Respectfully, @cjoh, that's pretty out of touch. Blue State, Salsa, all of those vendors charge money and create necessarily limited ecosystems.
EFF and Sunlight collaborated to create the data ecosystem necessary for this project in order to change that dynamic and make it possible to mechanize the sending of letters to Congress for free. That EFF and Sunlight could justify spending a pretty amazing upfront investment of staff labor and resources to create that ecosystem demonstrates that the existing vendor-driven market was limiting who could participate.
> I'd encourage you to hop on a plane, and go visit some congressional staffers and ask them how they'd like to receive your messages. Then build a tool starting from there. Like it or not, they're the customer.
They're not the customer, and to treat them that way is a great way to ensure that Congress is never made uncomfortable. It doesn't matter how many staff complain to the CMF about it.
Congressional staffers definitely are the customer to Intranet Quorum and any attempts to compete with it. Those are the pieces of software that need to bend over backwards to take their needs into consideration.
For sending messages to Congress, the burden is appropriately on Congress to find a way to handle receiving them.
Responding to frustrated Congressional staff by reducing the information below between Congress and constituents would be patrician and elitist. Responding to frustrated Congressional staff by limiting the intermediaries to a narrow range of mostly partisan for-profit vendors would represent an interesting and dangerous form of capture.
> That EFF and Sunlight could justify spending a pretty amazing upfront investment of staff labor and resources to create that ecosystem demonstrates that the existing vendor-driven market was limiting who could participate.
Not sure how Sunlight and EFF spending staff time on something validates or dis-validates a market.
> They're not the customer, and to treat them that way is a great way to ensure that Congress is never made uncomfortable. It doesn't matter how many staff complain to the CMF about it.
Let's be real: An 85% incumbency rate takes care of that. The reality is: Nobody is going to lose their office because they didn't reply to messages from Democracy.io. Moreover, no congressional _staffer_ is ever going to lose their job taking these messages and throwing them in the trash. There's not going to be some sweeping revolution in Congress because Congress wasn't representative enough.
The fact is that Congress' approval rating is 15% and their incumbency rate is greater than 85%. People already believe that their Congress doesn't listen to them, they also really don't like Congress and, it seems to me, are pretty much fine with that situation, at least electorally. The "This will make Congress uncomfortable" idea is one that's stale and old.
You can call this elitist or patriarchal. But my suggestion is that the EFF and Sunlight do exactly what you are doing at 18F (which I suggested to you 2 years before you took the job, scoffed at, and as I recall were quite argumentative about it. So...): go on the inside and work on problems from there, because if you're connecting firehoses to drinking straws, you're doing more harm than good.
Finally if you want to make it so Congress is well represented by its constituents, make it as easy and delightful to hear from your constituents as it is from a lobbyist. Until then, the lobbyists will always win.
> Not sure how Sunlight and EFF spending staff time on something validates or dis-validates a market.
They were previously customers of that market. They found it suited their needs better to replace the thing they were purchasing from.
> You can call this elitist or patriarchal. But my suggestion is that the EFF and Sunlight do exactly what you are doing at 18F (which I suggested to you 2 years before you took the job, scoffed at, and as I recall were quite argumentative about it. So...): go on the inside and work on problems from there...
I didn't scoff at working on the inside. I scoffed at the notion that working on the inside is required in order to have a valid opinion about what government should do. And that's something I continue to scoff at.
> because if you're connecting firehoses to drinking straws, you're doing more harm than good.
It's not zero sum. I'm glad for the companies that tackle the inside game here too. It's not the only game worth playing, and if democracy.io increases the pressure further for more people to work on the inside sector, then everyone wins.
> Finally if you want to make it so Congress is well represented by its constituents, make it as easy and delightful to hear from your constituents as it is from a lobbyist. Until then, the lobbyists will always win.
That's a pretty fluffy notion. Lobbyists can show up in person, and can get special access to events and meetings that ordinary constituents can't.
Sometimes that's earned by virtue of subject matter expertise, and a lot of the time it's just people who know each other. You can't make it more delightful to hear from a constituent than it is to get a call from a friend.
You can certainly argue democracy.io doesn't help with that particular problem, and that's fine. Arguing that it actually hurts democracy to help people send emails to Congress without having to go through a for-profit vendor is what gets into the territory of elitism.
Great thoughts & articulations, @konklone, wanted to add my support. David here, our non-profit PPF created Contact-Congress project on OpenCongress in 2010 and launched the first version publicly in 2011 to automate delivery of digital messages to Congressional webforms. Really excited to see the evolution of the Contact-Congress toolset, now with the launch of Sina & EFF's & team's Democracy.io.
Our primary goal was a positive user experience for OpenCongress visitors, who mostly arrived via search for official information about bills in the news or legislative issues they cared about - to walk these interested bystanders up the ladder of engagement, enabling them to write an informed letter (using info aggregated uniquely by OpenCongress) directly on the page where they learned about a bill in context (both its official status and social comments / plain-language summaries).
A secondary goal of Contact-Congress was to give users an immediately-shareable permalink to their letter to their members of Congress (if set to public, as opposed to private) - to demonstrate the potential of Congress treating constituent communications in an open CRM, a public queue, with tools to enable constituents in-district to share helpful resources, timely updates, and organize around their initiatives. My PPF Blog post on this potential for in-district organizing, from May 2014: http://goo.gl/gCS0fy
A tertiary goal of Contact-Congress was to demonstrate public demand for open letters and open priority lists for their Congressional offices, and highlight the potential of open data standards for more constituent communications. This is what I've described as the greatest #opengov potential in my nine years in this field (http://goo.gl/crVivS) - better listening tools, as per @cjoh's priority request - I wrote: "Government staff have new access to dynamic, data-rich dashboards for opinions and feelings of their constituents – crucially, that integrate with their official CRM & CMS solutions, so a bigger-picture is generated, gathering more public feedback & specific expertise." Exactly such an open data standard already exists and has been successfully tested, a few years ago, with a U.S. Senate office. So what's holding back development and adoption of such a standard for delivery & verification of more communications, such as petitions, questions, volunteer offers, public testimony, community events? In my view, it's simply a lack of charitable funding support for open-data infrastructure for engaging with government offices - I believe this can implement more & better constituent messages to Congress, including geolocation features for constituent verification in cases where implemented, and better analytics tools for Cong. offices to respond to messages without being buried in a queue.
That’s a huge opportunity for non-profits and for-profit civic startups to provide the next generation of CRMs to government – investing in the infrastructure to make that possible now, by supporting the work of PPF and other non-profits, will help open up that data as widely as possible and ensure the participation tools developed on top of it are, at least in part, open-source for remixing. (My Dec. '14 blog post: http://goo.gl/AprZns).
EFF and Sunlight collaborated to create the data ecosystem necessary for this project in order to change that dynamic and make it possible to mechanize the sending of letters to Congress for free. That EFF and Sunlight could justify spending a pretty amazing upfront investment of staff labor and resources to create that ecosystem demonstrates that the existing vendor-driven market was limiting who could participate.
> I'd encourage you to hop on a plane, and go visit some congressional staffers and ask them how they'd like to receive your messages. Then build a tool starting from there. Like it or not, they're the customer.
They're not the customer, and to treat them that way is a great way to ensure that Congress is never made uncomfortable. It doesn't matter how many staff complain to the CMF about it.
Congressional staffers definitely are the customer to Intranet Quorum and any attempts to compete with it. Those are the pieces of software that need to bend over backwards to take their needs into consideration.
For sending messages to Congress, the burden is appropriately on Congress to find a way to handle receiving them.
Responding to frustrated Congressional staff by reducing the information below between Congress and constituents would be patrician and elitist. Responding to frustrated Congressional staff by limiting the intermediaries to a narrow range of mostly partisan for-profit vendors would represent an interesting and dangerous form of capture.