FreeGovernment.org Launch on July 4th

It's official, 232 years after the Declaration of Independence, FreeGovernment.org is up. We are very excited (and anxious too) about this release and hope that you will enjoy using this website as much as we have while creating it.

This project has definitely been long in the making. Not 232 years--phew--but still long enough. Foy cooked up the Free Government idea when he was an undergrad student, and ever since then we've pushed hard to try and make the concept a reality. Now, after many take-out meals, countless IRC nerd chats, hundreds of lines of lorem ipsum, and too many pots of coffee, FreeGovernment.org is born.

Why did we create FreeGovernment.org? Simple question with a slightly more complicated answer. The reasons, though, can be roughly divided into two categories: 1) Our belief that politics should be free, convenient, and transparent and 2) that the timing has never been better for change.

Free, Convenient & Transparent Politics
Foy and I have always found politics to be a little out of reach for the average citizen. Getting involved in politics can be inconvenient, time-consuming, intimidating, even a little boring. Whatever the reason is, we still believe that politics should and can be accessible to everyone. FreeGovernment.org strives to bring political involvement closer to all its citizens by allowing anyone to create and vote on polls, comment on bills paragraph-by-paragraph, draft their own bills, create groups, or become advisers to vote on other users' behalf. Political involvement shouldn't only happen once every four years or on select days--we can speak up and make a difference any day.

• Free Politics - FreeGovernment.org is founded on Free Culture philosophy, so at the very essence of our project is the belief that citizens should be able to engage in government decision, understand the work of the government, share control, and improve the workings of the government for the benefit of all society. Translated to features on the site, users can view and discuss current bills in Congress and create their own bills for the FreeGov community to debate. This allows for constant discourse on the legislation being passed in Congress as well as citizen involvement in the legislation-making process.
  

• Convenient Politics - Want to have your voice heard but don't have the time to cover all the issues? To provide users with a convenient hands-off approach to voting and allowing effortless constant involvement, we've implemented the idea of "advisers." Users can select advisers whom they believe represent their political interests and beliefs accurately. The adviser votes for you on polls; it's like having a personal representative. Well not exactly, as you have the option to choose more than one adviser as well. This effectively gives you the potential to pool together a team of advisers that best represent you. With multiple advisers, we tally their votes as they are cast, and your vote is determined by wherever the majority stands. No worries though, if your advisers have gone against what you believe in any particular poll, you always retain the ability to override it by manually casting your vote.
  

• Transparent Politics - We aim for political transparency with all features of FreeGovernment.org. For polls, all statistics are kept public and up-to-date. Bills, posted either by users or CongressBot, are free for all users to look at and any discussion is kept in the public forum. There is no private messaging--FreeGov seeks to keep dialogue open to everyone.
  

A Trite Saying: Right Place, Right Time
We've become a society very open to melding the real world with the Internet. It's nearly impossible and even frightening to imagine a world before the Internet. We've also witnessed changes in politics. Citizens are more involved, have more tools at their disposal to take action, and are more hopeful of change. Seeing these two phenomena unravel before us, we know it's a good time to take the next steps toward a more citizen-involved government.

Final Message to Everyone
What do all these words amount to? One message: Get involved. We truly believe there is something on FreeGovernment.org for everyone. Yes, everyone. Why do I say this? I say this because Foy is a web developer and I am a dental school student. A typical day of ours includes programming or studying cranial nerves in a coffee shop. You don't need to be a political science grad student at a prestigious academic institution or a politician in D.C. All you need to have is some interest in the issues that matter to you.

So get involved and be heard.