Idea: I think it might be impactful for someone to run a call-your-representative / public comment newsletter. I’m imagining something pretty simple: EAers (or EA orgs) submit information about pieces of legislation that people should call their reps to support or oppose, or a regulation that people should submit public comment on. Someone collects all those submissions and sends them out in monthly batches to a distribution list, and those people call their lawmakers/make a public comment/etc. I imagine a lot of the process could be automated with Google Forms and a preset email distribution list.
This would obviously be fairly small-scale as a set of actions, but I still think it could be impactful. There are tons of laws that are very small and don’t get much/any press, but matter a lot for EA cause areas. (For example, here are two bills I’ve seen in the last few weeks to support carbon dioxide removal, which is a high priority for many climate change EAers.) And for many representatives, hearing from as few as 5 constituents on something small can make them sit up and take notice. A few calls won’t convince anyone who’s strongly opposed to change their mind, but getting a lawmaker to pay attention to something they’d otherwise ignore can be really important as well — especially for smaller bills that fly under the radar. Since it only takes a few minutes to make a call, the costs would be pretty small and seem unlikely to trade off with more-impactful work.
I imagine doing this for the US, since that’s where I’m from and what I know most about, but perhaps it would be doable in other regions as well.
I’d be very curious to hear what others think of this idea! If there’s interest, I could imagine taking on this project, but I’d also be very happy for someone else to do it instead.
I like the idea. Why not do it on the forum though? It could be a tag and you could do individual posts for each piece of legislation. People who are willing to call could subscribe to the tag and would be notified when there was a new post with the tag. People could also discuss in the comments if someone disagreed that it was something EAs should support.
I think this could be a great approach, but my concern is that people might not check the forum often enough (or might not check the tag). My personal experience suggests that one email every few weeks with a list of bills to call about all in one place would be better. But of course that might not be true for others!
The forum will send emails for tags you are subscribed to if you set it up that way in the settings. I think I would prefer the idea of getting the bills to call about one at a time (a big list could be imposing), and having the option to discuss, but it might be too much friction getting people to set that up though (and I guess some might not have forum accounts).