CongressCamp Unconference Notes and Thoughts

Written by: Gerald Irish

I attended a couple of sessions at the Congress Camp ‘unconference’ a few weeks ago at George Washington University.

I had never attended an unconference before so part of my reason was to get a feel for what they’re all about.  My weekend itinerary was jam-packed so I was only able to attend 2 sessions and lunch but even so it was definitely worth my time to come out.

Engaging Citizens in Subcommittees

The first session I participated in was focused on the question of how to get citizens engaged in Congressional Subcommittees when legislation is getting drafted.  The major issue was that drafts of legislation are usually written under tight deadlines and as a result Congressional staffers often have difficulty performing the requisite research for the bills.  The result is that staffers often rely on lobbyists and small groups of experts to provide input for drafting policy.  Citizens rarely gain any influence into the process.

But now with advent of Web 2.0 tools Congressmen have the opportunity to solicit and incorporate citizen input into the subcommittee legislation creation process.

• How does one determine the location and identity of participants?
• How to verify the expertise or quality of user submitted opinions, data, content?
• How to incorporate citizen input in a timely manner?
• How to moderate comments and user forums?

The consensus from the participants was that the technology exists to answer all of the major questions.  The major challenge then is to craft technical solutions to mitigate the human challenges to citizen participation.

My take on things was that crowdsourced input could be filtered by a rating/moderation system.  Some of the participants brought up concerns about the quality of citizen content but the answer to that is that no system is going to be 100% clean and tidy, and at the very least there’s a chance of finding outstanding citizen ideas and solutions if they are engaged (as opposed to now where there is little to no chance of this).

A good idea that came from the session was that one need not to use an approach the relies totally on random citizen input nor totally on expert opinions.  A hybrid approach of sorts could possibly get the best of both worlds.

Advocacy Software

The advocacy software session was focused on issues that the current crop of advocacy software creates for the Congressional offices that deal with the output of said software.

One of the overarching issues that came up was that of authenticity.  How does one go about ensuring that communication from constituents is real?  How do you make sure the 10,000 emails your office received on an issue actually corresponds to 10,000 people who feel the same way? When advocacy software is generating this mountain of email it’s hard to tell.

There was one Congressional staffer in this session who shared some of the problems his office encountered.  One is that advocacy groups often send emails on issues on the behalf of constituents who opt into their mailing list.  But when the Congressman’s office tries to contact some of these citizens who sent these emails sometimes the citizen either didn’t agree with the position written in the email or had no idea an email was sent on their behalf.

One attendee posed a provocative question about whether or not email as a marketing tool or advocacy tool is still relevant or effective.  The email campaigns generated by some of the advocacy software solutions are so rife with useless email that many times Congressional offices simply ignore them.  With each passing day email-based marketing becomes less and less effective.

To me, this is a piece of a very large problem on the internet, which is, ‘How do we filter content so that we can find the valuable stuff and ignore the worthless stuff?’ Some combination of filtering, authentication, and new forms of communication will probably be the answer. In other words, it doesn’t seem like there is a silver bullet as of yet.

The session closed up with a discussion of some political advocacy software that is available commercially. There was also discussion of an open source solution called CiviCRM that can plug into the Drupal content management system. Ultimately I didn’t get much out of that discussion since I had never used that sort of software.

Conclusion(s)

A lot of the issues that were discussed boiled down to the question of how best to incorporate Web 2.0 principles into the Congressional law-making process. A major part of the challenge is to convince Congressmen and their staff of the value of interacting with their constituents using technology.

A significant opportunity exists for companies who develop solutions that solicit and organize constituent input to help Congressmen craft better legislation. Any solutions developed to that end will have applications to other parts of government as well, or even the private sector.

Lessons Learned

*I opted not to haul my laptop out for this event.  Big mistake, always bring your laptop so you can try out websites that come up or blog or tweet about the events.

*Some folks spiced up their ‘Hello My Name Is’ tags with some pieces of flair as well as their twitter accounts.  Must do the same next time.

*Live blogging next time might be useful.

*If one intends to lead a session at an unconference, it pays to do a few things right:

• Have an interesting and informative title for your session
• Have a rough plan on your topics of discussion
• Graphics or metrics would be useful, but ditch the boring powerpoint slides
• Personal anecdotes and authenticity go a long way when getting your point across

You can visit http://congresscamp.org/ for complete event info, photos, case studies, tools and other useful resources.

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