This is an experiment that explores the different ways the ever-changing ideas we have can be logged, stored, structured and retrieved in an efficient way. A system that holds many different data types should also connect them in a meaningful way that helps us understand them better.

Ideas are all different in nature. These differences break down into their occurrences, their context, their time, their importance … which all can be further organized based on the images they invoke or a feeling they arouse. Some are recurring while others are infrequent like gold dust. In a system that attempts to sort similar ideas, the notion as ideas as being unique can be great challenge.

Modular synthesizers are a wonderful part of the history of electronic music that have long since slowed in manufacturing. This is because they were expensive to produce, difficult to maintain, difficult to move around, and they had tremendous electrical power requirements. The traditions of electronic synthesis have been continued today mostly through advancing software that provides all the technological aspects of the physical objects modeled in binary bits. While many argue that the problem with this is that \”it is not true analogue sound,\” I argue that with software synthesizers what is missing is the physical interface.

These days, fabrication is less expensive, and robust products are not required to be forged from metal or made from expensive woods any longer. Product shells easily be fabricated from recyclable materials specifically plastics, aluminum, and also bamboo. The electronic components can be both inexpensive and environmentally friendly, while rapid prototyping makes testing many options very inexpensive. Modules themselves require low power and can be separated without the need for a single power supply. They then each be thought of as individual objects which interface with each other and with existing computer softwares via wireless connections.

Cause Caller is a specific tool designed to address the needs of a distributed, participatory democracy. It is built upon fully extensible components including Semantic Media Wiki, Asterisk PBX and Amazon\’s Elastic Computing Cloud. The goal of the project is two fold: one, to develop a useful application demonstrating a particular and unique use of Asterisk, and two, to nurture a repository of information about political representatives that is free, editable, and reusable.