About three years ago, a remarkable and free online service named Call My Congress was announced to close by its developer who was no longer able to run it. About 300,000 users were able to contact and voice their opinions to their Congressional representatives through the site’s life starting in November 2016. Another service, whoismyrepresentative.com is also deprecated. We think a secure tool to quickly search representatives of all levels, including local would be beneficial. Some similar ones exist, but we don’t believe users are given extensive contact choices. Some other online tools also do not also provide depth of local officials including judges in applicable areas or a marquee planned feature: an electoral timeline for your representatives.

Not anymore… maybe. Thanks to the open-source nature of the project, we can do something about its legacy. Marie Chatfields, the developer and an incredibly talented individual, left an extensive GitHub repository. What this means is that we have a very good shot at bringing this service back to life better than ever. We think it was more valuable than given credit for.

We have the ability to bring this back online in some capacity under our hosting. While we have individuals parsing through code and establishing a system to facilitate the server under our webserver, this does not guarantee results. Updates will be posted in this blog as development goes on. One thing is certain: Call my Congress’ archived code does not support querying for representatives on levels lower than federal. Adding other features in addition to “bringing it back to life” is a whole other undertaking; there thankfully exist a lot of accessible APIs and databases making such a tool likely to succeed.

Support open-source software, good things like this can come about :)