April 19, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
By NICOLE WALLACE
Election season may be over, but the deal making hasn’t slowed for organizations that use the Internet to educate voters and encourage citizens to participate in the political process. Two charities have been the beneficiaries of failed dot-com political portals, and two others have combined operations.
- A year after acquiring DemocracyNet from the Center for Governmental Studies, the for-profit company Grassroots.com has transferred ownership of the site to the League of Women Voters Education Fund.
DemocracyNet (http://www.dnet.org) is a nonpartisan Web site that provides information about candidates and issues in local, state, and national elections. It was created by the Center for Governmental Studies, in Los Angeles, during the 1996 presidential election. In 1997 the center joined forces with the League of Women Voters Education Fund, in Washington, to operate the site.
After Grassroots.com, a company in San Francisco, purchased DemocracyNet last February, it continued to work with the League of Women Voters Education Fund to run the site. The company provided technology improvements and increased visibility, while the League, through its network of local affiliates, encouraged candidates to post information.
Turning over control of DemocracyNet was one of the final steps in Grassroots.com’s transition from a portal site that published information about politics to a company that provides Web-based advocacy software. The company is now called Grassroots Enterprise.
- E-the People.com, a company founded in 1998 to help citizens communicate with elected officials via the Internet, has donated its Web site to the Democracy Project, a nonprofit organization in New York.
Visitors to the e-the People Web site (http://www.e-thepeople.com) can write letters to more than 170,000 government officials in 9,800 towns and cities, start and sign petitions, and pay their parking and speeding tickets online. E-the People’s services are also offered on the sites of 400 newspapers across the country.
The Democracy Project runs a Web site called Quorum.org (http://www.quorum.org), which sponsors online discussions about current events.
In addition to donating the Web site — the value of which the Democracy Project estimates at $3-million — e-the People.com also contributed $150,000 to cover the expense of integrating the two sites. The merged version will be called e-the People.org.
- MoveOn.org and Generation Net, two nonprofit organizations that were founded with the mission of using the Internet to promote civic involvement, have merged.
MoveOn (http://www.moveon.org) is a grass-roots online-advocacy organization that was started in September 1998 during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. MoveOn has since conducted online campaigns on issues such as gun safety and campaign finance, and more than 250,000 people have signed up to receive its e-mail alerts.
Generation Net (http://www.generationnet.org) encourages young people to participate in online public-policy discussions. During last year’s election cycle, the organization’s members voted to focus the group’s advocacy efforts on campaign-finance legislation. The new organization will use the name MoveOn.org.
