FWIW: Fixing Congress's E-Mail Woes
Rob Bluey
Studies have shown that lawmakers often ignore and sometimes do not even receive e-mails ginned up by interest groups. Deluged with thousands of essentially identical electronic messages, congressional offices are constantly trying to make it harder for organizations to blast them out.
Now Neil Hare, a former vice president of communications at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has devised a way around the problem. He just started ISupportThisMessage.com, a Web site that solicits citizens' opinions on political and legislative issues and promises to deliver the results -- on paper -- to every lawmaker's office.
Visitors to the site are invited to "vote" on a variety of issues such as child hunger and presidential candidates. The numbers are tallied and comments compiled for later distribution on Capitol Hill.
"This is a reaction to the failure of e-mailing," Hare said. "We will issue regular reports with our numbers and, over time, Hill staffers will be able to log on and see the results themselves." He said that lobby groups can buy their own spaces on the site for far less than full-blown grass-roots campaigns.
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Robert B. Bluey
rbl...@gmail.com
http://RobertBluey.com
Clay Shirky
> U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has devised a way around the problem. He
> just started ISupportThisMessage.com, a Web site that solicits
> citizens' opinions on political and legislative issues and promises
> to deliver the results -- on paper -- to every lawmaker's office.
>
> Visitors to the site are invited to "vote" on a variety of issues
> such as child hunger and presidential candidates. The numbers are
> tallied and comments compiled for later distribution on Capitol Hill.
>
> "This is a reaction to the failure of e-mailing," Hare said. "We
> will issue regular reports with our numbers and, over time, Hill
> staffers will be able to log on and see the results themselves." He
> said that lobby groups can buy their own spaces on the site for far
> less than full-blown grass-roots campaigns.
So we come full circle.
The old hardship of paper made it a good proxy for votes. The ease of
electronic communication destroyed that relationship, so that
communication started to come from citizens rather than constituents,
and was no longer predictive of voting patterns (environmentally-
minded Republicans or fiscally conservative Democrats might write
emails with no intention of changing who they vote for.)
The messages so delivered stopped being meaningful, except in
aggregate, and even that is mainly a sign of health of the lobbying
group, like a peacock's tail, rather than being a tool that changes
legislative behavior (see MoveOn as an exemplar.)
And now that revolution is blowing back to paper. Unless the
signatories of these messages are either proven constituents or have
paid to add their names, the paper delivery will become as
meaningless as the email is, because the medium was never the issue,
it was merely a proxy for intent.
Unless a message is hard for the sender to create, it will be
meaningless for the receiver. That constraint is incompatible, by
definition, with ease of use.
-clay
Micah Sifry
http://www.personaldemocracy.com
http://www.techpresident.com
http://micah.sifry.com
The fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum is happening May 18, 2007 in NYC. Register now: http://www.personaldemocracy.com/conference/2007
Steven Clift
In all of my travels, the number one issue brought up by elected
officials in every country is dealing with e-mail.
Elected officials seem content on passing e-government budgets for
administrative services but are not articulating a budgetary need to
invest in tools which allow them to sort, understand, and more
effectively respond to e-mail and electronic communication from their
constituents. In some places, elected officials take the "virtual
Berlin wall approach" of dropping an e-mail address all together for a
web form (most of which do not send receipts to the e-mail address of
the sender denying the citizen proof that they actually sent something
in like they would have in the sent mail folder.) Contrast this with
insiders and lobbyists who often have direct e-mail line into
Congressional staff.
With elected officials I try to present this as a balance of power
issue - if representatives give all the "e" tools to the executive,
which part of government will be best equipped to listen to and
respond to people online? Now, not many would credit the
administrative branch of government anywhere with getting the two-way
nature of online communication. So in reality citizens will simply
start talking to each other online (often in narrow interest groups)
and skip the *important* formal deliberative parts of our
representative democratic processes from the local town meeting on up
to Congressional hearings because they aren't being adapted to the
anywhere, any time world that we live in today.
I have a laundry list of "if I had a million dollars" proposals - one
of them is to build/adapt an open source tool for elected officials
around the world to deal with their e-mail more effectively. Rather
than wait for Congress itself to fix this (ironically each Member has
too many independent resources to work collaboratively except through
existing proprietary technology relationships - in smaller
legislatures/parliaments they use more shared IT services), I say
build the tool externally and give it to any elected official (perhaps
those interested in being re-elected :-)) at any level for a couple of
years.
In the UK, mySociety has two related project - http://www.writetothem.com
and http://www.hearfromyourMP.com (where you can ping your MP and say
send me an e-mail newsletter via this system). The project we and they
are missing, is UnderstandThem.com or ListentoPeople.com!
All in all, as the information components of our representative
processes - both legislative and executive - become further Web
2.0ified I fear a further disconnect between citizens and their
government because those in power simply will not have invested in the
tools that allow them to accomodate the public will. I see greater
conflict among citizens and greater distrust in "disconnected"
representatives. For the most part, those external to the
institutions of representation are focused and resourced to fight for
their position. With more/all of Congress online, online advocates
may win in terms of generating more noise, gaining more influence, and
securing more donors, but I don't think we've addressed how we want
our democratic processes to result in better decisions and restore
some of the deliberation back to our processes using rather than
avoiding online tools and models.
Steven Clift
http://e-democracy.org
http://dowire.org
P.S. An old post from 1999 about this topic that is still very
relevant: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9908&L=do-wire&D=0&P=1355
Micah Sifry
This is a very interesting and important question. We've had some preliminary conversation with the mySociety folks and think they've really done some great things in England. I'm not sure if the cultural contexts are comparable enough but it would be great if folks in Congress or the executive branch were willing to experiment with such vehicles. Perhaps building the tool and just getting them to use it is one approach. There are clearly some archaic obstacles in the way of Members using donated software, however...
Micah
Clay Shirky
> of them is to build/adapt an open source tool for elected officials
> around the world to deal with their e-mail more effectively.
But note that, from the point of view of the members of Congress,
they are under attack. In fact, your narrow interest group scenario
is *more* evident in emails to Congress than in citizen-to-citizen
discussion forums. Compare your average MoveOn campaign to any
conversation in the blogosphere, bulletin board, or mailing list, and
I guarantee that you will find more thoughtful, reasoned and various
discussion in the conversational media, even in the soi-disant echo
chambers, than in the mail-in campaigns.
Any conversation about Congressional email that does not take into
account the fact that the perverse incentives of mail have led to an
unending deluge of spam being directed at those offices simply
doesn't understand the problem. Those webmail forms are CAPTCHAs, and
the people putting them up are the people we should be trying to
help, because they, at least, are working to restore some signal to a
catastrophically adverse signal-to-noise ratio.
One of the really interesting UK models is to set up local mailing
lists for citizens, and then invite the MPs to join if they like, but
this model succeeds where the US model fails -- it is designed to
reduce interest-group pressure, to reduce mail to the office, and to
increase the chance that the MP is talking to their own constituents.
> All in all, as the information components of our representative
> processes - both legislative and executive - become further Web
> 2.0ified I fear a further disconnect between citizens and their
> government because those in power simply will not have invested in the
> tools that allow them to accomodate the public will.
...but nor has the public invested in tools that respect the
structure of the US polity.
For good or ill, a Congressperson's constituents are the only ones
who can send them home, so any system that makes it *harder* for
Congresspeople to identify constituent mail is worse, not better. I
don't want Clinton and Schumer responding to mails from Utah, and I'm
sure residents of Salt Lake City feel the same about me pressuring
Bennett and Hatch.
If I had a million dollars, I would make a tool to help Congress
people ignore the 99% of their mail that is pure system-gaming. My
dream app is a latent semantic indexer that identifies and discards
even modified cut-and-paste campaigns, because without such a tool,
real constituent mail will simply not get through.
>
> I don't think we've addressed how we want
> our democratic processes to result in better decisions and restore
> some of the deliberation back to our processes using rather than
> avoiding online tools and models.
But wait -- are you talking about increasing deliberation, or
reducing it?
If we're talking about increasing accommodation to public will, we're
talking about reducing freedom of thought and action for Congress.
That's a perfectly sensible tack to take, but lets not confuse it
with making Government more deliberative. Email, right now, is
principally a tool for special interests to pressure Congress, but
the goal of any special interest group is exactly the one you
identified earlier -- bending Congress to their will.
-clay
Steven Clift
> If I had a million dollars, I would make a tool to help Congress
> people ignore the 99% of their mail that is pure system-gaming. My
> dream app is a latent semantic indexer that identifies and discards
> even modified cut-and-paste campaigns, because without such a tool,
> real constituent mail will simply not get through.
Actually, I agree. I understood that at one point folks in companies
like Capitol Advantage were working with Congress to define a
standard by which their advocacy systems could interface with the
main congressional constituent management systems. I don't know if
anything came of it. Anyway a bulk queries deserves bulk responses
(but they do deserve a response) and individually composed
communication needs to rise to the top.
> >
>
> > I don't think we've addressed how we want
> > our democratic processes to result in better decisions and restore
> > some of the deliberation back to our processes using rather than
> > avoiding online tools and models.
>
> But wait -- are you talking about increasing deliberation, or
> reducing it?
>
> If we're talking about increasing accommodation to public will, we're
> talking about reducing freedom of thought and action for Congress.
> That's a perfectly sensible tack to take, but lets not confuse it
> with making Government more deliberative. Email, right now, is
> principally a tool for special interests to pressure Congress, but
> the goal of any special interest group is exactly the one you
> identified earlier -- bending Congress to their will.
>
I mixed in another idea here ... basically, members of Congress need
a dashboard of sort to measure electronic communication and how it
relates to numbers with bulk communication and make sure other
legitimate constituent e-mail is not lost in the mess.
In terms of deliberation, I am interested in how online committee
hearings or other more deliberative aspects can be brought into
official process. If Congress can get over the e-mail hump, perhaps
they can move on to creating authoritative online experiences that
help them gather expert and other input on key policy decisions. (The
cynic or even realist might say Congress is too political -
everything is scripted for television, but I can't imagine a
legitimate democracy 20 years from now not having online time-based
asynchronous input (and queries for expert advice) mechanisms.)
Here is an example http://www.getinvolved.qld.gov.au and an older how-
to article - http://www.publicus.net/articles/consult.html Also see
some rough ideas (informed by the Minnesota legislative committee
process which isn't quite the high pressure show you can have in DC):
http://dowire.org/wiki/Online_Committee_Room
Cheers,
Steven Clift
P.S. When Jesse Ventura was elected Governor in Minnesota, his office
was flooded with e-mail ... more e-mail according to their staff than
that received by the Governor of California at the time. At a panel
I organized, his chief of communications noted that e-mail was
silent, it didn't light up the receptionist's telephone making it
ripe for quick video clip on the nightly news or share that person's
stress throughout the office. I envisioned a little bell or light
that would flicker each time an e-mail was received. :-)
> -clay
>
>
>
> >
^ ^ ^ ^
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