Okay–indulge me as a proud mother (and #nevertrumper) engages in some shameless promotion….
As many of you will remember from a previous post, one of my sons is a web developer, and following the 2016 election, created the Activism Engine website. That site is being used, but not to the extent he’d hoped, because a site like AE depends in large part on a massive amount of content that is timely and meaningful, which in turn relies on a virtual army of content producers to fulfill the vision of the site and make it as useful as it can be.
It was foreseeable that building such a content network (consisting of 12 issue categories in 3 approach areas spread across 50 states) was never going to be quick or easy. In the meantime, as my son put it, he “wanted to take what I thought was most interesting about the site, and package it in a way that could be immediately useful to potential activists and people who would like to get involved and make the world a better place.”
He is his mother’s child….
Anyway, out of this desire was born a new app, Take Action (takeaction.me). It shares a user database with Activism Engine, so people who already have an account on AE can login directly to the takeaction.me app. But takeaction.me differs in that the content is created by the app users for their own use, although they are able to share actions with friends (a feature that should make it particularly useful to the new groups springing up in advance of the 2018 midterm elections, or just as a “buddy system” to help keep motivation high).
With the takeaction.me app, users can:
- Add, edit, and review actions in any of a variety of categories
- Share those actions with friends, and copy or follow friend’s actions
- See charts and graphs and tables to help make sense of the actions they are taking
- See a list (based on address or just a zip code) of all their representatives, and be able to call or email them directly from the app (and have those calls or emails added automatically to their actions list) This is my personal favorite feature! It makes it unbelievably simple to contact everyone from your City-County Counselor to the President.
- Search for and connect with friends, see and share their issues and actions, and decide what to share with them.
- last, but not least, there is an option when adding an action to also submit it for review to Activism Engine. The hope is that takeaction.me and activismengine.org will provide each other with motivation and content, so he has made it easy to share activity between the two.
The app is available at the iTunes Store and an Android version is available at Google Play.
Trust me — it’s worth the 99 cents! (But only if you USE it!)
I just knew that sooner or later it would happen. Sheila and Bob having their morning coffee on a sidewalk in front of a café just north of Mass Avenue……Lights, Camera, Action…..they both raise their steaming cups to the civic literacy app to end all apps. And it’s all in the family. Beats driving over and parking at IIUPUI any day!
You deserve to be a very proud mother! I plan to get this app and thanks for letting us know about it. I will be sharing this info with my friends.
The app has been installed on my phone 🙂
Sheila, can you ask your son to email me? I tried to register on the app and my email address is taken. I am guessing he has it registered on his website and I cannot remember what my user name and login info are. Thanks!
Are there two apps we need to download or just one? thanks, Marsha
Marsha–just one.
Nancy–I will.
Sheila, I am just curious. Is there any screening of those who want to use the site, such as loonies, russians, white nationalists. People who might disguise what they were about and misuse the site. Contact info, etc. might be a problem. However, the contact part that you like sounds great. I am just worried about security. Thanks, your son sounds like a very can-do person. I hope he succeeds.
Hi Rose,
All the normal protections are in place, but anyone can open an account if they verify the same info as anyone else (email). I am working on a Terms of Service document to exclude anything related to violence or hate speech or fake/misleading info, so should be able to remove posts and people that fall into that category.
Hope this addresses your concerns.