggestion, events listing/RSVPing, profiles (with images), a full-featured message system and a registration system that lets users easily identify their district are just some of the features.

An affiliation system is also included to allow the administrator of the service to add groups that users can add to their profiles. The goal of this feature down the line is to allow all of the outside groups lobbying for change along the lines of the community to be integrated into the service.

I think the best description for this tool is that it's a social network for congressional change that's open for anyone to use, change and improve upon. By integrating the facts into the network, I hope that this tool will help create district communities around issues.

Note for people reviewing the site's functionality: Check out the red speech bubbles to see the comment system, upload a picture to see the cropping for image profiles and try sending messages to multiple people.

By integrating the Social Actions API, events and opportunities related to the state with which the users are associated with can be presented. Administrators of the site can change the search terms used to generate the social actions to present users with cause-related actions. The site could be changed to show "single payer", "healthcare", "health" and other terms (with duplicates removed automatically). By putting the actions inline with user-generated events on the website, the chance that users will come across relevant opportunities is greatly increased over periodic web searches on SocialActions.org.

By open-sourcing this tool, the ability to construct social networks for change, such as the ones that played such an incisive role in the McCain and Obama campaigns this past year, is put into the hands of every American.  

License: BSD

Source code:http://districtbydistrict.summerhilldesign.com/source.zip