Geodog

AdvocacyDev and the future of e-advocacy

I spend most of my time at work dealing with the day to day details of designing, coding, testing and releasing high quality software for use by non-profits and advocacy organizations, so I'm greatly looking forward to spending the next 3 days with my head out of the weeds, so to speak, actually looking at the forest. I'm going to spend the next three days at AdvocacyDevII, a gathering of Political Technologists (or is it technical activists), exploring the current state of open source tools for non-profits and advocacy groups. I'm hoping to spend a little time at exploring the future of e-advocacy, and proposed an agenda item on the topic:

What is the future of E-Advocacy?

5 years ago, it was a novelty for policymakers to receive email from constituents, and organizations that mobilized people to send emails impressed policymakers. Now policymakers are making it more and more difficult for people to reach them electronically, and some of them are actively hostile to organized communications. Meanwhile, we have seen the rise of blogs and decentralized network-based e-organizing empowering individuals to put forth their own views, but it is unclear to what extent that has resulted in actual policy changes. How can we best use the tools we are developing to *effectively* mobilize support for the policies we advocate. How do we translate communication in cyberspace to action in meatspace?

Just today the Congressional Management Foundation released a study "Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy (pdf)" which seems very on topic. The Washington Post summarized it thus:

On Capitol Hill, the Inboxes Are Overflowing

The money quotes from the article are:

Between legislators and the people who want to influence them, there's open warfare on the Web...

Unfortunately, a lot of the e-mails are barely worth reading -- or at least that's what the people who handle them believe. Interest groups generate most of the incoming e-mails and a numbing percentage of those are form letters. Half of the aides surveyed are convinced that constituents aren't even aware that they've sent such identical-form communications, and another 25 percent of staffers question whether those communications are legitimate at all.

Almost all of the congressional aides surveyed said that they'd like to find a way to differentiate between interest-group e-mails and the rare, more prized missives that individuals actually write themselves.

As one frustrated legislative director told the foundation: "[There is] too much mail, not enough staff. Not enough time to do it, particularly when in session. [We're] really losing sight of the important letters that come in -- like the three-page letter from Grandma as opposed to those floods of mail where all they're doing is clicking a button. It's insane."

"Stop sending form letters/faxes/e-mails that the constituent doesn't even know he/she is sending," a House staffer added. "It's a waste of time and resources and does not influence the members' stance on the issue in any way...

... once the e-mails penetrate Congress, staffers, for all their griping, usually take them into account. The survey shows that congressional offices at least tally and take note of the vast majority of electronic messages they receive, even if they are mass produced.

Deluging policy makers with form emails clearly doesn't have much effect on policy. So what are the new ways of organizing citizens online, and getting their voices heard? Targeting the media with blogs? Citizen journalism? Flash mobs organized via SMS? Distributed factchecking, or opposition research organized via blogs and wikis?

I hope to find out (and be part of creating new ones) at AdvocacyDevII.