Frustrated with Communications to Congress?
Tim Hysom - CMF
congressional offices are all equally frustrated with the current
state of affairs. Citizens feel as though their voices are not heard
on Capitol Hill, grassroots organizations want Members of Congress to
understand the magnitude of support or opposition to pending
legislation, and congressional staff are overwhelmed by an exponential
increase in communications volumes without the proper tools and
systems to help them manage the flow.
This is your opportunity to help shape a better—more effective—method
for reaching out to Capitol Hill.
The Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) has been studying
communications to Capitol Hill for almost a decade and has put forth a
proposal which we believe would vastly improve the current system and
benefit all stakeholders. This new model for constituent
communications is detailed in a draft report by CMF, entitled,
"Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the
Democratic Dialogue." It also includes specific recommendations for
congressional offices, citizens, and advocacy groups that will help
improve communications to and from Capitol Hill.
That report, the culminating report in the Communicating with Congress
Project, has been released in draft form to allow for a period of
public comment, and that public comment period has just been extended
to enable even more stakeholders to review the recommendations and
give us feedback. The public comment period has been extended until
July 28. Both the draft report and a feedback tool are available on
the CMF Web site (www.cmfweb.org).
We believe that these recommendations could result in significant
benefits for everyone, but their implementation depends on receiving
feedback, suggestions, and support from you.
If you would like to help create a more effective and efficient method
of communicating with Congress, please review the report, and take 10
minutes to fill out our questionnaire to let us know what you think
about the proposed solutions.
We look forward to your feedback.
Regards,
Tim Hysom
Tim D. Hysom | Director of Communications and Technology Services
CONGRESSIONAL MANAGEMENT FOUNDATION
513 Capitol Court NE, Suite 300 | Washington, DC 20002
tel: 202-546-0100 | fax: 202-547-0936
www.cmfweb.org | thy...@cmfweb.org
Rob Pierson
Several contributors to this list have been involved in discussions of the most effective way to address the concerns that have developed as a result of the vast increase in civic engagement as citizens can more easily communicate with Members of Congress. Congressional offices are struggling with the increase in online feedback, and the impact of constituent mail is being degraded. Staff sizes haven't increased in decades, so while more staff time is spent batching mail, less time is available to read and respond to the comments coming in. In addition, the increased volume has made it more difficult for Congressional staff to provide Members of Congress with useful summaries of mail campaigns.
To address the increase in advocacy mail campaigns, some offices have taken controversial steps to reduce the amount of mail generated through advocacy campaigns. You may have heard about the "arms race" that began when several offices began adding CAPTCHAs and logic puzzles to their contact forms. The arms race continues today, with a few offices blocking the IPs of mass email vendors in an attempt to focus their limited resources on individualized comments.
To strengthen the voices of constituents communicating with Congressional representatives, and to reduce the need for the arms race, several of us have been working on developing a new system. The proposal was first developed by Daniel Bennet, and then modified and expanded through bi-partisan and bi-cameral discussions with congressional staff, as well as conversations with advocacy staff and vendors. We are still working on the details of the proposal, and additional feedback can help guide its development.
This model offers a variety of benefits to congressional offices, the
citizens who participate in advocacy campaigns, and the organizations
that generate them. While this is only part of the solution for improving
communication between members of congress and the public, it addresses
a critical need. This framework would probably not replace the current model used
to communicate with congress, but would supplement it with a more advanced
system.
Proposal: Mass mail campaigns would contain an advocacy campaign
code. The code would identify that correspondence as being part
of an organized campaign. Campaign sponsors could also provide additional
information about their campaign using open standards.
Mockup screen shots are available, providing an illustration
of a potential implementation of this new system.
Enhanced communication fields: It is currently possible for communications
with Members of Congress to include the contact information for the
sender, along with a field for subject line and message body. Based
on the discussions we've been having with stakeholders, there are several
data fields which might be defined through an open standard:
- Advocacy Campaign Code - the URL of the additional information
- Bill ID - Legislation being commented upon
- Short Name for Campaign - to appear in reports given to Members
- Background on the issue - what currently exists as the body of the form letter
- Organization name, description and contact information - to allow Congressional offices to follow up with questions about the campaign and engage in proactive outreach
- Vendor name and contact information - for resolving corrupted data issues
- Link to web page - If advocacy orgs have a web page with additional information relevant to their campaign, such as reports or additional resource lists, they can have a link to a page containing that information.
Some of the benefits
- Individual comments can be viewed - At the moment, most mail sent to Congress is form letters with a few lines changed by constituents. These few lines are not recognized as distinct by congressional CRMs, so the personalized comments are rarely seen. There are solutions to this issue, as can be seen in Dr. Stuart Shulman's work, but having a distinct individual comment field, separate from the form letter / campaign talking points, would be preferable. With individual comments separated out, Congressional offices could see all individual comments at once, rather than the more time consuming process of switching between (potentially) hundreds of letters.
- More accurate reports of constituent sentiments - At the moment, most reports given to Members are based off of either the office-drafted title of outgoing letters or issue tags for incoming letters (i.e. 75 Iraq letters, 40 health letters, etc). Neither metric provides a useful description of the mail campaigns being received. The new system would allow mail campaign sponsors to designate a short title for the campaign which could appear in mail reports given to Members of Congress.
- Strengthened relationship between Advocacy Orgs and Congressional Offices: Using this system, advocacy organizations would be encouraged (though probably not required) to identify their organization as a sponsor of the campaign. They would also be encouraged to leave their contact information through this system, which would only be available for viewing by Congressional offices. This would allow offices to follow up with the organizations, learning more about the issue and strengthening their relationship with their civil-society counterparts.
- Time savings - Staff levels have not increased in congressional offices since the '70s, while the amount of people each in each Congressional district has increased substantially. In addition, the low time and financial cost of email has led to a massive increase in incoming correspondence. The flood has led offices to spend both more time on correspondence while giving less time to carefully reading from and benefitting from the comments of constituents. This proposal would allow for reduced time spent batching similar letters together, allowing more time to be spent on reviewing and responding to constituent concerns.
- Field Standardization - Advocacy orgs are currently required to monitor 500+ member non-standardized web forms to ensure that their systems can relay constituent comments to Members forms. When these forms change it can cause delays in comment delivery or loss of mail. Creating an open standard for communications would help prevent this.
- Viewing Constituent
Comments on a Bill - At the moment it is nearly impossible for members
of congress to search for constituent comments on specific legislation.
Legislation is referred to by a wide variety of terms, with a single
bill potentially being referred to as H.R. 6, HR6, House Bill 6, Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007, and over 10 other official titles. With standardized bill references
it would be possible for offices to search for all constituent comments
on a particular piece of legisation.
I've spoken with several people on this list about this proposal, and
hope to hear more thoughts on it. We're looking for a solution that
will work for everyone, and your comments will help us to build a better
system.
House System Administrators Association
Co-President
marci harris
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:57:03 -0400
From: pier...@gmail.com
To: openhous...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [openhouseproject] Re: Frustrated with Communications to Congress?
Use video conversation to talk face-to-face with Windows Live Messenger. Get started.
Clay Shirky
Here's mine: You've mischaracterized the problem.
You assume you are dealing with a potentially cooperative environment,
among people of good will, e.g. "This continuing arms race is
counterproductive because everyone ultimately has the same objective:
a real, authentic dialogue between citizens and elected
representatives."
This is simply false. Special interest groups are just that --
special, not general. If I'm the NRA or NOW or NRDC, I don't want
real, authentic dialogue, I just want my point of view to prevail.
Dialogue is a distraction for people who want gay marriage to be
allowed or banned, or for the FDA to be required or forbidden to
regulate tobacco, or whatever.
Let me offer an analogy: in the last 10 years, there have been
innumerable sites that set themselves up to help uncover great new
bands -- that was the headline story anyway. In fact, they all set
themselves up as advocates for the bands, and the message was "We know
you're talented, but The Man won't give your stuff a play. Come to our
site, and listeners will flock to you, without a record label in
between you and your legions of fans."
Every one of those sites sank without a trace, *because most new music
is bad.* It's not the bands who need an advocate, its the poor
listeners, who don't want to suffer through a lot of irrelevant junk.
The sites had set themselves up on the wrong side of the equation.
So with Congress. Most of the people contacting Congress are
uninterested in dialogue, and most of their communications are
illegitimate, in that the spammers are not actual constituents.
To take an example near and dear to my heart, what made the Airline
Passenger's lobbying work was a) there was a spokesperson, b) she
(Kate Hanni) lobbied at the State level, and c) she was able to make a
case that downstate NY State constituents would swing their vote based
on a politician's views on the issue. She created a credible
assertion, in other words, that this rose to the level of
vote-changing behavior, which is hard to do, and should remain hard to
do, for the long-term health of the republic.
Contrast this assertion: "On the other hand, our research shows that
the primary reason citizens contact their elected
representatives is that they care deeply about an issue." It doesn't
show any such thing. It shows that 91% of people say that is their
reason, but what else are they going to say?
The ones who admitted they wrote in b/c their friends told them to
just don't understand how the game is played. "Oh yes, Senator.
Regulating pet grooming salons is my #1 issue, and would affect my
vote this fall." You won't find a single sociologist or economist who
studies voting who would give this statistic an ounce of credence.
If you want to make grass-roots advocacy more effective, you'll start
by realizing that your job is to defend Congressional offices, who are
currently under attack from political spammers. 90%+ of the inbound
communication to any given Congressional office is junk, and success
will mean figuring out a way to throw most of that email away
automatically.
If you can't do that, then the CAPTCHA-style defenses by the offices
are the next best solution, because automated low-cost message sending
as a way to change the law of the land would be a disaster for
democracy.
-clay
Steven Clift
and we worked out a relationship where the public Minnesota Politics
forum - http://e-democracy.org/mn-politics - was included in their e-
mail replies. They said "yes!" when I asked them if they would rather
have people talk to each other instead of just e-mailing them all of
the time.
The effort to streamline Congressional handling and understanding of
advocacy campaign generated communication is hugely important.
However, in the end, when people across the political spectrum in the
same district communicate publicly, hold each other accountable for
their views and most powerfully generate new public opinion, then they
can have a much greater influence than under-the-radar essentially
private communication with their member of Congress.
The problem however, is while there is a bifurcated national political
blogosphere by ideology and growing state politics blogospheres, there
are no "places" (or aggregated mixes) online for discussions of
national issues among voters in the same Congressional district. Being
a "real name" for civility and agenda-setting proponent, most
"default" (anonymous, no decorum required) attempts to create such
spaces would turn into useless flamefests, but if you cracked this nut
the right way with online public spaces that a Member of Congress and
their staff actually monitored and responded to from time to time, I
think we'd create real civic value. The challenge is how?
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
Clay Shirky
> the right way with online public spaces that a Member of Congress and
> their staff actually monitored and responded to from time to time, I
> think we'd create real civic value. The challenge is how?
The MySociety guys in the UK ran an experiment of setting up community
mailing lists, and only after they got to a certain size did they go
to the MPs and say "Your constituents are talking to each other. Want
to join in?"
I'll look for a write-up -- would be interesting to know how they
arranged signups, once the MPs subscribed.
-clay
marci harris
Pooling bipartisan input from the tech-savvy, the advocates, the public, the staffers, members themselves... etc.?
I was thinking Thomas-meets-Facebook (building on the great work done at OpenCongress and GovTrack) with a "page" for each bill, and a district-specific profile for each user. Advocacy orgs could set up groups, and their own pages; discussion groups, blogs, etc. I think it could become a hub of political discourse, and perhaps (perhaps!) a transparent place to direct lobbying activities. Official "endorsements" of bills could be cataloged there, and members could get a quick overview, with district-specific information, on which bills are important to their constituents.
I think it changes the dynamic, and potentially reduces the impact of money in politics. As you say, "cracking the nut" of the how and the who is important -- is it for-profit, nonprofit, government a combo? CMF? LOC? Advertising allowed?
> Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:22:35 -0700
> Subject: [openhouseproject] Re: Frustrated with Communications to Congress?
John Wonderlich
Chris Baker
I don't think that it is reasonable to expect a single site to be a "hub". Web portals are very hard to maintain and tend to have group dynamics that aren't inclusive, especially when dealing with the realm of partisan political discourse. Imagine mergine Daily Kos with Free Republic. A distributed metadata layer that can be added to what is would make it possible to create reference sites that harness the data without having to worry about the natural consequenses of true free speach.
This is the where the web is flowing now and would allow for something to happen organically instead of trying to force it into a monolithic silo.
Chris
http://semanticcaucus.blogspot.com/
Marci Harris
I am sympathetic to the “group dynamic” issues you mention, but that exists already — no use trying to stifle it. I think it is possible to channel that into a site where each individual’s input is channeled to that individual’s representative/senator. One person may argue and debate in a thousand posts, but if posts are searchable by congressional district (or state), then the only member that will consider those posts will be the one that represents that active constituent. (And it’s their job to listen to that constituent.) And that constituent will learn that their energy is best spent convincing others to share their opinions with their respective member... And if that gets contentious or partisan — oh well, that’s democracy!
The web is indeed “flowing” now, but that doesn’t translate into quantifiable feedback that assists decisionmakers, which is why so much of the current feedback mechanisms do not produce results. An office that receives 50,000 emails, but does not know if those come from the district, will likely delete 50,000 emails. On the other hand, if 50 emails are verifiably traceable to the member’s district, and publicly available, you can bet they will get a response, and will be considered in the “do I co-sponsor/vote for this legislation” decision. And once people and advocates see that such a tool is actually used in decisionmaking, it will be used more. (Or at least, that’s my theory.)
Chris Baker
There is a reason for Godwin's Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Lord of the flies rules are in effect.
A case in point. Back at the end of 05 then Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown set up a state wide forum for political discourse. It was carefully moderated and had a very talented blogger running it. At the same time, or a little before, a local blogger that supported his primary rival Paul Hackett had also set up a state wide forum. Many of Hackett's supporters saw Brown's site as a threat on many levels. One site had respectful, moderated discourse; the other obscene jokes and cartoons about Sherrod Brown's wife. I'll let you guess which one is now considered the most influential blog in Ohio politics and which one has closed its doors.
Now I see these forums as valuable tools, especially when they try to unroot a problem by distributing it to dozens or even hundreds of people. They have uncovered amazing things. But realize that it is their partisan energy, the same energy that can be so ugly and divisive, that fuels their actions. I don't think that you will uncover a representative sample of what people think because bullying and extreme emotions are what direct the energy.
Also, the same rules that apply to email and spam apply to online forums. It will be gamed. Current methods for authentication and reputation simply don't make it feasible to control the content when opened up to the public. Within days partisan forums will be directing their members in how to register for a targeted politician or bill and providing them with possible talking points. Many will create automated tools that will do most of the work for them.
I respect what you are trying to do. Maybe I've just spent too much time in the sausage factory.
Chris
Will Johnston
Will
Clay Shirky
> work and engagement; sending form letters is much easier.
Yep.
Sending letters also doesn't involve the threat of dialogue with
people who don't agree with you.
This is why any attempt to re-configure relations with Congress that
don't start with the goal of defending Congressional staffers from
email will fail.
-clay
John Wonderlich
- On CMF's proposal, getting at least some advocacy campaigns to add tagged advocacy campaign information to mass email campaigns (I think this is Daniel Bennett's "topic code") will improve the level of trust and build a better working relationship between advocacy campaigns and targeted offices. If even some MRA resources can be diverted away from mass email sorting and toward anything else, then member offices can be that much better at their jobs. Even if the built in tags only help email sorting for some campaigns, that alone would make the proposals worthwhile.
- on legislative commenting and tracking: I think Marci makes a great point, that howitzer-style advocacy campaign organizers often overlook the value they could hold for congressional offices. Advocacy campaigns and organizational endorsements provide something like free polling for congressional offices, and that information is much more valuable when: constituents are reliably identified as constituents from specific districts, organizational endorsements are collected for specific legislative initiatives, and when this information is presented in such a way that recognizes that it is useful from a member/LA/party whip perspective. While the point is well taken that online fora have their own tendencies to amplify conflict and to reinforce group dynamics, the benefits of collecting issue and district specific position information are only starting to be developed.
Clay Shirky
> sorting and toward anything else, then member offices can be that much
> better at their jobs.
What are those jobs, in your view? Being *more* responsive to mass email?
I find it remarkable that the goal of so much of this conversation is
to make issue spam effective. That's like building bigger highways in
the expectation that traffic will then go down.
> Even if the built in tags only help email sorting for
> some campaigns, that alone would make the proposals worthwhile.
It would be better to do this with latent semantic indexing on the
office side, as a service offered by the House to members.
If I go to issue spammers and say 'You should tag your posts so that
all the letters can be lumped into one basket, even if your opponents
don't', that creates the wrong incentive for the arms race.
> Advocacy campaigns and
> organizational endorsements provide something like free polling for
> congressional offices, and that information is much more valuable when:
> constituents are reliably identified as constituents from specific
> districts, organizational endorsements are collected for specific
> legislative initiatives, and when this information is presented in such a
> way that recognizes that it is useful from a member/LA/party whip
> perspective.
But John, that could happen today. All an activist group recruiting
signatures would have to say is "Don't send email from this site
unless you live in the Congressperson's district."
Not only do they not say this, they say "If they ask for a zip code,
use this one."
The idea that activists are motivated by a desire to be counted in
proportion to their actual numbers is nicely dealt a death blow in
Federalist Papers #10, which should be required reading for anyone
assuming that we aren't dealing with factional motivations here, and
with all the attendant system-gaming that implies.
-clay
tracyjo...@gmail.com
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
-----Original Message-----
From: "Clay Shirky" <cl...@shirky.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:13:42
To: <openhous...@googlegroups.com>
John Wonderlich
What are those jobs, in your view? Being *more* responsive to mass email?
> If even some MRA resources can be diverted away from mass email
> sorting and toward anything else, then member offices can be that much
> better at their jobs.
Member offices have two main jobs, oversight and creating laws. Any increase in member office efficiency results in more time spent on these things. An opt-in system that makes advocacy campaigns easier to sort, even if it does nothing else, frees MRA resources. Members are free to be as responsive to mass email as they want. They can ignore it, or they try to respond uniquely to each of them.
I find it remarkable that the goal of so much of this conversation is
to make issue spam effective. That's like building bigger highways in
the expectation that traffic will then go down.
I don't think "making issue spam effective" is that large a part of this conversation. If advocacy campaigns are more often traceable, and have contact info from the organizers, that helps both "issue spammers" and congressional offices.
It would be better to do this with latent semantic indexing on the
> Even if the built in tags only help email sorting for
> some campaigns, that alone would make the proposals worthwhile.
office side, as a service offered by the House to members.
I suspect that's true. But until HIR or the Senate equivalent is staffed and funded enough to support such development, then third party solutions proposed by groups like CMF that benefit all parties involved will make sense.
If I go to issue spammers and say 'You should tag your posts so that
all the letters can be lumped into one basket, even if your opponents
don't', that creates the wrong incentive for the arms race.
I don't understand this point. (not being flip, I don't get it.) When advocacy groups opt to make their messages more sortable, they don't then become less effective.
But John, that could happen today. All an activist group recruiting
> Advocacy campaigns and
> organizational endorsements provide something like free polling for
> congressional offices, and that information is much more valuable when:
> constituents are reliably identified as constituents from specific
> districts, organizational endorsements are collected for specific
> legislative initiatives, and when this information is presented in such a
> way that recognizes that it is useful from a member/LA/party whip
> perspective.
signatures would have to say is "Don't send email from this site
unless you live in the Congressperson's district."
Right, that could happen today. This is moving on the the discussion of a legislation tracking and discussion site, like opencongress or govtrack. Gaming may still exist, and authentication needs to be reasonably ahead of the spammers and gamers. That doesn't mean, however, that collecting by-district information and organizational endorsements isn't really valuable to member offices.
Not only do they not say this, they say "If they ask for a zip code,
use this one."
Mail-based district authentication is one counter-measure against fake zip code gaming.
The idea that activists are motivated by a desire to be counted in
proportion to their actual numbers is nicely dealt a death blow in
Federalist Papers #10, which should be required reading for anyone
assuming that we aren't dealing with factional motivations here, and
with all the attendant system-gaming that implies.
I don't think activists need to be good faith participants for collaborative listening and advocacy tools to be effective. Neither do member offices. The aggregation and the incentives they create just need to be better designed than the spam and gaming they attract. Tom Steinberg makes this point often with respect to mysociety.org's tools: the authentication just needs to be a little better than most illegitimate participants are willing to circumvent.
-clay
marci harris
I think gaming is a given... but that can be dealt with. Require that addresses be given for those signing up for a profile, send them a return-addressed postcard, and have them send it back to become a "verified user." That places the respondent in a congressional district and cuts down on the fraud.
No reason to diss "issue spam;" offices deal with it every day. I don't think form letters are bad, just wasteful and inefficient. I would much rather see people get receive a link on an issue alert (whether from a friend, the Sierra Club, the NRA, you name it) click through to a site, and express their support (or opposition.) As John said - it's almost like poll data for a member (or the media) and it provides a way for advocates to quantify their impact.
I understand that many of groups are one-issue machines, but that's already part of the process. I also agree with Clay that the passion level of those who contact Congress ranges from the "what the hell" to the Kate Hanni "my-vote-depends-on-this" level, but again, that's not a problem. With a public, quantifiable response system, Kate Hanni would be best served by working to get as many people as possible to click through and support the Passenger Bill of Rights. And with her passion and determination, no doubt she would be very successful, and members would pay attention. The mysociety threshold might be a good example for this.
To Will's point - yes, I do think people will stick with an easy way to send input. The only way this would replace email to members would be if it were easier and more consulted by members and the media. I think the public aspect makes this important, because media will cover the response that issues receive (right now the local paper has no idea if an office is getting 100,000 emails or the phones have been flooded.)
The reason that I thought this feedback would be best tailored to commenting on specific bills is because a bill has inherent champions - its sponsors and co-sponsors. And those sponsors would use the information to build support, "Dear Colleague - did you know that 500 people in your district support H.R. XX, a bill to increase funding for XXX. ... I hope you will join me in supporting this important legislation.... yada yada yada"
As for the "jobs" that staff do - much of that is researching policies, learning about the proposed bills, and responding to constituents' concerns. A centralized site would make that easier.
Am enjoying this discussion - it's something that I've been thinking about for a long time, and really appreciate the input here. Clay, have to admit - some of this thinking was inspired by your book! ;-)
Keep your kids safer online with Windows Live Family Safety. Help protect your kids.
Clay Shirky
> addresses be given for those signing up for a profile, send them a
> return-addressed postcard, and have them send it back to become a "verified
> user." That places the respondent in a congressional district and cuts down
> on the fraud.
>
> No reason to diss "issue spam;" offices deal with it every day.
But Marci, I think these two sentiments are at odds.
Verifying users, in just the way you say, would be good, precisely
*because* it regards the offices as being under attack, and because it
would succeed in marking most of the inbound mail as spam.
Go to any advocacy group, though, and ask them what they think about
limiting their advocacy messages to only hosting communication between
a Member and their legitimate constituents, and watch what they say.
And if you were to implement such a system, watch how fast people
would set up drop boxes in various key districts to answer those mails
fraudulently.
>... it provides a way for advocates to quantify their impact.
This they don't want to do. They want to magnify their impact.
> To Will's point - yes, I do think people will stick with an easy way to send
> input. The only way this would replace email to members would be if it were
> easier and more consulted by members and the media. I think the public
> aspect makes this important, because media will cover the response that
> issues receive (right now the local paper has no idea if an office is
> getting 100,000 emails or the phones have been flooded.)
But this is the opposite of your point above,no? Your verification
system would make sending messages much, much harder.
There is another way, which is for Members to announce that they are
abandoning all email as hopelessly spam-ridden, and returning to paper
mail and fax. I hope it doesn't come to that, but unless we start
conceiving of the problem as unmasking non-constituent mail from
advocacy groups, that's the way its headed.
-clay
Jon Henke
1. Citizen activists
2. Advocacy groups
3. Congressional offices
Each of those groups has different incentives (and there are multiple possible incentives for each group, as well). If there's no way to align those incentives, communication with Congress will always be, essentially, push advertising. That is an adversarial proposition.
It seems to me that the three really important questions are:
1. Does citizen communication with Congressional offices *really* provide any value to Congressional offices? I think this is an open question. Sure, people and advocacy groups like to "speak out" about an issue, but - though they could never say as much - I'm not sure that Congressional offices gain any valuable information from it. They already know that (a) advocacy groups take a position and (b) some people agree with them. Do emails of undetermined origin from political activists (whose alignment is probably locked in) really provide information that alters their calculations?
If not, perhaps we should reconsider whether Citizen/Congressional office email communication is a goal we should pursue, or whether we should look for better ways to provide the information activists/advocacy groups want to impart.
2. If email communication is really useful, then do these three groups have any (genuinely) common interests in Citizen/Congressional office communication?
3. If there is no existing alignment of incentives, then can differing interests be resolved with some sort of value proposition between groups?
------------
(via Blackberry)
Jon Henke
Strategic Manager
New Media Strategies
----- Original Message -----
From: openhous...@googlegroups.com <openhous...@googlegroups.com>
To: openhous...@googlegroups.com <openhous...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Fri Jul 18 17:19:58 2008
Subject: [openhouseproject] Re: Frustrated with Communications to Congress?
Marci Harris
> *because* it regards the offices as being under attack, and because it
> would succeed in marking most of the inbound mail as spam.
I guess I don't see offices as being "under attack," (except in rare cases.)
On the contrary, I think advocacy campaigns are useful and important. And I
think those advocates, at least the more sophisticated ones, understand the
difference between spam and constituent mail that makes a difference.
Advocacy vs. attack: I would compare the difference between a campaign run
by the AARP (hundreds of letters from retirees in each member's district,
constituents flown into DC for office visits, targeted advertising, op-eds,
etc.) with a right-wing radio-inspired call-a-thon. (I.e. Rush Limbaugh
says someone hates the troops and babies, and all of a sudden phones are
alight with calls from all over, and emails flood in.) One is issue-based
advocacy, the other is an attack. (You can reverse the examples to suit
your politics - compare an organized effort by the NRA with a post on
DailyKos urging calls and emails to offices.) If someone wants to advocate,
they will use a system that quantifies their effectiveness; if someone wants
to annoy office staff, harass summer interns, and shut down the email system
-- they will find a way to do that anyway.
> Go to any advocacy group, though, and ask them what they think about
> limiting their advocacy messages to only hosting communication between
> a Member and their legitimate constituents, and watch what they say.
I think they would welcome it, because, as mentioned before, I think
experienced advocates know that this is how they actually have an effect.
>
>
> And if you were to implement such a system, watch how fast people
> would set up drop boxes in various key districts to answer those mails
> fraudulently.
If we set up a system that becomes so utilized that political groups invest
money in gaming to this degree, I would consider it a pretty resounding
success. Am sure that's a possibility... But in this day of online banking
and various other applications that require validation, it just seems like
it would be possible to work this out. Any techhies have ideas on this?
(Joshua Gay - I just KNOW you could help solve this!)
> But this is the opposite of your point above,no? Your verification
> system would make sending messages much, much harder.
Ah... Maybe at first. But thousands have to wait 48 hours to post on
DailyKos, and they do it anyway. Yes, it would be a hurdle, but in a sense,
that makes the resulting impact even better. People who are willing to send
back a postcard in order to submit feedback to a member are probably also
most likely to vote. (Completely random assertion for which I have no
proof.) If that's the case, those are exactly the people a legislator wants
to listen to.
>
> and because it
> would succeed in marking most of the inbound mail as spam.
Oh - and BTW, I may be talking past you, because I envision a web-based hub
that would provide an alternative to emailing the member, not filtering or
altering emails to an office. I think there are two different approaches,
and I'm most interested in a public site.
> There is another way, which is for Members to announce that they are
> abandoning all email as hopelessly spam-ridden, and returning to paper
> mail and fax.
I shudder to imagine this. Do you hate staffers? And trees?
> ;-) thanks again for the input.
Clay Shirky
> conversation. If advocacy campaigns are more often traceable, and have
> contact info from the organizers, that helps both "issue spammers" and
> congressional offices.
Only if you assume that issue spammers have, as a goal, providing a
legitimate view of how many constituents in a given district really
care about an issue. Given the current state of play, I can't imagine
why you would think that.
> I suspect that's true. But until HIR or the Senate equivalent is staffed
> and funded enough to support such development, then third party solutions
> proposed by groups like CMF that benefit all parties involved will make
> sense.
Not if they make the problem worse rather than better.
>> If I go to issue spammers and say 'You should tag your posts so that
>> all the letters can be lumped into one basket, even if your opponents
>> don't', that creates the wrong incentive for the arms race.
>
> I don't understand this point. (not being flip, I don't get it.) When
> advocacy groups opt to make their messages more sortable, they don't then
> become less effective.
They become less effective, because they simply provide a sentiment
and a count, while people who don't self-tag can pretend to be
grassroots rather than crowdsourced email mills.
Tagged mail operates at a disadvantage, in other words, precisely
*because* it is easier to measure, and makes the single-sourcing
clearer.
> Gaming may still exist, and authentication needs to be reasonably ahead of
> the spammers and gamers.
In the current case, that argues precisely for systems designed to
defeat automated mail, through e.g. CAPTCHAs, precisely the strategy
the original report condemned, no?
> That doesn't mean, however, that collecting
> by-district information and organizational endorsements isn't really
> valuable to member offices.
Of course that would be valuable, but many advocacy groups don't
_want_ by-district counts.
> The aggregation and the incentives they create just need to be better
> designed than the spam and gaming they attract.
This is a good re-statement of the problem.
It is, however, only a re-statement of the problem.
When thinking about large-scale systems, just being able to describe a
problem doesn't mean you can procure a solution. In particular, the
problem you've noted -- role-based authorization -- has been solved at
population scale only once, with credit cards, which have a host of
characteristics that don't apply to voter identification.
Even Google, no slouches in the thinking department, have been unable
to ensure that access to Gmail is limited to human beings, so taking
on a problem that requires identifying someone as being a potential
voter living in a particular area, at a scale per district ten times
that of the UK, is, as they say, non-trivial.
Much more importantly, the solution to the problem is going to look a
lot like member offices further raising barriers to access, in
something like the manner Marci detailed, which seems to my eye to be
the opposite of the assumption made by the report that kicked off this
thread.
-clay
Chris Baker
Even Google, no slouches in the thinking department, have been unable
to ensure that access to Gmail is limited to human beings, so taking
on a problem that requires identifying someone as being a potential
voter living in a particular area, at a scale per district ten times
that of the UK, is, as they say, non-trivial.
I still see problems even if you were able to solve all of the automation and authentication problems. By requiring people to prove that they live in the district you are simply forcing advocacy groups to get more savvy with social networking tools. For instance facebook plugins. By registering people for specific causes they have data on who lives in specific zip codes that share certain interests. They can then send out alerts to people telling them how to set up the proper authentication with the regional only system, and then hit them with action alerts on their pet projects. In a way you are forcing them to be more effective since now they emails will have the weight of being real constituents.
Much more importantly, the solution to the problem is going to look a
lot like member offices further raising barriers to access, in
something like the manner Marci detailed, which seems to my eye to be
the opposite of the assumption made by the report that kicked off this
thread.
As a user of Congress I don't trust that it represents my interests. The thing that would make me most happy initially is better reporting on what my Representatives are doing.
Chris
Clay Shirky
> you are forcing them to be more effective since now they emails will have
> the weight of being real constituents.
Yep -- the goal is for the message traffic to have the same relevance
and predictive ability as snail mail and telegrams used to.
> Your root problem isn't
> that you aren't routing the tickets well enough or are making it too easy
> for users to send them. Its that you are working for an entity that has a
> lot of unhappy users.
I'd go a level deeper.The root problem is that one user's bug fix --
legalized abortion, say, or an open-carry law -- is a bug-introducing
move for another set of users.
-clay
Clay Shirky
> I guess I don't see offices as being "under attack," (except in rare cases.)
But can you find anyone who works in an office who thinks these
attacks are rare?
>> Go to any advocacy group, though, and ask them what they think about
>> limiting their advocacy messages to only hosting communication between
>> a Member and their legitimate constituents, and watch what they say.
>
> I think they would welcome it, because, as mentioned before, I think
> experienced advocates know that this is how they actually have an effect.
But this just says "The advocacy groups would all do this, except for
the ones who wouldn't."
Tautologically true, but beside the point, if the goal is to reduce
the inflow and raise its relevance. For such a system to work, it
would have to force message limitation onto _in_experienced advocates.
Which brings us back to defending the offices as a first-order goal,
which brings back the arms race.
> But in this day of online banking
> and various other applications that require validation,
Financial institutions hold passwords for each user. Do you know of
any working application with large-scale validation outside the
financial industry?
>> But this is the opposite of your point above,no? Your verification
>> system would make sending messages much, much harder.
> Ah... Maybe at first. But thousands have to wait 48 hours to post on
> DailyKos, and they do it anyway.
Yep. Which is to say that the validation on Kos cuts participation by
three orders of magnitude. That's not a side-effect. That's what its
*for*.
> Yes, it would be a hurdle, but in a sense,
> that makes the resulting impact even better. People who are willing to send
> back a postcard in order to submit feedback to a member are probably also
> most likely to vote. (Completely random assertion for which I have no
> proof.) If that's the case, those are exactly the people a legislator wants
> to listen to.
Absolutely true. I agree with everything here.
All I'm saying is that this model -- raise the hurdles, so that the
resulting inflow is limited to the motivated -- is a defensive
strategy, at odds with the sense that constituents, activists, and
offices are somehow in a shared enterprise.
>> There is another way, which is for Members to announce that they are
>> abandoning all email as hopelessly spam-ridden, and returning to paper
>> mail and fax.
> I shudder to imagine this. Do you hate staffers? And trees?
Staffers would take up a collection to have a statue erected in my
honor if this went through. Message traffic would fall through the
floor if it became this inconvenient.
-clay
Tom Steinberg
John Wonderlich suggested that I might want to take note of this
thread. There are three contributions I think I can make:
1. To point out that we haven't solved the mass mailing problem, we
just run a website ( www.writetothem.com ) that simply doesn't let
people send mass mails through it, using a series of filters. That
makes it no good for many advocacy groups, who want to spam people
with identikit mail, but we don't care much because we don't run it
for them, we run it for citizens. It doesn't send much of the total
volume of mail that members of parliament get, but we just try to
maximise the chance that any one single person using it will get their
letter read, rather than totalled and binned. Some intelligent
campaigns do use it, and guess what, they get good results even though
they send way less mail than with one click solutions.
2. I have a different idea from Daniel Bennet's codes solution, which
doesn't require mailers to do anything different. Simply write scripts
that detect that mails are mostly identical, and then bounce back a
mail to the sender of an identikit message containing two options. 1)
Click here to have your letter converted to a signature on a petition,
and get a reply in a couple of days or 2) Don't click and we'll read
your letter and process it as normal, which might take a month, or
never get a reply at all.
3. The lists/peer pressure system Clay is talking about is our little
site www.HearFromYourMP.com . It's a very small site compared with
some of our others, but over 160 MPs have used it to send at least one
message to their constituents. One my key goals with mySociety is to
make sure this site is still there in 10 years, so that when new
people get elected they find a measurable proportion of their
electorate is right there ready to be talked with (not to).
4. I'm very pleased that at last SOMEONE is building an email client
for politcian's staff especially designed to group and cluster email.
Round of applause to Sarah Schacht.
Tom
On Jul 19, 12:06 pm, "Clay Shirky" <c...@shirky.com> wrote:
Jennifer Bell
> There is another way, which is for Members to announce that they are
> abandoning all email as hopelessly spam-ridden, and returning to paper
> mail and fax. I hope it doesn't come to that, but unless we start
> conceiving of the problem as unmasking non-constituent mail from
> advocacy groups, that's the way its headed.
>
messages that originate online, it won't work. Technology is past
that.
Email-to-mail:
http://www.l-mail.com/
Email-to-fax:
http://www.srfax.com/srf/index.php
Potentially, you could set up a defense that scans messages coming in
to congress to make sure they're written in long-hand... but then it's
a matter of time before someone cracks that too.
Jennifer
visiblegovernment.ca
Clay Shirky
>> abandoning all email as hopelessly spam-ridden, and returning to paper
>> mail and fax. I hope it doesn't come to that, but unless we start
>> conceiving of the problem as unmasking non-constituent mail from
>> advocacy groups, that's the way its headed.
>
> I know this is a joke (I think?), but if the idea is to cut out
> messages that originate online, it won't work. Technology is past
> that.
It's not a joke, and it isn't the technology that's at issue. It's the
acceptance of the messages; one can readily imagine a whitelist model
for this kind of messaging as for any other, and the net effect would
be to silently discard 99% of the inbound email.
-c
Greg Palmer
1) An efficient system would aggregate them automatically and allow a legislator's staff to respond en masse, taking up no more time than communicating with a single citizen.
2) Big companies and monied interests have lobbyists. I think that some of these groups perform the equivalent function for individuals. For instance, I can't monitor every environmental rider on every bill that goes through Congress, but does that make me a bad citizen or indicate I don't care? No - maybe I donate to the NRDC to represent my interests. If they alert me to an upcoming vote and I respond, why is that spam?
Jennifer Bell
much of this discussion is hinged on two points that I disagree with:
1. written messages indicating 'I'm Pro on X' or 'I'm Con on Y' are
the best way to communicate individual stances to politicians
2. individually composed letters, with proper grammer, etc. are more
valuable communications than spam forms
Re: point 1 - The process of writing a letter to communicate a
position on an issue, than to have someone read the letter and
decipher it is a bizarrely friction-filled way to encode and decode
two data points: My name is Rosy and I'm Pro on X. Re: point 2 - The
fact that Rosy took the time to compose a letter does not neccesarily
mean that her opinion is more deeply held or thought out... it may
just mean that Rosy had more available time. You're using individual
composition to stand in for a third variable: strength of opinion.
Taking a cue from other domains (for instance, the stock market) one
of the best ways to judge strength of opinion is by asking people to
allocate scarce resources on the basis of how much they believe
something. If Rosy were able to log into a website, and spend $80
'congressional dollars' of the $100 she was allocated supporting gay
marriage, and $20 on opposing dog grooming laws, suddenly you've
started to get opinion metrics that have more meaning.
Jennifer
visiblegovernment.ca
Clay Shirky
> legislator's staff to respond en masse, taking up no more time than
> communicating with a single citizen.
Two reasons: First, the staff doesn't care about citizens, they care
about constituents. Until there is a way to sort mass emails into two
buckets -- My Constituents, and Irrelevant -- mass emails are mostly
noise.
Second, the staff doesn't care about the constituent's opinions per
se, they care about those opinions that are likely to sway votes.
Systems that lower the threshold of message-sending actually make it
_harder_ to tell which issues sway voters and which are distractions.
-clay
Rob Pierson
Constituent Authentication: Most offices use an authentication system to ensure that only comments from constituents are allowed into their system. This is based on trust, but very few organizations game the system (AFIK). This proposal would encourage email campaign organizers to indicate the organization sponsoring the campaign (and the email vendor), potentially increasing the trust built into the system.
MySociety approach: I've been a huge fan of the MySociety approach to citizen empowerment. I don't see emails to Congress stopping any time in the near future, and as such we should embrace the opportunity to make those communications more useful to Congressional offices while simultaneously supporting innovative websites that address the issues that people have been commenting upon.
Lowered Barriers: The barriers would only be slightly lowered by this proposal. The primary goal of the proposal is to channel incoming emails into a format that was much more useful to Congressional offices while helping to prevent the ratcheting up of the arms race.
robin sloan
strategist at Current in San Francisco and blogger at http://snarkmarket.com.)
Even if there was a slick technical solution to the constituent-
verification problem (and an accompanying issue-salience algorithm,
natch) it seems to me that's the wrong problem to solve -- and the
wrong direction to take constituent communications.
After all, who says communication w/ your representative should be a
one-to-one affair? Why are we trying to support thousands and
thousands of parallel, independent, often redundant messages?
We could do the "many eyes" thing instead: Instead of sending a
message privately to your representative, you submit it to a public,
shared system. Then the whole community evaluates what's been
submitted -- flagging the junk, promoting the good stuff, voting for
what they support, etc.
In short: Why not pool the collective intelligence of a district to
help solve this problem -- and then more besides?
There are still authentication challenges, of course. But the calculus
seems better: Gaming this system would take continuous, daily effort,
not just a bunch of emails cast into the ether.
And rather than improve the system by closing it down, it improves it
by opening it up.
Any philosophical (or legal?) barrier to a congressional office
insisting on public, many-to-many communication -- vs. private, one-to-
one -- that I'm missing?
(Thanks for all the smart messages -- I've been learning a lot from
this list lately.)
--
RS
Clay Shirky
Ahem.
"Torlakson, Tom (D) [...]
Use zip code 94519 in zip code box"
(from http://www.calsport.org/cspa7-21-08.htm)
"District 3 -- Representative Gresham Barrett [...]
A zip code in his district is: 29801-5555"
(from http://www.savesrel.org/YOU.htm)
and see especially this gem, offering a rationale specifically
designed to defeat the design of the Constitutions:
"Note: Many members automatically delete e-mail from outside their
district, or may reject messages copied to other members. Every
American has the right to contact any Congressmen they wish, because
their votes affect the entire country. More Congressmen are using the
"WriteRep" system where you must have a zip code from the district of
the Congressman you want to write. Tip: Go to the Congressman's web
site and get the zip code of one of their district offices, or get a
zip code for any city."
(from www.conservativeusa.org/mega-cong.htm)
That's from two minutes of googling.
-c
Stephen Purpura (Cornell University)
communications through email with your Congressional representative
plausible and they enable grass roots organizations to express
constituent opinion in a manner which a Congressional member can
evaluate.
I want to be able to send my Congressional representatives a note that
asks for a flag, help with a visit to D.C., offers to donate money for
their reelection, explains how my grandmother has a catastrophic
problem with the social security system, or to express my opinion
about legislation. If my representative's email client is
unmanageable, they can't use this medium to decide how to respond (in
a timely manner).
The technology behind the recommendations is less "slick" than a
straightforward engineering problem. While I have personal opinions
about how to improve the technology implementation, I'm fairly
confident in the principles under discussion. If one of the
"engineering cooks" wants to know my opinion about a specific issue,
I'm happy to answer. But, in the mean-time, I'm glad that someone is
fighting to give Congress the tools that every successful business
person already employs to manage their email and make it an effective
medium.
Best,
Stephen Purpura
http://www.stephenpurpura.com
On Jul 22, 1:20 am, robin sloan <rsl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (Hi all -- first contribution to the list. I'm Robin Sloan, a
citizencontact
that CMF is making. There is an internal XML format that the Congress
and Whitehouse have been using for a decade that I have added the
Topic Code (aka the Advocacy Campaign Code). This code is simply a URL
that an advocacy group uses for their campaign (I recommend using the
URL of the form citizens use to have the advocacy group forward their
message). I also have recommended that the advocacy groups be able to
forward in their supporters messages in the XML format with the new
code. Most offices have software that can recognize the new code and
all the rest can have it added easily. My beta tests in actual offices
showed that this could save considerable time tabulating and
responding to large advocacy campaigns.
The XML format I helped develop around 1994 with our vendor,
Intelligent Solutions (now part of Lockheed Martin). Back then most
email/Internet messages were from individuals so I set up the system
for that purpose. It was only as I was leaving Capitol Hill in1999
that advocacy groups started to forward messages using the Internet. I
apologize for not anticipating this problem, but I did work on it for
many years coming up with this solution in 2005. It took Lockheed
Martin about a year to include it in their software and about a year
more to get it tested in actual offices and about another year or two
to get buy in from CMF and others.
This system takes minutes for most congressional offices to turn on
and will save them hours a week. Having run the mail operation for a
member of Congress for six years and personally read through tens of
thousands of messages I think that is vital to make the system of
responding to mail easier, faster and more accurate. The current
software in most congressional offices builds on a tradition over 200
years old and is very adept at the formal system of drafting and
approving response letters. The Topic Code/Advocacy Campaign Code will
make it better for citizens that use advocacy groups to collect
petitions and have them forwarded to members of Congress as well.
Having more resources and better training in congressional offices
would also help.
I welcome people to read and/or watch the papers/presentations I have
made regarding the history, description of the process of responding
to mail and the technology in use. I have found learning about the
role of correspondence in Congress fascinating and urge people to
visit their Member of Congress' office and see the process for
themselves. Between the casework in state/district offices and the
issue correspondence in the DC offices, perhaps half of the work of a
Member of Congress' staff is to respond to constituents. And thanks
for all the ideas generated in the conversation.
Daniel
http://advocatehope.org/project-papers/communicating-with-congress-by-way-of-advocacy
http://advocatehope.org/project-papers/future-of-emailing-congress
http://images2.americanprogressaction.org/iar/iar20080515_email_congress.mp4