Colin Delany at ePolitics just released the second edition of his classic handbook, Online Politics 101. It’s a handy (and free) guide to using the Internet in politics, updated for a post-Twitter, pre-AI political world.

BTW, Colin is speaking at Personal Democracy Forum next week.

May the force be with you, Colin.

It looks like a lot of people are unhappy with their communications with Congress, according to a new report by the Congressional Management Foundation called Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement.

• 92% of Internet users who contact Congress through email, web forms, etc. want a response.
• Only 63% recall receiving a response.
• Almost half (46%) were dissatisfied with the response.
• More than half (64%) say the response did not address their concerns and that the response was too political biased.

It gets (a little) worse: only 39% of those who contacted Congress (and 36% of those who had not contacted Congress) thought the information they received from their Senators and Representatives was trustworthy.

More than half said they did not think their Members cared about what they had to say (55%) or were interested in what they had to say (62%).

That’s a lot of disgruntled voters, but there is a silver lining, according to Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter, authors of the study. Despite their dissatisfaction, voters want their Senators and Representatives to update them on their activities and the policy issues they are addressing in Washington. As Goldschmidt and Ochreiter reveal, almost half of Americans contacted a U.S. Senator of Representative in the past five years (44%), providing elected officials with an opportunity to create more positive moments with constituents who communicate with their offices – if they use the technology effectively.

This is where Communicating with Congress transitions from being just a research study into a handbook. Goldschmidt and Ochreiter spend half of the publication reviewing the implications their research has on Congress and suggestions tactics to help Congressional offices better communicate with constituents – and help the advocacy community better communicate with Congress.

One recommendation asks Congressional offices to “reconsider the tone of your responses”:

many [Congressional offices] use their responses solely as opportunities to talk up the Senator or Representative and explain all the actions and votes he or she has taken on the issue. These messages often sound like press releases or marketing materials. When people express their views and opinions, responses which “sell” the Member may not be the best approach, as it amounts to an exchange of opinion without a meeting of the minds. Congressional offices may want to consider how to craft response with the primary goal of acknowledging constituents’ key concerns and a secondary goal of conveying the Member’s accomplishments.

This may go some (but perhaps not all) of the way toward turning potential dissatisfied constituents into satisfied constituents.

While I focus on satisfaction in this post, some of the Goldschmidt and Ochreiter’s most interesting findings look at the role advocacy play in citizen communications with Congress. You can find a copy on the Congressional Management Foundation website.

Some of the most creative stuff comes from conservation and animal protection organizations, like this piece from the WDCS (Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society).

Yup, that’s a full size whale.  And if you wait long enough, you get to see a lot of it. Discretely, but just so cleverly tucked into the top left-hand corner is a box to “click here and close” the application. I accidentally rolled over it, and the following slogan popped up:

Think before you close this window. This might be the last life size whale you will ever see.

With a link to their website, http://www.stopbloodywhaling.org/.

Granted, when I clicked on the link, it didn’t actually go anywhere. Still, clever, very clever.

Someone or some group has started an Anti-Romney for VP online petition. Like any online petition, I’m not sure how successful this one will be. I read over some of the comments and chortled.

A few favorites of mine: “Get a conservative or get lost”, “Romney would make a great VP. Don’t listen to the inbreds.”, and “Please, not that guy!”

There were more than a couple of entries that do not merit repetition. From the Democratic perspective, it’s good to see the Republicans haven’t fully embraced/coalesced around McCain yet.

For those of you attending (or thinking of attending) the upcoming Politics Online Conference, consider attending two panels I have assembled: Social Networking/Media Strategy of the Presidential Campaigns and Open Source Advocacy. While it may be too soon to say that this aspect of online campaigns is the “be all, end all” of online strategy, there have been some great innovations in this space this campaign cycle.

Social Networking/Media Strategy of the Presidential Campaigns

The panel includes Justine Lam, eCampaign Director for Ron Paul; Amy Rubin, former Deputy Director of New Media for John Edwards; Katie Harbath, Deputy eCampaign Director for Rudy Giuliani; and Michael Turk, former eCampaign Director for Bush-Cheney ‘04 and my fellow blogger at techPresident.com.

The panel will explore two contrasting views of using the social web for campaigns: it has not been useful (for some) and it has been essential (for others). I suppose where you sit is where you stand.

In any event, come join us at 3:30p on March 4 and join the debate.

Open Source Advocacy

On March 5 at 3:00p, I am chairing a second panel on Open Source Advocacy. This panel will explore how open source software, software that is free to use, though not necessarily free to implement, can help advocacy organizations. The panel includes Michelle Murain, who blogs on Non-profit technology at the ZenofNPTech.org; Ryan Ozimek, President of PICnet and a core Joomla developer; Michael Haggerty, President of Trellon and a core Drupal developer; and Jo Lee founder of CitizenSpeak, an open source advocacy campaign tool that integrates with CiviCRM.

Both panels should be very interesting and I encourage all to attend.

IPDI’s very own financial director, Chris Brooks, who moonlights on campus as the chairman for the George Washington University College Republicans, made CNN last week. In a short three-minute video you can see here, Chris and a few other GW students managed to get their two cents in about college-age voters’ use of the Internet.

Chris, like most of us here at IPDI, is a compulsive Web surfer and admits as much in the video. While this expression of love for 24/7 access to the candidates might scare off a few Luddites (mostly because that’s all that is really left of that movement…just a few), Chris is a good example of how plugged-in young voters can enjoy greater breadth of knowledge about the candidates than our parents’ generation could through newspapers and once a night newscasts just by heading over to the dot-coms for the news networks or junkie sites like RealClearPolitics.

And I am not just saying this because Chris is the guy who fills out my paycheck…although a small blogging bonus could never hurt!

One of the great, shiny ideals that organizations like IPDI espouse is the belief that the Internet is a tremendous tool for political and civic engagement. And my-oh-my has there emerged a delightful abundance of sites that attempt to inform and enable voters.

Here’s a shortlist of sites I am cruising this week:

The National Presidential Caucus (NPC) is an organization trying to engage voters in a day of discussion and deliberation preceding the 2008 presidential primaries. As Myles Weisleder put it when I spoke with him yesterday, “If there’s a national primary, then should be a national caucus to discuss issues before the vote. People deserve more.” IPDI pledges to hold its own caucus in December.

Connect2Elect asks each user questions about his or her political beliefs, and then matches the users up with the presidential candidates who most closely match. What matches Connect2Elect different (and a bit more fun) than other sites is its lack on multiple choice questions. Instead, users drag and drop values into different columns, a practice that is rather addicting.

RangeVoting.org uses an algorithm to eliminate some of the ills of redistricting: “huge amount of gerrymandering, artificially manipulated spoiled ballots, and ludicrous ballot access restrictions.”

There’s a creepy scene at the beginning of the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Charlie and a strange man stand outside the gates of the chocolate factory. The man, referring to the factory, says “nobody ever goes in; nobody ever comes out.”

This is all well and good in factories. But what’s a government to do when information about the goings-on instead its borders appear to threaten state security? The same thing: shut down the gates.

That’s what the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) did in Burma a few weeks ago when the less than 1 percent of its citizens who do have Internet access used it to post camera phone pictures and blogs about protests in Rangoon. The power of citizen media, the stirring images it produced, and the growing support for the protestors within the global community, led the government to shut down the country’s two ISPs, Myanmar Posts and Telecom (MPT) and Bagan/Myanmar Teleport (BaganNet) sporadically, then completely, then sporadically between September 29 and October 16. The idea was to prevent citizen coverage of the protests from reaching outsiders and outside signs of support and solidarity from reaching its citizens.

Now, the OpenNet Initiative tells you how the government did it in its latest report, Pulling the Plug. Author Stephanie Wang writes,

Burma provides a rare example of a government also taking extreme measures to keep information from escaping its borders. In pulling the plug on the Internet Burma became only the second country to resort to such drastic action; in 2005 King Gyanendra of Nepal declared martial law and briefly shut down the Internet, along with international telephone lines and cellular communications networks.

Like any factory with a security threat, the government didn’t stop at shutting the gates. It also started identifying protestors using protest footage. Wang reports that security forces in Mandalay checked motorcycle registrations against footage of the protests, pinpointing and cracking down on protestors using the same medium as the citizen journalists.

The point of the crackdown might have been to prevent nothing from coming in and nothing from going out, but that doesn’t mean that something wasn’t circulating from within. Wang alludes to the incident as an illustration of the power of citizen journalism to share up a nation and a global community.

But there is something else, something just beneath the surface, something about a government watching and adopting the tactics of a dissident citizen force. If a government wants to keep up with techno-powered dissidents (even in a country with one of the smallest Internet populations in the world), it behooves the government to quickly, nimbly and quietly (or not so quietly) think and even act like a dissident.

At this afternoon’s release event for our new study, Poli-fluentials: The New Political Influencers, Doris Spielthenner of FAS.Research presented some fascinating data about finding and activating networked, word-of-mouth, politically-charged opinion leaders. According to her presentation, as well as the two chapters she co-authored (along with Neal Gorenflo and Harald Katzmair, both of FAS.Research), Poli-fluentials are likely to be “Hubs.” That is, they are more likely to have political networks of 30 or more people.

These Hubs, according to Spielthenner, can be divided into two different categories. Each category of hubs plays a different role in the political process.

1. Community Hubs are at the center of ideological similar or homogeneous networks. In other words, their friends mostly think the same way about politics that they do. Political campaigns and advocacy groups should approach these Community Hubs with political messages and asks that mobilize their base of support.
2. Bridging Hubs are at the center of ideologically diverse or heterogeneous networks. Target Bridging Hubs with “bridging messages” – messages designed to help them reach out to and persuade people of different ideological beliefs.

Spielthenner’s organization, FAS.Research has a history of charting these types of hubs online, offline, and even through cell phone usage. To learn more about Community Hubs and Bridging hubs, check out the publication and the FAS.Research website.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be at Wiring the Climate Netroots, a discussion about building a grassroots blogging movement around slowing global warming. The even it hosted by Climate Progress (part of the Center for American Progress Action Fund) and the Energy Action Coalition.

Speakers include Lexi Schultz (Union of Concerned Scientists), Matt Stoller (Openleft.com), Chris Mooney (The Intersection), and Joe Romm (Climate Progress). Moderated by Arthur Coulston (It’s Getting Hot In Here and the Energy Action Coalition).

Details:

July 20, 2007, 9:30am - 12:30pm

1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor

Washington, D.C. 20005

(202) 481-7197

Nearest Metro: Blue/Orange Line to McPherson Square or Red Line to Metro Center

RSVP to Richard@energyaction.net

P.S. As a nonpartisan institute, we find any event that marries online community building and organization with technology to be particularly thrilling.