> Congressional Reapportionment Software Project
September 28, 2007

Why:
The US Constitution promises, "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative."

To put this in perspective the founding fathers felt so strongly about 30,000 people for every one Representative; they mandated that a census be taken once every ten years to balance out our democratic representation and add more members to Congress as needed. Great debates raged for years over how to deal with a fraction of 30,000 people.

The Constitution promises, "We the people of the United States" what we have now is "We the politicians and lobbyists."

Goals:

1. Map the country's current congressional districts.
2. Divide the country into provisional congressional districts of 30,000 people by state.
3. Create a committee for each state to move the boundaries of each provisional congressional district as the collective citizens see fit.

Steering Committee:
The committee is to help facilitate the process, make suggestions, maintain fairness and order, and to supervise whatever votes are required to help create a geographic contiguous congressional district, not dictate the boundaries. There are to be no natural obstacles that would impede the citizens from interrelating with each other on a daily basis.

Road Map:
Once the boundaries have been set, the software will allow citizens to change the boundaries whenever a large minority can be formed using the Collaborative Democracy process and their local knowledge of how and where the borders best fit. The boundaries must create a geographic contiguous congressional district with no natural obstacles that would impede the citizens from interrelating with each other on a daily basis and easily meeting in person, thereby fostering citizen collaboration.

After each national census, the quantity of congressional districts shall be either added to or subtracted from based on the state's population divided by 30,000 citizens.

Where there is a remainder of citizens after dividing the entire state into congressional districts of 30,000, the remainder of citizens, if less than 15,000 shall be assigned to the congressional districts that directly border them as equally as possible.

In the case of 15,001 citizens or more in a geographically contiguous area, these people shall become their own congressional district that is equal in all ways to the other districts. In no case shall there be more than one congressional district created due to a remainder in any given state.

Get Involved: Email us to join in!

1. We need software engineers, architects and coders to volunteer who are familiar with working in an open source collaborative environment to design and build the reapportionment software.
2. We need good citizens to volunteer for the initial steering committee to assist in the forming of national, state, county and local steering committees who will help set the local Congressional boundaries.
3. We need good citizens to volunteer to put the Collaborative Democracy Voting Process in place to nominate and choose our successors on the steering committees.
4. We need citizens to nominate who they think are the wisest among them in their Congressional district for Congressional office.
5. Donate