Silicon Valley Fights Trump in Its Free Time

As it grew clear on election night that Donald Trump would become president, Nick O’Neill, a 32-year-old San Francisco programmer, suddenly got a lot more interested in civic engagement. Even in the internet age, phone calls remain the primary means for constituents to pressure their congressional representatives. O’Neill wanted an easy way to register dissent on a regular basis once Trump began trying to put various elements of his platform into effect.

With about two months’ worth of help from his wife, Rebecca Kaufman, and several friends, O’Neill created 5 Calls, a website aimed at making complaints to members of Congress as easy as possible. Users type in their Zip codes and indicate which decisions or policy moves they oppose—a Trump cabinet pick, his Supreme Court nominee, the Jan. 27 ban on immigrants from seven mostly Muslim countries—and the site returns the local representative’s phone number and a script for the call, written by Kaufman. The site attempts to track the number of calls visitors have made by asking them to click a button after each one. Since the site went up on Jan. 17, the tally has topped 400,000.