There’s a bit of talk at the US Open House Project about the problems that have arisen as a result of technology reducing the technical barriers to communication between constituents and elected representatives:
Citizens, grassroots advocacy organizations, and 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.
I seem to be on a bit of a Shirky bender at the moment, but he encapsulates this problem well in Here Comes Everybody when he discusses the problems that arise because of an “imbalance between inbound and outbound attention” ie ‘fame’. While in the past it was technically impossible for Oprah to engage in a conversation with her viewers because of the one-way nature of television as a medium, the mere fact that we now have many-to-many mediums does not mean that ‘famous’ people are going to be able to engage in a conversation with everyone who wants to talk to them. This isn’t because they aren’t interested in these people (though this is how it is often interpreted), but simply because there is a limit to anyone’s capacity for ‘outbound attention’. While social tools remove technical barriers to communication and interaction, they don’t remove social limits.
This is essentially the problem with constituent communications. There may be thousands of people who want to tell a prominent Minister how they should be doing their job and now have the communications tools to do so, but those communications tools don’t turn Ministers into omniscient beings able to conduct thousands of simultaneous conversations. It’s not a problem of lack of desire; it’s a problem of lack of capacity.
Usefully, the Congressional Management Foundation has just released a report aimed at addressing these issues titled: “Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue”. It’s the result of extensive 360 degree survey and consultation work and is quite comprehensive. Unfortunately, it’s not well structured, thick with bureaucratese and rather unimaginative in some respects (ie more congressional staff). However, there are some useful insights in it, for example:
The emerging communications paradigm is multi-dimensional and interactive. Communications between Members and constituents can occur through several channels simultaneously, each playing off and building on the others. Constituents get their information from a variety of sources, such as e-mail, Web sites, blogs, podcasts, and even YouTube. The medium and the source of the information can impact a constituent’s perspective, and citizens have many options at their fingertips for learning more about an issue or bill than was possible before the Internet. No longer do constituents assume it will take days or weeks to receive a response to a message. They expect on-demand access to information, services available 24-7, and rapid responses to communications on par with the standards set by the private sector and other government entities. The public has the capability to be almost as informed as Members and staff about the minutiae of pending legislation. Now, it is not only the Member educating and updating the constituent, but the constituent is bringing new information to the Member as well.
To manage communications in this new paradigm, congressional offices will need to adopt alternative practices and ways of thinking about these issues. This presents many obstacles to their traditional ways of communicating with constituents, but it also offers them an opportunity to reply to specific constituent inquiries and to forge relationships with constituents, as well as build communities online.
And:
While the volume of communications to congressional offices is at an all time high, few offices actually post substantive information on their Web sites about their correspondence policies. Because each office has different procedures, constituents would be well served if they could easily access specific Members’ policies on their Web sites. Specific information would vary from office to office, of course, but a thorough communications policy would include: guidance on the most effective ways to communicate, an estimate of how long a response can be expected to take, an overview of what information the office needs to properly process the message and respond, information about delays in postal mail delivery, and any other requirements or restraints the office may place on e-mail communications.
Most usefully, the report make an attempt at outlining how ICT might be applied to creating Constituent Management Systems that could increase the ability of elected representatives to respond to constituent communications more productively. It’s got a long way to go, but I think it’s on the right path. The Next Big Thing in the use of ICT to improve democracy needs come in the form of tools that address these social barriers. Tools that allow elected officials to overcome these social barriers and more efficiently ‘listen’ to citizen’s new online voices.
