(top) Paul Everton
Visible Vote
Upset by the government bailout of the U.S. banking system last year, Paul Everton set out to express his views to the officials in Washington who represented him from Chicago. The 29-year-old computer networks sales agent called the Senate and the House and sent faxes to both Illinois senators and his district's representative, but there was no way to know if anyone was listening on the other end. Everton figured a software program that could compile the opinions of other voters and deliver this overall point of view would be a more effective way to sway individual politicians. He had the programming skills to pull it off; he had graduated from Georgia Tech with a BS in computer science. After six months of coding software on nights and weekends, he launched Visible Vote last March. The first iteration was crafted to work within Facebook—Everton bet that the power of social networking would help the tool gain popularity. He then built mobile versions to work on the iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones. Visible Vote also shows users, in a simple percentage, how their representatives' votes compare with their own stands, and it sends alerts when bills are about to come up for a vote. Currently, 50,000 people across the U.S. are using the program, spread evenly among states, and the Web and mobile platforms. Revenue has totalled only $400 in donations, hardly a dent in the $15,000 Everton has sunk into the project. He views his site as a public service, however. "The only way for this to work is to include everyone," he says. –Damian Joseph
