With the unexpected election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States in November of 2016, came an outpouring of anger, frustration and dismay.  Democrats and progressives quickly mobilized and took action.  My family and I participated in the Hamilton Elector letter writing campaign, appealing to Republican members of the electoral college to reconsider their vote for President-elect Trump in favor of a more palatable Republican option.  When it became known that Stephen Bannon would be a close advisor to President-elect Trump, a wave of NOT BANNON postcards flooded Trump Tower. 

 

Amidst all of this activity, I wanted to try my hand at building a tool for this new movement.  I decided to combine the power of letter writing and the visual impact and creativity seen in protester's picket signs and postcard campaigns and create a tool to send political action postcards to members of government. 

 

I worked with a friend to design, build and launch our new website - actiontoday.org.  I focussed on the front end UX/UI, my friend took on AWS database setup and deployment mechanics and we split backend coding.  We built our service on the lightweight but highly extensible Flask Python web framework.  We used a number of other tools and web service APIs to build our application including:

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• Lob API - letter and postcard printing

• Google Maps API - Map user address to congressional district

• Stripe API - Payments  In March of 2017 we launched

• AWS DynamoDB - Database

• AWS S3 - Image storage

• Bootstrap - Responsive front end framework

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We launched our application in March of 2017 and sent 1000's of postcards in the few of months of operation.  People often put their heart into the messages they sent and used the combination of image and text to powerful effect.  Postcards capturing concerns over healthcare, education, the environment, government ethics and integrity were sent to President Trump and members of the Senate and House.  

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I decided to suspend operation of the site during the summer of 2017.  It became apparent that intensity of the activism after Trump's election and Inauguration had given way to a longer outlook and focus on the special elections of 2017 and the 2018 election cycle as well as a careful watch over the Mueller investigation, and when mobilization actions were needed, phone calls to congress seemed to be the most immediate and effective tool for applying pressure to congress.

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