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We are struggling with authorities.

Long story short. To be able to receive paid sms-messages (so people can support us easily with small amounts) we need to register a "public collection". To do so we need prepare different "papers" (that we do not owe money to tax office, insurance, ... you name it) from 5 different towns (we are based in the country and not a city, so one office is in one place, another in different one, etc.) and send it to authorities. Plus the collection needs to be "publicly beneficial".

Our application NapisteJim.cz (WTT) was suggested by a campaign site InternetBezCenzury (Internet Without Censorship) to be used to contact local MPs. Several hundreds emails have been sent to support this cause to stop a "dangerous" change in a lottery law during the last few days, since the problem was discovered on last Thursday by a blogger.

I have just created our first WTT widget sitting on a bench in Prague waiting for long day of meetings (and a radio interview). It is rather a pilot version, a bit heavy, but working ok. You can see it in the left side column right here, at kohovolit.eu.

It was prepared as an answer to a Chameleon Charlie's will to promote NapisteJim.cz at their page (and they prepared a picture for it themselves - so they can put whole widget on their site now).

We will see how it is going to work, if everything goes ok, we shall prepore more such widgets.

So on Thursday the 26th of the Czech version of WriteToThem was finally launched!

That day we used three different channels to promote the new application:

1) we organized a press conference for media with stars from the vide present
2) we published the video we made to YouTube, Vimeo and Stream (local site)
3) we approached the most read bloggers on the Czech internet

The results, so far, are just amazing!

The Czech version of WTT was launched at press conference in Prague on Thu 26th of May.

The application is here: NapisteJim.cz

After long finish, we were able to show both a functional application and a promotional video starring some of real Czech movie stars.

A scraper of data and updater for Senate – the upper house of the Parliament of Czech republic is mostly done and beeing tested now. Together with already working updates of Chamber of Deputies the whole Czech parliament is covered.

We have also installed the necessary platform for Lithuanian WTT – Parašykjiems, the source code itself and after a short fight get it running on the localhost. A small error needed to be fixed. I am getting familiar with the application as well as the Python+Django platform and hopefuly start soon with customization for Czech republic.

Almost 20 people well known from culture scene in Czech republic (actors, actresses, directors and writers) agreed to connect their face and name with NapisteJim.cz, which is now official domain for czech WTT.

The video will be screened on the launch press conference which is schelduled for 19th of May and then spread through social media.

Any suggestions for innovative channels we can use while we have this video to use it the best way possible?

You can watch the photos from shooting the video here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/60640328@N02/sets/72157626417866631/show/
or here:

Considering the current state of development of the Czech WTT clone it was decided to move the launch of the application about three weeks later than originally planned – from the end of April to half of May. The main reason is more complicated data acqusition than expected. The MPs' contact information and membership information needed for WTT are scraped from official parliament website together with other MP data. Recently, while actual scraping of the data a number of wrong records was discovered on the official websites.

The updater scraping the data from the Lower house of Parliament of Czech republic and storing them into KohoVolit.eu database structure is ready now. The downloaded and processed information include MPs data (personal data, image, contact information, assistants, office), constituencies, groups (political groups, committees, commissions, etc.), membership of the MPs in those groups and roles they stand. All those data will be updated nightly from the official website of Czech parliament.

Besides ongoing development of the scrapers and updaters for two chambers of Czech parliament we agreed on the name of the domain where the WTT application for CZ & SK will live. Among a dozen of candidates the classics won - the domains being registered this week are NapisteJim.cz and NapisteIm.sk which means exactly "write to them" in Czech and in Slovak language. So, together with the Lithuanian ParasykJiems.lt and UK WriteToThem.com the family of "write to them" named sites is growing to at least four. (I wonder why the UK version is on .com domain.)