The recommendation serves to help congressional staff manage incoming communication. It’s a method of triage on the one hand, and a tool to help tally communications by position on the other. Critical as this may be, I find tallying to be incredibly superficial — and it really reveals, I think, that the world of communicating with Congress has become extremely narrow. (But I’ve written on that before.)

I’m loving the conversation about debate transcripts that Josh just posted about, because it’s a great example of information becoming increasingly public, even though it was in plain sight all along. All public televised debates are, by their nature, quite public. The transcript or video/audio, however, has been less available, so much that the battle over their fair use continues even now.

Despite this struggle, innovative presentations of this most hotly contested, most scrutinized of public appearances are popping up with increasing frequency. Josh’s post took the speaking time from the NYT and calculated the statistical correlation between candidates’ time speaking and their poll ranking. I just came across this tool (application?) that allows for all sorts of user-defined analysis of the debate transcript. You can see, explicitly, how many times the candidates said a term of your choice, and the text from the transcript is available right along with it. This is the sort of thing that we’re lucky enough to witness developing, as long as the data that drives this sort of innovative presentation stays open and available.

~

Whenever I come across something like this that I’d like to share, I’m confronted with a paralyzing set of choices. I can email those people that I think would appreciate it, I can tag it on delicious, I can link to it on twitter/facebook/jaiku, I can share it on facebook, I can send a link to someone through AIM or google chat, I can write a blog post on one of several blogs I sometimes write on, or if I’m really impressed, I can physically use my mouth to discuss it with someone (again, by phone, by ichat, or by physical space.)

One of the reasons that the Open House Project has been successful is that it started, and has functioned primarily through a thoroughly public interactive space. By gravitating toward the public and the collaborative, we’re inviting input from unknown sources, who always seem to be listening. This also builds trust and approachability, which is clear as people have often approached me to discuss things they wouldn’t necessarily write to the whole list (which I gather can be rather intimidating).

This is exactly what we want Congress to do more often, and better. The form that this will take will probably continue to evolve, just as stenography made a Congressional Record possible, telegraphy encouraged wire services and revolutionized the press, and TV and C-SPAN made hearings and floor speeches public in a new way (thanks in part to the spectacle of McCarthyism.) Evolving technology is also responsible for the permitting lawmakers to go on blogs like redstate or dailykos, soliciting input or even in sprited confrontation.

As political Web use struggles to get its footing, I’m still wondering in just the same way what the best forms are for how we share our awareness of the goings-on online. I recently discovered delicious, or maybe I recently adopted delicious in earnest, and now I love it. I can easily create a public space of links made up of things I found to be notable, find others with similar interests, and tag my links for easy retrieval later. Also notably, delicious has RSS-feeds galore, which means that one can transform or subscribe to tag, an person, or specific person’s tag.

This is particularly interesting to me because it may present the best way to share Open House Project related links with a broader community without constantly deciding whether to blog, email, etc. I think there must be a way to set up a portion of my delicious account so that every time I tag something with “ohp”, it appears in a public way. I’m sure we could add a section to the sidebar that lists the most recent delicious entries with that tag, but I’d like to also give others the ability to add links to that tag. Is the best solution to use a public feed, like ohp? It seems that that would be insufficiently specific. Anyone have a suggestion for a collaborative link-sharing space, preferably delicious based?

Sending postcards to verify addresses– The recipient has to type in a random code in the postcard to verify that he got the postcard, i.e. that he’s at that address. (Oxa mentioned this, and I’ve seen it elsewhere.) I didn’t mention it because I assumed this would be too costly. Actually, that may not be so true. I’m just ballparking, but if the overhead of a credit card purchase is around 10 cents, and it costs 41 cents to mail a postcard, that’s not soooo different. But mailing a postcard has some additional overhead (printing the postcard (automagically), and manually schelpping postcards from a printer tray to an outgoing USPS mailbox). I also found a service that will verify phone number-address pairs, which is actually pretty close to what is needed — at around 40 cents per verification.

However, even these methods don’t get you all the way, because in fact we need more than address verification. We need verification or at least assurance that the person hasn’t verified before. You could limit the number of verifications per address, but there are some technical problems with that. The credit card method has the advantage that an individual can only verify as many times as the number of credit cards that he has, and that’s usually pretty limited.

There’s another route to consider, but this is a route tried before with no success as far as I’m aware. You can off-load the authentication problem to the users by creating a web of trust. User A does the work of authenticating users B, C, and D, User B authenticates E, F, and G, etc.. And then one just has to worry about how much you trust a small number of root users, rather than the whole community. But I don’t know if this has ever been a practical solution to anything.

As commenters Oxa and Chris (in the post before last) note, OpenID is one of these emerging protocols that would seem to be helpful here. Sort of. Here’s the technical side of the problem we face: When a citizen signs a letter (or joins into one of these many-to-one communications), how does the congressional office know that that signature is legit? Currently, the only authentication in the process is citizens providing at least seemingly-real addresses, but as one staffer at the CMF conference noted, there are people (maybe not many, but at least one) who are using other people’s names and addresses when submitting letters to Congress.

A technical solution here would be for congressional offices to implement some (whatever it might be) form of authentication, and someone at the conference (apologies I forget who) mentioned conceivably using the e-Authentication system (in development) at GSA (iirc). That would authenticate people against bank accounts, possibly. (And someone else at the conference raised the question of whether that was fair to all.)

The problem gets a little bit worse if someone wants to implement one of these communications methods outside of the Capitol. In this case, not only does one have to do the authentication as above (and probably without the GSA’s help), but one has to then be able to convince congressional offices that the signatures being relayed are legit. It’s one thing to authenticate at the time of signature, and quite another to be able to prove to someone else that you did the authenticating. (Well, proving may not be necessary. Trust is another solution.)

Of course, these issues have been completely solved at the lowest technical level in the world of encryption. The issue here is a matter of how to implement it so it’s not limited to geeks with PGP keys and congressional offices with geeky staffers who can verify PGP signatures.

But, now as for OpenID in particular. Actually it doesn’t solve the problem because there is no way to tie an OpenID to a real-world name and home address, which is what we really need. OpenID, for readers who haven’t seen it yet, is a sort of global login identifier that you would use to log in at any website, rather than giving a different username and password for each website you use. It’s a great idea because, most interestingly, it is a completely decentralized system, and an open standard.

OpenID is certainly a good place to start if you want to build a system that is going to have broad applicability (i.e. “open use” ?) beyond verifying signatures on letters to Congress. How to co-opt OpenID into this is an open question, as far as I know. (I’ve talked about it ever so briefly with Andrew Lee at Fantasy Congress. And, also, I noticed that the idea of authentication was listed on the Gateway to Gov wiki some time ago, just to mention. Also, I know people in the OpenID and FOAF communities have thought of issues like this, but I don’t believe anyone has tackled it head-on.)

To do the actual authenticating, really the only practical way that I know of is using credit card billing addresses — charging users a nominal fee to authenticate, and then returning the money (or not).

So here’s the bottom line as I see it now: An authentication system is the primary thing we need if we’re going to have new forms of congressional communication. Building the core of this system based on credit card billing addresses should take about a week. I would do it myself except that the system must process credit cards and possibly needs to hold onto some personal information (certainly not the credit card number, but a name, home address, and an encryption key, for instance), which makes the site a huge liability and responsibility.

The petition, which I mentioned last post but am including here for completeness’s sake — A letter with a number of signatories. Questions: How can Congress authenticate the signatories? Is a petition too easy to sign to be meaningful to representatives?

The collaboratively written letter. This is something I have a new interest in following the discussion of the “C-Wiki” on the OHP list. This differs from the petition in that the signers actively participated in crafting the letter, meaning that the effort of the signatories is roughly the same as an individually written letter. The question is: How does one do a collaboratively written letter on a large scale? Something like a wiki would be involved, but one could imagine tweaking the wiki process to make a better system for writing consensus-driven letters. On a small scale, this is really not much different from the individual letter (if sent multiple times), so it’s a technological question for how to do it effectively/usefully.

A petition to answer a question. This is something like a Digg for “ask your rep”, or the Slashdot-style interview, and I may have first seen this for politics on the Gateway-to-Gov wiki. Vote up questions you want your rep to address, the top questions get sent, and the rep sends back a single reply to all those who participated in voting. I’m separating this from the usual petition in that the emphasis here is on the response.

The town forum. Once relegated to physical spaces, this can now be done in a few ways on the Internet. A text-based chat room (this must have been done before, but I don’t know of any examples), a virtual video-based chat room of some sort, or streaming a video recording of an actual (in person) town hall over the web. (I met someone on Monday who had some experience with that that I hope to talk to more about once I get the chance.) In a town forum, questions may have been authored by individuals (solitarily), but the method of disseminating the response is much more lively/interesting than a letter or press release.

The delegated voice. (Ok, I’m making up that name.) This is where members of the community elect someone to voice their thoughts and communicate one-on-one with someone higher up. Think of this as Your District’s delegate-to-your-representative on Net Neutrality issues. Backed by a large constituency, the delegate makes meetings with the congressperson, relays views, reports back, and perhaps establishes a long-lasting relation both with the community and the member of congress.

[Update 10/6/07: Commenter Chris on my previous post notes blog comments and forums as two other communications methods. Definitely.]

That’s all I can think of for now. Leave comments if you have other ideas.

The interesting thing to me is that there are technological issues in each of these methods that can be resolved with some elbow grease that might make them practical (whereas without technology, most are perhaps difficult or impossible to do effectively). (Thanks Oxa for the comment!)

Two things that I learned stood out:

First, congressional offices are ridiculously overloaded with communication with the public. 313 million emails came into Congress in 2006 (iirc), which if you do the math (because I forget if anyone gave the exact number) is in the ballpark of 300-2000 emails per office per day. And given the current office budgets allowing for just a few people (in the House) to be dedicated to dealing with communications like that, there is no way, as passionate as they are about it (which also became quite evidence both from the staffer panelists and those that were in the audience), for them to respond to all communications. As a result, what we see on the outside — web forms, sometimes CAPTCHAs, limiting communication to constituents, and other barriers, are a means for them to triage the bombardment of letters they get. If they can’t deal with it all, they prioritize the letters that the writer took the most effort to create. That’s very reasonable to me.

However, what was not reasonable was that if Members sincerely want to respond to every incoming letter (one staffer told a story of how Sen. Frist asked his staff to reply to every letter, and the staffers looked back in puzzlement), and given that more staff is needed to do that (staff sizes haven’t increased in 30 years), then the Members should be writing resolutions to increase their budget to make that possible. Congress can’t blame the need to triage on budgetary restrictions — they decide the budget, after all.

The second thing was that, as panelist Alan Rosenblatt presented, the method of triage has unintended ramifications — that barriers to entry can be seen as an insult to those to care but don’t have time to write a carefully crafted letter themselves and instead rely on the research of advocacy organizations to make his point (by joining in on a letter-writing campaign, with a pre-written letter). He put the point quite well: Members of Congress rely on their staffers to do research and craft public statements, and in the same way, Americans rely on advocacy groups to do research and craft letters to politicians. There’s nothing wrong, he said, with sending a pre-written letter. And as another panelist showed, less than 10% (he later said 20%+ as a guess, but the numbers on the slide indicated otherwise) of those who participate in a letter-writing campaign modify a pre-written letter.

I got in under the wire with the last question of the day, which went effectively unanswered (though Daniel tried). I should have started with this: There seem to be three ways to deal with the problem of overloaded communications staffers (“LC”s?). One way is to increase the barriers to communication so they get fewer letters, eliminating the least important ones (as they see it). Another way is to streamline the process, which goes along the lines of what Rob suggested for a computerized, standardized (XML) letter submission format. But there is a third way, which is what I suggested, which is looking at other forms of communication entirely, to complement individual letter writing, that deal with more constituents at once. Clearly, to the extent that it makes any sense at all, dealing with communications that are sent collectively by citizens is more efficient than dealing with the same letter sent individually. Currently, petitions (a basic form of an aggregated communication) that Members receive have no weight, according to one staffer I asked. Presumably this is because (1) it is too easy to sign a petition to be meaningful (again, as they see it), and (2) it is impossible for Member offices to verify who signed the petition. At the least, (2) is something solvable with technology. But there are many other forms of many-to-one, aggregated communication, and I would sincerely like to know more about what Members think of those methods and whether the problems with those methods are technologically addressable.