Do we need a GetSatisfaction for Congress?
- Written by
- Clay Johnson
- Date
- 03/12/2009 2:43 p.m.
On Thursday, the Sunlight Foundation launched a campaign to "twitter lobby" Congress, asking citizens to ask their Senators who are on Twitter to co-sponsor S.482. By my count, about 203 tweets were sent out by dozens of individuals. There are 17 members of the United States Senate on Twitter, meaning that through the duration of the campaign (which lasted a few hours yesterday), the members on Twitter received an average of about 12 tweets (11.9411 to be more precise).
So far as a result, two members of the United States Senate announced, over twitter, that they support the bill: @barbara_boxer and @clairecmc. Most surprisingly they announced their support via the medium itself, as well. Judging from the number of contacts, and the rapidity of response, it is one of the most successful grassroots lobbying campaigns in history! 203 Contacts for two public announcements of sponsorship! I'll say this: it would take more than 11 phone calls or emails to persuade a member of Congress to vote on something.
Philosophically, raises an interesting question. On one hand, if Barbara Boxer wasn't a United States Senator, I probably wouldn't care if she was on Twitter. She's not a friend of mine or someone I know. The reason I want her on twitter is so she'll listen to me and hopefully vote the way I want her to. The point of getting members of Congress on Twitter is so that they will listen and so that we can hear from them as real-world human beings rather than vetted, inauthentic communication.
On the other hand this experience may inevitably unleash a monster on Members of Congress. It may not be long before we're looking at swarms of people lobbying their members of congress to vote rendering Twitter completely useless as a medium for members of Congress. And like E-mail, it may become a less effective method of interacting with your representatives.. Soon our twitter streams may be filled with tweet-spam political agendas from our friends, neighbors and the friendly neighborhood lobbyist.
But that Sunlight did this, or that Twitter is set up the way it is, isn't the problem. The solution isn't that Twitter should somehow change, or that people shouldn't voice their opinions to their representatives in a way that best suits them. The problem is that the mediums we have available at our disposal aren't effective or transparent enough to be useful to citizens, members, or organizers. No matter what medium it is, if members of Congress are on it, lobbying, grassroots or otherwise, will quickly follow.
What we need to be thinking about are new mediums that use the collaborative power of the Internet and computational power of machines to effectively communicate with (as opposed to send messages to) Congress through the various mediums that the Internet allows: email, Web, Twitter, and whatever else is out there. It should be a service for both citizens and representatives-- advocacy groups, and heck, even lobbyists to communicate effectively to members of Congress in a transparent way that's open and free.
I've often looked at GetSatisfaction.com as a model for this. GetSatisfaction flipped customer-service on its head by allowing employees to have a voice and help customers solve problems, but also allow customers to solve problems too. And they allow people to aggregate their requests and responses so that they get effectively transmitted up the food chain. I personally think the key is aggregation and transparency of message. It's far more valuable, for instance, for Congress to get a message saying "Don't Club Baby Seals" +400 next to "Club Baby Seals" +100 than it is to get a message saying "Don't Club Baby Seals" 400 times and "Club Baby Seals" 100 times.
We began building out a project in mid-2008 to use this model, and called it GetRepresented, but I think it is time we dusted it off and opened it up a bit. Perhaps it is worth taking a look at building a similar service for Congress in Sunlight Labs? What would it look like? I'm not sure it works to just add our 535 members of Congress to GetSatisfaction, as you've got to do things like verify that a person is from that district. And you probably want to equip some district specific aggregation as well.
I've added a Get Represented wiki page for us to brainstorm and think about this. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Discussion
What are Your Thoughts?
Comments have been closed on this post.
Just for posterity, I searched on the hashtag I found about 228 now. However, a more generic search;
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=S.+482
Pulls up a higher count, more like 310.
However, your point is valid regardless of the number. I think rather then pushing our thoughts to our representatives (something which doesn't scale well for them) it would be nice if they could pull from us.
I know I'd be happy to accept a few tweets a day asking how I feel about the situation in Tibet ( recently in mind as I read about my representative's stance thanks to GovTrack.us).
Similarly to your "anonymous voting" solution what if there was a site which helped visualize and aggregate a "twitter poll".
The challenge I see with that is that the summary of the bill becomes critical. e.g. "Do you support Clubbing Baby Seals" ? vs. "Allow native seal hunting using primitive weapons?"
Information needs to be free as in beer, but it also needs to be as free of bias (as in magnetic north) as possible.
Funny you should post about this. I had a draft of a response to the allstaff email with similar sentiment sandwiched between ideas for a different tact for engagement and ways to visualize participation.
Anyhow, I can't help but wonder if the easier it is to interact the less likely Politicians are to take it seriously. At one time the phone was probably a powerful and direct way to communicate with your Member of Congress. Now it is pretty much pointless. Same goes for emails and online petitions. Indeed the same fate will likely befall the twitter lines of communication as they are unable to keep up the conversation and resort to broadcast only or filtering.
I like the idea/concept of GetRepresented, but without financial clout or a lobbyist, or both, I wonder if it will just be relegated to the same communication ghetto as email and the phone?
Another thought, vaguely borrowed from Clay Shirky, is that online "votes/tweets" probably don't really matter to politicians. For example, there have been several "pro-marijuana" articles on Digg.com that have thousands of "diggs" clearly indicating a desire by some for at least a discussion of the legalization. And apparently even on Obama's post-election site Change.gov, the legalization of marijuana took center stage. Did this make an impact? Hard to say, but probably not. (especially given all the other major issues that didn't get as much attention but are clearly occupying Congress's time)
What's to keep the issues on GetRepresented from being marginalized or entirely ignored despite massive participation? Or more accurately, does massive participation really reflect the desires of the constituency or just of those that bother to show up? (squeaky wheel getting the grease, etc.)
Clay--
Very well thought out post. I had been thinking of writing something similar just today, and sent a tweet to Sen. McCain to see if I'd get a response. (I didn't.)
I guess I see the paradox as this: the power of twitter today is the directness and individual nature of the communication. Once it hits overload, an aggregation strategy will be better than nothing, but it will lack the authenticity of twitter.
We're working on a hybrid approach of aggregating individual communications into groups that can then be presented in aggregate and granular form. I'll tell you more if you're interested.
And by the way, if my name sounds familiar, I taught Kelly and Coddy sailing at SYC and I'm Tim Spencer's brother...
I've been informed that phone calls to your Members of Congress aren't as pointless as I declared. Please pardon my jaded opinion.
Let's say I'm a Senator. In principle, my job is to represent the will of my state's voters. I'm not in the business of teeing off my constituents.
So, by the time an issue comes to a vote, it's too late to do much, and Twitter, etc won't help me. If I'm lucky, the state of nature is that a large majority of my voters -- enough to get me re-elected, thank you - leans one way, and I can breathe a sigh of relief. If the issue is split close to 50/50, all I can do is hope to spin the voters I disappointed - or persuade them.
I also face bad choices if the state of nature is such that the majority of my voters oppose what I consider to be the right thing to do: betray my conscience, or lose the next election.
Tweets, email messages, calls, and letters all help me to gauge intensity of those for and against the issue, but they don't change the state of nature.
I'd like tools that help me create a state of nature that makes my vote easy. I need to understand my voters' concerns at a way deeper level than "for" or "against", so it might be useful to lurk in forums where voters are discussing the issue, pose questions from time to time, and run mini-polls.
I'd also like to be able to educate voters - a large topic in itself.
Finally, when there are sharp divisions, I'd like to support negotiation and consensus building. Imagine, for instance, a citizens' jury that includes homeowners facing foreclosure, bank managers and investors, and taxpayers who'll be footing the bill for a mortgage bailout.
Now let's turn this inside out, since none of us are Senators: we need to use these tools to educate politicians on how an issue affects us, tools to educate one another, so that our fellow voters are deciding based on good information, not "Harry and Louise", and tools to build agreement and consensus with fellow voters whose interests seem to be opposed.
Clay, you and I only met briefly at TCamp, but it seems we have a great deal to talk about now.
While there is no technology to play with at the moment, we've been working on exactly this issue at the Open Forum Foundation. Starting with Congress, we've been focused on understanding the needs of representatives and staff, advocacy groups, and citizens in order to build a system that meets all of those.
We're nonprofit and will provide this as a free (as in beer) service that is responsive to the people that it serves. In this way, we are also guaranteeing that there is a free (as in freedom), legitimate, and reliable channel of communication between the citizens and their government.
The comments on this blog have hit a lot of the high points, but I would also like to add the importance of the solution being both a website and a collection of web-based tools that integrate broadly (via api, widgetization, apps, etc.) with other websites, blogs, social networks, and crm software to collect and display the aggregated information in a myriad of ways.
We have a well-developed model of what the solution needs to be and are about to begin formalizing our partnerships and advisory relationships. We definitely want to engage with anyone who is working on similar projects or who has thoughts or expertise in this area.
There are a couple of problems with this whole notion of moving congress via twitter. First of all I want to note that Twitter does hold some legitimacy as it is often referred to by top newscasters and politicians all the time. Whats more is that the new generation of senators and representatives are honing in on the fact that younger voters are online and on twitter. So they make an effort to ''not seem out of touch'' or behind the times, and make full use of the internet. So the idea of using twitter to lobby congress is a valid idea in my opinion however....
There's no doubt that twitter could be gamed and manipulated to the point where it really is like spam as you said. That would definitely render twitter useless as an effective means to let your senator or rep know how you feel.
Another point is that although our reps in congress do want to know how their constituents think and feel about certain issues they are not obliged to vote according to our whims. Our folks on ''the hill' are elected and expected to vote according to their own best judgment and not to be subject to democratic tyranny.
I can tell by reading this post and some of the comments that further explanation is not necessary but if I may; suppose suddenly there was a wave of extremism of some sort that began to take hold, let's say for example a frightening number of folks were suddenly for segregation. Our reps in congress receive a million tweets urging the passing of a new segregation law. Our reps shouldn't be subject to democratic whims and should vote with their own conscience and judgment.
I know, it was a poor example but the point is valid I think. I'm not saying we shouldn't let our people in congress know how we feel, I'm just saying that a million tweets shouldn't be able to manipulate the judgment of our congressmen and woman.
Hey, this is cool man!