Graham Sibley and Justin Scot, founders of the YounitedFoundation, invited FreedomSpeaks to sponsor their event again this year – the 2009 Donkaphant Film Festival in partnership with the LA Film Festival, and they premiered Jason Pollack’s new film, “The Youngest Candidate“.

The event was great, and the film… even better. Jason Pollock did an incredible job writing, directing and producing this documentary that follows four teenagers as they throw their hat into the political ring.  Pollock worked with Michael Moore for over three years on 911 and this is his directorial debut. It shows a glimpse of the emerging future, and we’re excited to see this film succeed.

Check it out!

The Youngest Candidate, Directed by Jason Pollock (@Jason_Pollock)

We’re proud to announce the release of our flagship product The Proponent. In a nutshell, it’s the online solution for grassroots advocacy campaigns. Hats off to Ben Kuo at socalTECH.com for his recent coverage of our new product launch.

We’ve built it on a solid framework (cloud computing services, xml, json, rest, etc.), and our approach is a game changer is what our clients are telling us. Not only does our API allow our clients to control their presentation, but our data set drills down to the local level.  Plus, we’ve priced it to take market from competitors, plus we’ve filled it to the brim with Web 2.0 functionality and features.

We have an referral program too, so keep your eyes and ears peeled about our weekly webinars to show you how to use the product, as well as making some dough referring clients our way.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We’re always open to feedback – positive and critical.

How can you help us get the  product out there and wake up the neighborhood?

C’mon!

We’ve recently signed on TalkPAC, an organization dedicated to defeating the “Fairness Doctrine”, to our suite of advocacy solutions. By implementing our API, they’ve been able to send out over 100,000 letters (via email & fax) to their members’ representatives. Along with them, we’ve also signed on NoMoreTaxation, an organization intent on decreasing the tax burden on the American Citizen.

We’ve also begun working on an offline solution to the problem of citizen apathy disengagement called CitizenCamp. Think of this as an offline (think “real world”) tool to get the citizenry educated and involved in the political process. Such items as how to create an election initiative or proposition, best practices in effecting political change, and a slew of others will be on the agenda. We’ll also be looking to you, the citizens of this fine country, for ideas on making government more transparent and accessible. FreedomSpeaks, along with some other socially conscious partners, will be sponsoring events to achieve this goal. So be on the lookout for a CitizenCamp near you. Oh, there will also be food and drink served at all CitizenCamps – good times abound!

A revolution has begun America. It’s time to wake up the neighborhood!

I read a post on a voting system report being sealed. This seems pretty simple to me. If it has anything to do with our government (barring, of course, national security), it should be made COMPLETELY transparent and available for inspection/accountability. Why on earth do these voting machine companies want to make their technology proprietary? Government systems should be built on the premise of open source, and this is a perfect application of that.

This madness has got to stop. Feel free to write your representative on this! I know I will.

Yep, the announcement came over the wire today (click here for the formal release). I was finally able to get FreedomSpeaks' API out the door. I'm really excited about this launch, I've been working hard on it for a few months now, and it's nice to see the fruition of my work. I still have quite a bit more work ahead of me, but the API will be driving pretty much everything. Here's a list of what you can do with the API (so far):

1. Get your officials based on your address
2. Get official data based on id/screen name. 
3. Get a letter based on id 
4. Write your own letter (and send it to your officials)
5. Forward a letter already written to your officials 
6. Search our database of officials 

We also have a widget (with a couple more due out soon) that members can embed in their blog, website or MySpace profile. This widget performs the "Get Officials" action and allows visitors to their site to lookup their officials. Pretty cool if you're into getting your friends politically involved.

I don't have a forum right now for the API, so if you want to leave comments about it, or have questions, just add a comment to my post. I'll try to answer every one in a timely manner.

Spread the word – Our API is Finally Here!

Below's a sample of our "Get Officials" Widget – Get Your Widget Code Now!

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up. I have some exciting news about Freedom Speaks. I’ll be launching our API very soon! The API will have some barebones features to start, but I hope to make almost all the data on our site available through the API. Here are a couple of the features we’ll be launching with:

1. Who Represents You?
   (Enter: Your Address; Get: Your Districts + Officials)
2. Forward A Letter…
   (Enter: Any LetterId + Address; Get: Your Districts + Officials + Your Letter Sent)
3. Get A Letter
   (Enter: Any LetterId; Get: Letter + Comments)
4. Get An Official
   (Enter: Any OfficialId; Get Official + Comments)
5. Search Officials
   (Enter: Search Terms; Get Officials)

The results sets will be pretty verbose and returned as Xml. You’ll be able to pick and choose what data you’d like to display within your application.

We’re also making available a few widgets that consume our API services. Embed any one of these widgets on your own profile, and you’ll instantly enable your visitors to take action on any issue you’d like! That’s pretty powerful stuff.

Stay Tuned!

An interesting event happened last night around 6 PM. I saw an unusual amount of activity on FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM and thought I may have a potential spammer on my hands. I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was it not a spammer, buy my site had become the target of a quite intriguing blog post by WONKETTE.COM. The story poked fun at the Senator, making light of the fact that he didn’t have any friends on my site. If you follow the comments on WONKETTE.COM, I think you’ll find (as I did) the comments are pretty amusing. Some might say that it isn’t right that we add fodder to the fire of a political scandal, but politicians are fair game in my books. More often than not, they tout themselves as pillars of society. We all know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So, I’d like to give a shout out to the WONKETTE.COM. One final thought. Now that Senator Larry Craig has over 20 friends, what do we do about Senators Obama, Clinton and McCain? They don’t even come close! Maybe Senator Craig should be running for president.

Chalk up another exciting couple of weeks here at FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM. We continue to grow and
we’ve far surpassed the 5,000 letter mark sending out a total of 5,531 letters!
We’ve also been sent our first offer for financing. I won’t say any more than
that, but it’s great to be validated with a funding proposal. Be sure to tell
everyone you know about FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM – familiy, friends,
radio talk show hosts, local news, everyone. The more letters we can flood our
politicians with, the less they can ignore us.

For everyone living in the Los Angeles area, I
wanted to point out two things:

• Tonight, our
  founder, Jason A. Kiesel, will be getting interviewed by TechZulu at Makai in Santa Monica. The
  event is hosted by DigitalLA and starts at 6PM.
• A very special issue has come up due to the
  recent tragedy of Jamiel Shaw. I’ve set up a special letter that goes directly to the
  LA Mayor and City Council Members regarding the passage of Jamiel’s Law. Please take a look at it and
  forward it along. Most important, be sure to click "Send This Letter Now!".

Keep spreading the word – we can
make a difference in Washington (and our respective States)!

NEW ANNOUNCEMENTS!

• We’ll be adding petititions to the site within the next few weeks. Our petitions
  will be similar to a letter, but will be sent all at once when a threshold level
  is reached (a certain date or number of signatures). Any suggestions should be
  sent via our feedback form.
• We created a new
  type of letter on the site – a letter that targets a specific official or group
  of officials (We used this for the Jamiel’s Law letter). We will be rolling this
  out within the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!
• We’re also
  planning on rolling out more content on the site. We’ll be presenting commentary
  that represents both (or multiple) sides of an issue and then getting discussion
  on those points of view by all of you.
• We’ll be starting a live show once every other week starting
  next week. We’ll stream it live online and we’ll take your calls and questions
  on air. Our founder, Jason Kiesel, will have a guest or two and they’ll discuss
  the top letters/issues from the site. Be sure to check it out!

TOP NEW LETTERS!

1. Speak English Please!
2. A Revised Approach to the War on Terror
3. America Desperately Needs a High-Skilled Labor
   Force!
4. Illegals
5. RIGHT To VOTE

I just wanted to thank everyone for continuing to visit FREEDOMSPEAKS.COM and contributing great letters and comments. There have been some really great letters written by some of our memebers since my last email went out (see below), and I’ve added some great new features. Everyone on the site has been giving some great feedback – in fact, most of the new features come from member suggestions! Keep up the good work, and I look forward to reading your next letter!

Here are some of the new features we’ve added:

• Sending letters to other officials, even if they don’t represent you, just got easier!
  (just go to your account home, click "Send Letter", do a search for the officals you want and add them to your list)
• Letters can now be written as private – no one on the site will ever see it.
• Not happy with your screen name? You can now change it!
• State Official data is slowly trickling in. Members in CA now have their executive and legislative officials in their profile (if we’re able to correctly geocode your address). We’re working on the other states, so stay tuned!
• Improved Search now includes ALL State officials as well as Federal.
• You can now subscribe to a letter and get email alerts whenever anyone comments on it.
  (simply comment on a letter and be sure to check the "Subscribe" checkbox)
• Get a list of the most recent letters (not just most active letters)
• Check out our list of RSS Feeds – You can now stay on top of your favorite issue / topic!

Check out some of these great letters…

1. Medical Marijuana: in defense of a voter approved measure.
2. Reduce the Gas Tax and Provide Relief to All Americans!
3. Its Time to Balance the Budget!
4. Reinstate Proposition 36 – "Treatment Rather Than Incarceration"
5. Same-Sex Marriages – Protect the Rights of Homosexuals