An introduction to how this site will pan out

Hi there.

If you're reading this pre-launch you're either already one of the volunteer team, else extremely nosey - congratulations if it's the latter.

My first step here is to make everything work for one local authority area. And I've picked Mayo.

Why?

• We got the streets-to-electoral-area mapping list for Mayo before we got any others,
• It's not a huge data set, and
• Mayo County Council maps directly onto one constituency, and only one. Which may or may not be helpful later but it certainly makes prototyping simple.

If you're wondering who we are, we've made something of a list at our internal wiki site here. If you want to join in, feel free to sign up to the group at Yahoo Groups.

If you're still wondering what we're doing, I'll tell you. We're copying, as far as possible, this UK site which lets you contact your elected representatives. I'm John Handelaar, and I took it upon myself to recruit 15-odd similarly minded volunteers to the cause by using Pledgebank.

This prototype is the first stage which will be publicly visible. It'll let you identify who your elected reps are by asking you for your address. Actually contacting them comes after that.