What is crowd.ed?

Our Mission

Leverage the contributions of the masses to empower ordinary citizens in the struggle to keep their elected officials accountable to those whom they represent.

Our Name

At the most basic level, crowd.ed comes from the words crowd and (ed)ucation, but it is far more than just a combination of words. crowd.ed is an idea. The idea that ordinary citizens can donate just a little bit of their time, energy, skills, and/or money towards helping to educate and inform others about the issues that impact us the most.

The Problem

This project was started out of frustration with the Nation’s current political situation. Congressional approval ratings are the lowest they’ve been in 40 years (a mere 16%), yet we continue to see reelection rates above 80%, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. At what point do we begin to take responsibility for continually sending the same people back to represent us on the Hill?

To be fair, this is likely due to the major barrier to entry that has developed over the years. In the 2012 election cycle, the average cost for a challenger to even have a chance to win out over the incumbent in a House election was $2.4 million dollars, a 2300% increase since 1974 [1]. If a challenger can’t raise the money, the odds of victory are considerably lower, with odds of 293:2 if your campaign furnishes less than $1 million.

With numbers like these it’s no wonder that so many have lost hope in the system, and distanced themselves from politics wherever possible. For what hope does a single voice have of being heard in a room filled with attack ads, big business, and dirty money?

What Can We Do About It?

This is where crowd.ed comes in. A network of connected and informed citizens, actively participating in the collection and dissemination of information. Thomas Jefferson once said in a letter to Richard Price:

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

—Thomas Jefferson (1789)

It is no longer sufficient to sit idly by and watch our elected representatives make a folly of their entrusted positions. “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.” [2] If we are to have any hope of steering this country back onto the course intended by our Founding Fathers, it is necessary that we act.

This is a project driven by the people, for the people.

What Can You Do

Simply put, you can get involved! crowd.ed is a project driven by the people, for the people, and will go nowhere without your contributions.

We encourage contributions from any and all who are interested an able. We only ask that you take on a professional and respectful attitude while working with us. We strive to provide factual information that is unbiased in nature, that can be used by all people to make educated and informed decisions about where they place their trust.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

—Robert F. Kennedy

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.”

—Sydney Smith

Feeling inspired? Find out how you can Contribute

Similar Projects

There are several existing projects that are similar in nature to crowd.ed. Each project is quite valuable in its own right, however we felt that each of the projects was missing at least one small component that is vital for enabling the changes we need.

The Vote Smart Project

This is an excellent project with many fantastic features, and a wealth of useful information. The information on the site is collected by members of the organization during internships. University students along with members volunteer to contribute to the cause for a pre-determined amount of time during the internship. The organization has a full-time staff that works out of offices in the beautiful Montana Rockies.

• Pros
  • Data is entered by people, leading to an easy-to-read analysis of most issues
  • Several great tools to help voters determine their stance on pivotal issues
  • Volunteers and interns get to work at a beautiful ranch in the Rockies
• Cons
  • In order to contribute (anything but money), you must take a minimum of two weeks to travel to the Montana Rockies. While this would be a wonderfully beautiful experience, who wants to spend their hard-earned vacation reading through congressional voting records?
  • Closed source software platform, and data is copyrighted
  • The organization seems to have difficulty in keeping up with the work, especially during non-summer seasons.

Open Congress

Open Congress is an open software platform developed by the Sunlight Foundation. The platform uses automated scraping software to collect information from numerous sources, and prevents them for display on the website. The organization also supports several Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to allow the data they collect to be used by other developers for other projects. The main drawback here is that the project seems to be no longer under active development, and is limited in scope as to the information it provides. The platform does not allow for users to enter data directly, which leaves us only with limited analysis and summaries of many issues. We hope to be able to leverage much of the data already collected by the Open Congress project in the development of crowd.ed.

• Pros
  • Tons of good data in one location
  • Provides users the ability support comment on and show support for candidates/issues
• Cons
  • User contributions to the site are limited to comments and showing support. They cannot contributed to the site content directly.
  • The site/data collected generally lacks a human element, making it somewhat difficult to parse through the information at times.

[1]	https://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/cost.php?cycle=2012

[2]	Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:207