Got a Cause and a Computer? You Can Fight City Hall

October 3, 1998

Got a Cause and a Computer? You Can Fight City Hall

By RICK LYMAN

USTIN, Texas -- Bill Clinton seems to have generated the most petitions, calling for him to be impeached, to resign, to be left alone. Thirteen people have signed one demanding a ban on tigers and other exotic cats as pets. Eight favor the establishment of areas in national parks for nudists. But a petition demanding statehood for New York City attracted not a single signatory, not one, not even Donald Trump.
In that dark epoch between the discovery of fire and the discovery of the World Wide Web, the Bolsheviks had to storm the Winter Palace to get their point across.
Now it can all be done with the gentle click of a mouse button.
"I got the idea when I was sitting at home in Austin watching a city council debate on cable television," Alex Sheshunoff, 24, said. "The issue they were discussing was very important, but the debate was really boring, enough to induce narcolepsy. I started wondering: How can you get citizens involved in the democratic process when they don't have time to spend three hours at a city council meeting waiting to make a three-minute statement?"
His answer: E-The People, which describes itself as "America's Interactive Town Hall" and resides in cyberspace at www.e-thepeople.com.
Those who find their way to the Web site, either directly or through one of the newspapers or nonprofit agencies that are Sheshunoff's partners, are given the chance to sign a petition already posted on the site, create a new petition or write a letter to government officials about whatever is stuck in their craw.
"There have been a lot of people talking recently about the intersection of democracy and the Internet," Sheshunoff said, "but not a lot of people sitting down and writing the code. That's where we come in."
E-The People has been open since August but is still trying to "stomp out the last of the bugs," Sheshunoff said, and should be fully operational in a month or so.
The Web site, which also bills itself as "an Alex Sheshunoff Initiative," is designed to connect citizens with their government officials, local or national, and to turn a profit for Sheshunoff and his investors.
For example, a Houston resident interested in protesting about the environment is led through a process of identifying whom he should contact (a click calls up a list that includes the governor, lieutenant governor, city council representative, 26 state representatives, eight state senators and 20 agency officials with specific responsibility for the environment).
Then the resident can compose a message that is automatically sent as e-mail to whichever officials are selected, or as a fax, if the recipient has no e-mail address. It is all free for the petitioners and letter writers. Advertisers and media partners pay the freight.
Messages can also be sent to the White House or to Congress, Sheshunoff said, but the central intent is to address local issues.
"The president already received a half-million e-mails a month, but for a city council member to receive 10 letters on a single subject can have a real impact," he said. "This is really about local people solving local problems."

The letters are treated as private mail, Sheshunoff said. E-The People takes no note of their content and promises it will sell none of the demographic data that might be collected in the process.
Sheshunoff's initiative operates from an office on the 19th floor of a tower in downtown Austin, part of a suite of offices that are home to Alex Sheshunoff Management Services, the company run by his father, a well-known banking consultant.
The younger Sheshunoff prowled his small room recently, a thatch of sandy hair brushing his forehead, occasionally grabbing for a purring cellular telephone while a team of young programmers hunched over keyboards frantically tapping in data. An American flag dominated one wall while a map of the United States filled another, showing the route of an 80-city transcontinental bus tour that Sheshunoff has been running to spread the word.
The bus, decorated to resemble a mailbox, left Austin on Aug. 1 and has made its way across the Southwest, up the Pacific Coast and across the prairies into the Midwest, New England and New York. It is heading south on its return to Texas.
So far, 45 newspapers have agreed to go into partnership with E-The People, meaning they will feature a link to the site on their own Web pages and share with E-The People any advertising revenues generated by surfers traversing that link. Among those signed up are The San Antonio Express-News, The Oregonian in Portland and The Daily News in New York. Sheshunoff is hoping for 100 media partners.
Sheshunoff once considered a career in network television. While a student at Yale, he did some work for ABC News, as a production assistant and then reading his own short, personal essays in the wee hours. Then he read somewhere that the audience for network television news had dropped 30 percent since 1990.
Sheshunoff said he spent his senior year "thinking about where news was going." This led him, as it has hundreds of others in his generation, to the Internet.
His first effort was an online magazine developed as a way of allowing readers to pinpoint the restaurants and other venues nearest their homes. "We sold some of that underlying technology to newspapers and others, for their Web pages," he said.
A similar process is used in E-The People, he said, but it is more sophisticated.
"It's not as easy as it sounds," he said, "to take somebody's address and tell them who their elected officials are."

Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today