I just wanted to do a quick review of eDemocracyCamp, the BarCamp conference that I attended earlier today. For those of you who aren’t familiar with BarCamp conferences, they are user-driven issue conferences, usually focused around Web 2.0, new media, open source software, et cetera. In other words, people volunteer to organize the conference, and the specific workshops are led by participants who post information on their workshop at the beginning of the conference. The specific agenda for the conference is not set out until the day of the event, prior to that there is only a general topic. The system works surprisingly well. I didn’t realize what the format was until this morning and ended up co-leading a workshop on communicating with Congress.
This conference was specifically focused on the use of new web technologies in government. I couldn’t liveblog because WiFi access was very spotty, but the posts I did post my notes from the sessions. Oh, and before I forget, a huge shout out to Tim Bonnemann for heading this thing up.
MySociety
The first workshop that I attended was definitely my favorite. It was led by Tom Steinberg from MySociety.org, a UK based organization that facilitates constituent contact with government. They have a number of websites that connect British citizens to their elected officials. You can read more on them in my notes, but there were two that I found incredibly interesting and innovative.
fixmystreet.com – The idea is that people can go online to place a pin in a map when they see a tangible problem that the government should fix. So, if there’s a burned out car on your street or a broken streetlight, you can put a pin in a map with the specific location and a description of the problem, and the website automatically sends a message to the government with the pertinent information. You then receive an e-mail a couple of weeks later asking if the problem was fixed. If not, you are directed to another one of their web properties with information on how to directly contact your elected officials.
pledgebank.com – The basic idea is that people commit to doing something (contact a politician, donate money, volunteer, whatever), but only if a specified number of other people do the same. So, for instance, I could commit to giving $100 to Heifer International if 50 other people will do the same.
Communicating with Congress
My second workshop was the one that I led with Rob Pierson. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how Congressional offices can handle the increasing volume of e-mail from advocacy organizations. Rob is proposing the idea of a topic code that can be used by organizations to help offices aggregate mail according to the specific e-mail campaign.
My interest in the topic lies more in the use of newer forms of communication. How can Members of Congress use tools such as blogs, wikis, online video, et cetera to engage with constituents and get their input on the issues important to them? There are more details in my notes, but one of the biggest roadblocks here is what to do about input that wouldn’t be deemed appropriate to be displayed on a Congressional website. Most content that creates a problem is either vulgar or involves electioneering. Normally, if objectionable content needed to be filtered out, one could simply moderate input. However, any time government is doing the moderating, there are very significant concerns about government censorship. In other words, was a comment disallowed because the commenter is a dissenter or because of legitimate content concerns? In most cases this is obvious, but there are certainly times when the content will be more questionable. One way to solve this would be to change the rules/laws that limit what can be placed on a Congressional website. They could be amended to allow for any content so long as it was from a concerned citizen and not a person connected with the Congressional office. This, of course, raises other concerns, but it is one possible solution to the problem.
National Policy Discussion and Online Facilitation
Joe Goldman from America Speaks led the third workshop that I attended. The topic was how to have a large scale national policy discussion and how the Internet can be used to help facilitate this discussion. By large scale, they’re talking 1 million plus people. I think my notes were pretty clear on this one, so I’m not going to spend too much time on it, but the one question I do want to raise is if it is possible to do this in a truly effective fashion. People are willing to spend time and energy on the issues that they care most about; they are less willing on issues that may be important but that they are less interested in. For example, you’ll find me commenting on politics and tech blogs, but you probably won’t see me on blogs dedicated to renewable energy, even though I think that is a very important topic. If you’re only getting input from the people who are already passionate about the issue, there is little benefit to re-engaging these people. Perhaps this is an obstacle that can be overcome, and I think America Speaks has some good ideas about how to do this. However, this is one of my biggest questions in relation to a policy discussion of this size. Again, I may have to explore this issue more fully in a future post.
I’m not going to do a review of the final two sessions of the day. The first workshop I attended during the fourth session wasn’t useful for me, so I ducked out and sat in on another workshop, meaning that my notes for both are very incomplete. That session ended a bit after 3 PM, and I decided to take off and spend some time with my wife, this evening. I’d love to hear more of your ideas on these topics in the comments for this post as well as the posts of my notes.
Presenter: Joe Goldman
I’ve got a more cohesive review here.
What would it look like to have a national discussion with 1,000,000+ people involved? – Did a pilot in 2003 & 2004
- Need to engage enough people that people would take notice
- Need to do it in enough places that Congresspeople would think their constituents were represented
- You need to do it in a demographically diverse enough way that you have credibility
- You need to sufficiently inform people so that you have good discussion
- Use technology to integrate
- Televised dialogue – demographically representative group
- Hope that viewers begin to identify with people on TV
- Online strategy component
- How can you recruit people both on and off line through the Internet
- Want to generate small group discussions online
- How can you use tools to keep people engaged?
In Northeast Ohio, a group of 85 organizations came up with 30 million dollars to stimulate the economy of Northeast Ohio and granted money to America Speaks
The online world has come a long way in the past few years. What are the online tools that could help take this to scale large enough to impact the U.S. Congress?
Strengths of large scale deliberation
- Asynchronous
- Anonymity – Can be a positive and negative
- Good moderation system
- Searchability
- Hot topic identification
- Facilitation
Challenges
- How do you get lots of people?
- Outreach message needs to be from someone who is known and trusted
- Message needs to reach people on their terms
- Repetition of message
- How do you get people to stay?
- How do you make sense of their opinions?
- How do you aggregate that?
- It has to be fun
- People learn in different ways?
- Have to consider people who cannot participate (too many jobs, disabilities)
- People need to know that their participation has a real impact.
What is the business model? How do you start all of this?
- Start at the local level?
- People may not care about public transportation, but they do care about how long the delay is on the Metro in the morning.
- Is part of the role of online engagement to find online games/tap into online games?
America Speaks is trying to institute an national discussion on climate change
- Engage with science around the subject
- Online game?
- Partner with a bunch of really big institutions that can get the message out?
How often do you do have one of these national discussions?
Swiss model of direct democracy
- Vote on ballot initiatives several times a year
State of the USA
- Comptroller General of the GAO said a few years ago that we don’t have a common way to talk about how we as a country are doing
- Working with the National Academy of Sciences, they came up with a system of indicators
How do you get people to care about something that they may not see as an important issue now, even though it is important overall?
Presenters: Rob Pierson & Will Johnston
I’ve got a more cohesive review here.
Topic Code for e-mail
- Help Congressional offices deal with increasing volumes of e-mail
- Provide a unique identifier for each new mass mail campaign
- Would allow offices to aggregate all letters from a specific organization on a specific topic AND view how constituents have customized a form letter so that the office can read what they think
Alternatives forms of communication
- Polls
- Something like a Digg for Congress
- Perhaps something with a Congress-wide account that ensures you contact your own Representatives/Senators
New media methods of communicating with Congress
- Blogs
- Problems with comments and what can be placed on an official site
- No electioneering, vulgarity, slander/libel
- Does it need to be on a governmental level?
- Should we change the law to allow for more open discussion on forms/blog comments that are run by Congressional offices/government and concern ourselves less if a citizen decides to post a political comment or something that is vulgar? Basically, is open discussion more important than being sure that government resources aren’t being used for electioneering?
Need to update franking regulations to reflect realities of modern Internet
bigthink.com – Video site for larger, more issue based discussion
I’ll try to come back and clean this up later, add in a few links, but for now, here are the notes. WiFi is spotty here, so I can’t really liveblog anything.
Presenter: Tom Steinberg
I’ve got a more cohesive review here.
Important Note: All of this code is open source
MySociety.org – arguably runs the largest network of non-partisan democracy/e-government sites in the U.K.
Started by building faxyourmp.com
- Put in zip code to find MP
- 2000-2003 – won awards, incredibly simple
Wanted to build more things like Fax your MP
writetothem.com – tells you who all of your polis are (at all levels) and lets you write to them
- Survey for two questions
- Did you get a reply?
- Have you ever written to a politician before?
- Important to know if they’re engaging new people
- Can figure out differences in wealthy and poor areas b/c you get zip codes
- Roughly the same amount of communication to politicians
- What else can we use this information for?
- Very private, everything deleted from servers within a few weeks.
theyworkforyou.com – notifies people via e-mail whenever a politician votes on/acts on/speaks on an issue
- Available via an api
- Loads of information put together in a way that is easier to understand
- Instead of saying they voted for/against specific issues, aggregate into sentences, they voted for/against this most of the time
foi.mysociety.org – Freedom of information website (will be whatdotheyknow.org/com)
- People make request to the government agencies
- Very public, all of the government’s answers are posted
pledgebank.com – Peer Pressure – how to get people to do things
- Conditional pledges – I will do things if x other people will as well.
fixmystreet.com
- You stick a pin in the map with a problem in your area. The site then identifies the proper government authorities to fix the problem.
- Two weeks later it sends e-mail asking if it got fixed. If not, it sends you to writetothem.com so that you can directly contact your politicians about the problem
hearfromyourmp.com – Mailing lists of people who want to hear from their MP
Important to have an organization in place to escalate requests. In other words, fixmystreet.com works very well because it can send people to writetothem.com
petitions.pm.gov.uk
- At end of 2006, the PM’s office asked them to build a petition website
- Gov’t doesn’t own e-mail addresses so they can’t spam
- If they reject a petition, there is a public paper trail
- Two days in had the same number of users sign up as myspace
- Anyone can go to the site and make a petition
- Basically can’t be vulgar or defamatory
- 30,000 petitions submitted
- 15,000 rejected, most rejections due to duplication
Sctemviser (this spelling is way off) – who should I vote for website
- A Dutch website.
- They gave out 4.8 million answers – there are only 16 million people in the Netherlands
Demographic issues: Senator from Florida and Senator from North Dakota have very different volumes of mail.
- Solution: compare only like states
MySociety started when someone who liked faxyourmp.com donated 10,000 pounds for them to come up with new ideas
- Crowdsourced ideas through an open blogging platform
Someone donated 400,000 dollars
I’m headed eDemocracyCamp today, a conference about the use of technology and the internet in government. I just realized about 2 minutes ago that everyone who attends is supposed to do a presentation, so I’m hoping they’re not too strict about that. I may try to come up with something on the bus, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be the greatest presentation ever. Anyway, I’m hoping there’s wifi so that I can provide updates throughout the day. Otherwise, expect a writeup when I get home tonight.
