Clear Voices is a password-protected website that allows dozens of Oregon environmental groups to work together to track the progress of bills through the Oregon Legislature and to coordinate their strategy and message.  Clear Voices is also tied to the Oregon Conservation Network "Common Agenda" process, through which groups come together to set a joint legislative agenda for the Oregon conservation community.

The Challenge

Six weeks before the start of Oregon's 2005 legislative session, Oregon's environmental lobbyists, working together for the first time through the Oregon Common Agenda process, realized that they had no way to track critical bills in the Oregon Legislature. Worse, Oregon's environmental protectors couldn't easily share information about critical bills with one another and with allies outside the environmental movement.

Jed Jorgensen from the Oregon League of Conservation Voters approached ONE/Northwest for help, and we sprang into action.

The Solution

In less than six weeks, we created "Clear Voices," a collaborative bill tracking system for Oregon environmental activists.

Clear Voices helps Oregon's environmental champions work together better. It provides a simple system that answers the day-to-day needs of individual lobbyists "in the trenches" in Salem, and automatically pools their individual knowledge into collective intelligence for the broader Oregon environmental community.

Here's how it works:  every night, Clear Voices downloads data on legislative activity straight from the Oregon legislature.  Environmental lobbyists and their colleagues and allies can log into Clear Voices' private, password-protected website. There, they can:

• Search through thousands of bills in the Oregon legislature to more easily discover pending legislation affecting their specific issues
• Create "hot lists" of critical bills that they can easily track for their organization
• Easily discover and communicate with other individuals and organizations that are tracking similar bills and could serve as new allies
• Alert colleagues and allies on fast-breaking news around particular pieces of legislation

We built Clear Voices on top of Plone, a powerful open-source content management system that is ideal for building customized tools for helping people work together online.

The Results

In its first "season" Clear Voices was a hit. Over 70 users from 20+ leading Oregon environmental organizations hopped on board.  Jed Jorgenson, Political Director of the Oregon Conservation Network said:

"Clear Voices has been a unique and useful tool for the Oregon Conservation Network. Our work requires us to know what bills the rest of the environmental community is tracking. In previous years, we had weekly meetings where representatives of different groups would discuss the bills they were following. We still have the weekly meetings, but now with Clear Voices we are able to spend more time on strategy each week, rather than just reviewing a litany of bills."