Grading the Twittering Politicians
David All
David All / President
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Curious about Twitter?
Lou Klepner
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House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash
By Jordy Yager
Posted: 09/30/08 01:16 PM [ET]
The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites
from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on
the financial bailout bill.
As a result, some constituents may get a 'try back at a later time'
response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about
the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote.
“We were trying to figure out a way that the House.gov website
wouldn’t completely crash,” said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the
Chief Administrative Office (CAO), which oversees the upkeep of the
House website and member e-mail services.
The CAO issued a “Dear Colleague” letter Tuesday morning informing
offices that it had placed a limit on the number of e-mails sent via
the “Write Your Representative” function of the House website. It said
the limit would be imposed during peak e-mail traffic hours.
“This measure has become temporarily necessary to ensure that
Congressional websites are not completely disabled by the millions of
e-mails flowing into the system,” the letter reads.
Ventura likened the problem to a bottleneck scenario on a highway,
where multiple lanes of traffic converge into a smaller set of lanes.
In that situation, some cars get to move forward while others have to
remain at a standstill.
“What we had to do was basically install the digital equivalent of a
traffic cop,” Ventura said. “It was a question of inconveniencing
everybody or inconveniencing some people some of the time, while
servicing other people the other half of the time.”
Member offices began to notice an overwhelming number of e-mails last
week as the economy roiled and the Emergency Economic Stabilization
Act of 2008, or “bailout package,” became of interest to millions of
Americans. All the clogs in the traditional e-mail service have since
been resolved, according to the CAO.
However, Ventura ventured that the problems on the House website might
not be resolved until the economic package was finalized.
“We think we will see this spike [in Web traffic] until when and if
another bill is hammered out,” Ventura said. “There’s going to be a
lot of interest in this all week.”
The error message in its entirety reads:
“The House of Representatives is currently experiencing an
extraordinarily high amount of e-mail traffic. The Write Your
Representative function is therefore intermittently available. While
we realize communicating to your Members of Congress is critical, we
suggest attempting to do so at a later time, when demand is not so
high. System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we
appreciate your patience.”
citizencontact
unprecedented numbers about the financial legislation, but the
solutions to handle the flood are hard to come by when the levies are
breaking. Once the flood waters of correspondence ebbs, we should
start to implement solutions that have been possible for several
months or longer to deal with this. I spoke last year of taking
advantage of the simple API that all members of Congress use
internally for receiving messages which could be used more efficiently
with a slight change that would take no money and only minutes to
implement for most offices. Advocacy groups could use the API which
has been around for over a decade and has had a new method added
recently for easing making messages forwarded by advocacy groups
easier to tabulate and sort.
I will be offering help to congressional offices. Based on successful
beta testing in actual congressional offices, I believe offices will
welcome a change that will make their correspondence system easier to
manage and quicker to make accurate reports. I hope to work with
advocacy groups that are interested in making sure that their
supporters' messages get in and get counted quicker and more
accurately.
If you are a Hill office, Senate or House, I will set up short
workshops to help you. I saw in the news reports, one office staffer
holding up print outs of hundreds of emails. Hill offices shouldn’t
feel it necessary to kill all those trees to sort through emails. I
will help offices to better use the correspondence systems so printing
emails isn’t needed.
If you are an advocacy group, you can read my explanation of the
system and once enough offices have implemented the system it will be
worthwhile to use it for messaging. (see:
http://advocatehope.org/project-papers/communicating-with-congress-by-way-of-advocacy).
Daniel
dan...@citizencontact.com
On Sep 30, 7:02 pm, Lou Klepner <l...@gatewaytogov.org> wrote:
> http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/house-limits-constituent-e-mails-...
Thomas Bruce
> Citizens are writing their elected officials with their concerns in
> unprecedented numbers about the financial legislation, but the
> solutions to handle the flood are hard to come by when the levies are
> breaking.
It would be tempting to point out the misspelling of "levees", but in
fact the levies *are* breaking, or will shortly, at least here in New
York State (grin).
Best,
Tb.
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Thomas R. Bruce, Director
Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School
http://www.law.cornell.edu/
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