E-The People

[Steve]

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

Rick Lyman
NY Times 10/3/98


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." 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company 




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