The Congressional Management Foundation has been doing the yeoman’s work on addressing the problem of constituent communications. Through their Communicating with Congress project, CMF has been designing solutions for advocacy organizations and congressional offices, to help them create systems that can efficiently deal with massive advocacy campaigns.

Tim Hysom, from CMF, just wrote to the Open House Project google group, describing their latest initiative:

You can leave comments on their draft plan on the CMF Web site.

I’m ecstatic. All right, so this all goes back to late 2006, a bunch of people sitting at their computers writing some emails about what Congress should do with data. I distinctly remember Dan Newman and I both thinking that the Library of Congress should make its raw legislative database (that powers THOMAS) available directly to us to build applications off of, rather than the screen-scraping that I was doing. One thing leads to another, the Open House Project, the legislative databases section of the OHP report in May 2007 (which I principally wrote), then later that year with the support of Rep. Mike Honda, in November CHA asked the LOC to look into the issue (more), and then in the last month his office submitted text for the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Report, which made it through subcommittee markup of the bill, to give this request a little more teeth (like, ehm, the force of law).

His office also submitted a second paragraph which I’ll get to below.
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(For everyone looking for an update or an explanation about Congress examining its web use restrictions, I just sent the following email to the Open House Project google group, explaining why the issue is important, and what I think that community has to offer.  If you’d like to be involved or follow that discussion, you can sign up for the group.  -John)

The issue has raised a larger question than the one originally intended to be addressed in the house — video.

The Senate is in the midst of reconsidering their recommendations too (see congress daily today, sub only).

The question now before the Franking Commission is how to update what Pelosi and Capuano have both admitted are “antiquated” restrictions.  They have to balance legitimate concerns — decorum, commercialization, and improper taxpayer funded political content — against what all involved parties have recognized as immense potential online.

Clearly, the current rules are unclear, unevenly enforced, and poorly understood.  That this “hooptedoodle” (great word!) is even possible is evidence of that point, which I don’t think is in question by anyone.  The need for an update, revision, loosening, recodification, or whatever, is well accepted on the hill.

Dismissing the argument as being about a trendy web service misses the more interesting thing that’s going on here:  We’re seeing the leadership from both parties in the House affirm the role of technology and public engagement in representative democracy, in an explicit, practical way.  Of course it’s adversarial, that’s what party leaders do.

There are a ton of other reforms I’d like to see addressed, and I’m hoping that we’ll soon have a slew of other accomplishments and issues to focus on, public congressional video (go Carl!) among them.

The useful thing we can do, though, is to recognize that the people on this list are probably the best equipped people to help define what acceptable web use looks like.  It isn’t an easy problem.

I’m trying to focus on what’s clearly the case.  The rules need to be updated, confident engagement online with clear standards is the goal, and right now the chilling effect of a combination of restrictive and unclearly enforced rules is keeping Congress from doing as much as it should online.  (I talk a lot more about this in my interview with Dave Witzel here, especially starting at “what’s the steak without the sizzle?)

So, I’m hoping we can start to talk more about the details of member web use restrictions.  What really constitutes commercial endorsement?  When does conduct become unacceptable or undignified?  What role should Congress play in enforcing those questions online?  Where do the edges of “official duties” lie anyway?  Are we treating the Internet differently than we do traditional media?  (See Boehner’s recent post for an expansion on this theme.)

Probably more importantly, what are the principles we can use to approach those questions with clear minds?

I’d like to expand on the question of how we can reasonably approach those questions, but I think this email was necessary to clear the air first, and explain what I think the discussion should be about, and what I think this list has to offer the dialog.

(from the Sunlight blog)

New lines are being drawn about the restrictions Members face when using the Internet.

House Minority Leader Boehner today released a memo, entitled the “Internet Freedom Alert”, criticizing a letter sent by Rep. Capuano to the Chairman of the Committee on House Administration.

Member Web use restrictions are among the main Open House Project priorities, and one of the chapters of the report is about the restrictions set by the Franking Commission, which operates under the Committee on House Administration. (This chapter was written by David All and Paul Blumenthal.)

Boehner’s letter today rightly sounds the alarm about Capuano’s newly proposed Franking commission guidelines. In his letter, Capuano admits that Web use restrictions need to be redesigned, and proposes that acceptable Web sites and uses be compiled by the Committee, and that content from Members, when posted on outside sites, should “meet existing content rules and regulations”, and should “not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information.” (pdf)

While reconsidering or reforming these antiquated restrictions is a laudable goal, the proposed guideline reforms are only a half-measure toward modernized engagement online, and don’t address the underlying problems with these unnecessary restrictions.

The Committee on House Administration and its Franking Commission are tasked with making sure taxpayer money isn’t spent on commercial or political advertising on the Web. While there is good reason to limit incumbents’ advantage to be gained online, Capuano’s memo overstates the liability that comes when Members of Congress use popularly accepted communication tools. Exaggerating the risks online hamstrings Members and staff at exactly the time when they should be boldly engaging with constituents.

Communicating online involves only negligible cost, which means that the potential advantage given to incumbents, or the potential for a conflict of interest, is only very slight. Imagine a traditional example. No one would impugn the motivations of a Member who grants an interview to a very small newspaper in their district, where perhaps their grandchild is a journalist. Even though such an interview has a distinct financial benefit for the small paper, Members are free to speak with whomever they wish, and can be confrontational, or only pick interviews with sympathetic figures, at their discretion.

This discretion is important. Members need to be able to communicate freely, and the financial consequences of where their voice is featured are tiny compared to the possible consequences of trying to limit Members’ speech.

Has it ever occurred that a Member gives interviews to only one particular newspaper? I doubt it. That just isn’t the way motivations work in a political world.

If the potential for conflict of interest or political advertising is so low the context of the traditional press, then why are we treating the Internet differently? Is the Internet so unfamiliar, so public, that it should be considered undignified to have a video on the same page as a link that might link to pornography? That worry was reasonable in 1995, but not now.

People generally understand the potential of digital communications tools. Most services are provided without cost, and are open to public viewing, and, increasingly, public content submission. While this opens the door for disruptive participation, it also provides us with the immense potential of our shared digital connection, with consequences as fundamental as those of the printing press or the telephone.

If Members can use whatever brand of inkpen, or any brand of paper, or buy whatever shoes they want, they should be given radically expanded freedom to use the Internet, and make the same empowering discoveries that their constituents are. Even if that same pen was once used to scribble a ransom note.

The Committee on House Administration still has a line to draw, and plays an important function through the Franking Commission in preventing abuse of taxpayer funded resources. The restrictions, however, should reflect a balance between the liability they’re meant to avoid, and the potential benefits Congress could realize. The conflict of interest (or undignifiedness), is minimal, at best, and the potential benefits are nothing short of revolutionary.

Citizens are overcoming their fears about engaging online, and Congress should follow suit.

Congressional staff working on reforming Franking restrictions should be praised for their efforts, and Republican Leader Boehner should be praised for his bold stance on such reforms.

(from the ohp google group)

I’ve talked to probably 6 people on this list with ideas about publishing Congress’ “Dear Colleague” letters.

Dear Colleagues are letters sent between Members of Congress, often daily, often detailing legislation and asking for support or cosponsorship.  The Committee on House Administration recently announced new plans to “allow for greater categorization and customization of electronic Dear Colleagues.”

CHA also notes that staff sometimes receive up to 70 of these letters per day, a rather astounding number.

My question is this:

Is there reason to either push for the publication of all Dear Colleague letters (or some subset of them)?  What would be the ideal publishing method, and what might be a good incremental step toward that?

I expect that most members would welcome Dear Colleagues’ publication, since they’re written similarly to press releases, and are about getting attention.

On the technical side, I expect that an ideal situation would be for the House system to offer a “public” option for Dear Colleague distribution, where the default is public.  In the meantime, cc-ing some predefined third party public ingestion email would probably work, with that email connecting to a database and a public facing index of dear colleagues, functioning on an opt-in basis.

Any reactions or ideas?  I’m especially interested in any thoughts on why this would be a bad idea, since I can’t think of any.

Probably the highlight of PDF for me was seeing this talk by Mark Pesce, whose blog I’ve followed closely for 8 months. This presentation is very quotable, and very entertaining. (video follows)

Happy 4th of July. I thought I’d share an interesting website that has nothing to do with government transparency but is about good use of government data. The USDA maintains a big database of nutrition facts about foods. You can download the database and build applications based on it, like a menu planner. This is something I’ve been thinking about in the back of my head for a while since after getting into the whole Michael Pollan food mind-set I’ve wondered whether one can make a healthy diet just by balancing various food groups (as I try to do with limited success), or whether (contra Pollan’s overall message, though maybe not in the details) it would be useful to start adding up the numbers of various nutrients to see how my meals match up with recommended values. How should I know, for instance, if I’ve managed to exclude an important vitamin in my particular selection of foods that I eat week after week, right?

The database is great itself, but the cooler website is MyPyramid Menu Planner (mypyramidtracker.gov) (also out of the USDA). You can enter a typical daily roster of what you eat (with a nice sound effect) and it will tell you how it stacks up for a recommended diet for your age (or for me, how to gain weight to a recommended amount for my age). It feels a little over-simplified, but the simplicity keeps me on the site. I find, not surprisingly, that I probably eat about half of the recommended calories and clearly not enough grain or fruit. Well, I knew this in the abstract, but quantifying it helps direct me to fixing the problem.

I’m sure there are other websites that do similar things, but it’s nice to find a case where the government has both published a comprehensive (well structured, well documented) database and has also built a really nice interface for the data. And on a topic that is really very important to daily life, too.

And with that, I think I will take the rest of the weekend off from civics!

Implicit in our work is the assumption that public judgements of legislative acts are possible, and that individual legislative acts usefully reducible to data points, allowing legislative intent to be discerned. In a system dominated by parties and negotiations, this reduction of complex acts within a market-like system is tricky (or even sometimes impossible), but increasingly sophisticated metrics and judgement procedures are themselves valuable, especially when votes and positions are politicized in bad faith by both sides. While public evaluations aren’t a precise instrument, they’re far better than outright coordinated manipulation of legislative acts. Coordinated public scrutiny can serve as a counterbalance against party-based manipulation of perceived intent, and even if that scrutiny doesn’t do a perfect job of assigning intent or influence, it has positive effects on the incentives that govern future action.

Clay Johson’s recent post On Baseball and Congress on the Sunlight Labs blog neatly imagines new political data points, suggesting that our perception and evaluation of legislators should look to the business of sport for inspiration, and to suggest that Congress would benefit from “decent, predictive and objective statistical methods.”

Tom Bruce, writing to the Open House Project google group, describes a menu of criteria that might be useful in devising standards for which legislation might merit public attention:

A post, from the Freesteel blog, gives a detailed walk through searching down the data behind a political ad’s claims, making a strong case that deriving legislative intent is used to rather recklessly construe individual votes’ meaning.

I’ve even seen recent examples of letters from lawmakers explaining that their votes shouldn’t be construed as cast, that their intent was political and they wouldn’t have voted that way if they had known it would have passed.

I think the lesson from these examples is that deriving legislative intent from congressional data is difficult, but setting up systems that create meaning from (what looks from the outside like) legislative noise. The better job we do at ascribing meaning to legislative acts, the better job we’ll do in exerting electoral pressure that reflects a realistic view of voters preferences.

CMF published an interim report Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue . I had one of those “someone got it right” moments reading the report. Following what seemed to be tireless work by Daniel Bennett and Rob Pierson (Rep. Mike Honda’s office) and CMF staff going back a long time, and a conference in October that I really enjoyed, they recommend adding metadata to constituent communication to reliably indicate who the sender is, what the issue is, and what advocacy organization helped the sender send the message.

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.)

Matthew Burton has written a spectacular essay on government service and citizen tech development, Why I Help “The Man”, and Why You Should Too, available here, and reprinted on techPresident here.

I’ve witnessed a great deal of enthusiasm for creating a community of practice and better coordination for citizen technology politicos/political web devepers.  I’ve been preparing a post on the groundswell of coordinative activity both within and from outside government, and this essay provides a great context within which to describe such enthusiasm.

For now, here’s an excerpt from Matthew’s post:

Absolutely worth reading in full.