Dear AIR Colleagues, Before I start bubbling over with enthusiasm, I need to make a full disclosure: I serve as a paid consultant to Capitol News Connection (CNC). Urging people to use the Ask Your Lawmaker widget <http://askyourlawmaker.org/widget> is part of what I'm paid to do. That said, I thought that some of you would be interested in tracking or studying this geeky yet populist approach to strengthening participatory democracy. Capitol News Connection is a nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism organization that is based in Washington, DC. Ask Your Lawmaker (AYL) is one of their online initiatives; constituents from any district in the U.S. can pose questions to their senators and representatives by posting them to the web site, and then anyone who is interested in legislation and policy can go to the site and vote for the questions that he or she deems most crucial. The CNC reporters are conveniently headquartered on Capitol Hill, and when a question garners enough votes, they go out and ask the legislator(s) to which it is addressed. The responses are recorded in broadcast-quality audio, and posted to the web. They are also made available to local public radio stations, which are often in need of quotes they can use back in the home district when they report on national issues. Ask Your Lawmaker is now making a laudable move into Web 2.0 territory by offering nonprofit advocacy groups and individual activists a free widget that they can use on their own web sites or Facebook pages. It's a way for advocates to voice their concerns, and to engage their stakeholders in pressing legislators to address an issue, This widget is only the beginning. Capitol News Connection is working on many more ideas for making national news coverage more participatory and holding legislators more accountable to their constituents. In a time when every community activist can also be a citizen journalist, and RSS feeds are making it easy to syndicate news selectively, Ask Your Lawmaker is poised to become a provider of tailor-made news streams for any advocacy group. Best regards from Deborah P.S. This post to AIR-L is based on a blog article that I wrote. You can see the article (and the AYL widget that I created for myself) at <http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2009/1/8/4050172.html> Deborah Elizabeth Finn Cyber-Yenta Boston, Massachusetts, USA deborah_elizabeth_finn@post.harvard.edu www.cyber-yenta.org Skype: Deborah909 Twitter: Deborah909 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/deborah909 "Nothing softeneth the Arrogance of our Nature like a Mixture of some Frailties. It is by them that we are best told, that we must not strike too hard upon others....They pull our Rage by the sleeve and whisper Gentleness to us in our censures." -George Savile (1633 - 1695)