The Council of State Governments-WEST gave me a unique opportunity this year – the chance to work with state legislators to develop a white paper on adapting CRM philosophies and practices for state legislatures. The result of our collaboration, E-Constituent Relationship Management for State Legislators, is now online.

I spent a lot of time talking to legislators and legislative IT staff about handling constituent requests and emails – and the technology they use to do so. My interviewees included

Lee Harris, who developed the California Legislator’s first-rate CRM platform.

Representative Janice Arnold-Jones from New Mexico, who is emphatic about responding to constituent requests, in spite of the fact that she has no staff or technology (other than a person email address) to help the process.

Kevin Hayes, who runs the session information office for the Montana State legislature. His office handles all the email requests for its members.

Representative Mike Doogan from Alaska, a state which hosts a network of 22 regional “legislative Information Offices” that allow citizens with Internet access to send messages to their representatives.

Paul Mouritsen, whose Nevada State Constituent Services Office developed its constituent request log.

Bud Richmond, an IT analyst at the Oregon State Legislature whose office looking into building a more comprehensive constituent tracking system.

Ric Cantrell, the Chief Deputy of the Utah State Senate, who uses the Internet to communicate with constituents about policy issues.

I came away from those conversation with a newfound respect for the amount of dedication many state legislators have to their constituents – and the obstacles (including lack of staffing, technical support, and funding) they overcome in order to serve them. Incidentally, members of the CRM community and the inside-the-Beltway technology crowd offered strategic advice and functioned as “virtual consultants” for some of the scenarios discussed in the white paper. They included

• Peter Churchill, Center for American Progress
• Jeff Mascott, Adfero Group
• Daniel Bennett, Practitioner-in-Residence at IPDI
• Ken Ward, Adfero Group
• Paul Greenberg, The 56 Group
• Thomas VanderWal, InfoCloud Solutions
• Chris Massicotte, NGP
• Bruce Culbert, iSymmetry
• Nick Schaper, Office of House Republican Leader John Boehner

You can read a PDF of E-Constituent Relationship Management for State Legislatures on our site.

UPDATE: Check out the coverage on Capitol Comment.

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’s 2008. We call this the digital era. Yet, in the United States we seem to lack political leaders with a vision for technology, much less an interest in the ways technology can make all levels of government services more efficient, effective, and accessible to regular voters.

Yes, indeed, the rumblings are starting to get a little louder – snuggled, as they currently are, within our niche community of tech-savvy politicos and politics-friendly techies. Is a technology transformation upon us?

For some, the transformation begins when elected officials use technology to listen. There’s a word – listening. In the middle of an election season that has seen a glut of staged conversations, online and offline. Andrew Feinberg rants about some of these so-called listening exercises today at Capitol Valley. There’s a difference between talker at voters and listening to them.

Talkers get headlines. Listeners get things done.

Like fixing potholes and handling case work, increasing the efficiency and efficacy of government programs. A year ago, IPDI published Constituent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics, which looks how political campaigns and elected office can use online and offline feedback loops to run case management and constituent communications. Many elected officials and political candidates already use database platforms to help this process.

The next step? Government institutions that employ tech-enabled feedback loops to deliver better goods and services.

In their Politico column, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry write about some of the ways in which foreign citizens and governments are using technology to listen and act, including e-petitions in the United Kingdom and the government of New Zealand’s wiki for a new Policing Act. As Rasiej and Sifry put it, you can use the Internet to file your taxes, but you can’t use it to make suggestions on how your tax dollars ought to be spent:

Imagine then, that the next time you file your taxes online, your government asks for your feedback on how those tax dollars are being spent. Or it takes your suggestions on how to make a law more understandable. Or it helps you find groups near you that are doing things that benefit your community. It may sound mundane, but today in America, it would be the equivalent of a revolution. How much longer do we have to wait to bridge yet another digital divide?

What about tech policy?

At the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Robert D. Atkinson writes,

we need a debate in America that focuses on the most important issues like to get fast broadband networks to all Americans; how to use IT to transform our health care system, transportation system, education system, and government; and how to encourage all organizations to become digital, thereby driving productivity and income growth and a better quality of life.

Atkinson thinks that better private-public partnerships can help create an environment of “digital transformation.”

Over at Open Left, Matt Stoller blogs about the successful efforts of blogger and member of the California Democratic Party platform committee, Dante Atkins, to get Net Neutrality in the party platform:

California Democrats, in order to promote vigorous free speech, a vibrant business community, and unfettered access to all information on the Internet, support policies to preserve an open, neutral and interconnected Internet. California Democrats strongly agree with recent rulings by the Federal Election Commission that political communications, including blogging, which take place independent of a political party, committee or candidate, receive a media exemption from campaign finance regulations. California Democrats further reaffirm their support of the right to free speech as expressed in the First Amendment, including the right to critique any elected official or comment on any and all public policy, whether during war or peace, without fear of reprisal.

 Perhaps it is time that we — voters that we are — begin to expect more from our elected officials and encourage digital leadership on our blogs as well as in our voting booths.

In case you weren’t at the IPDI’s 2008 Politics Online Conference, we released the March 2008 Politics and Technology Review, our newest regular publication.

In this issue, David Faris looks the way citizens used social networking sites and mobile phones to spread political rumors in Egypt. James Valentine questions whether the wisdom of crowds can produce creative thought. Lowell Feld Nate Wilcox analyze the online Draft Jim Webb movement in 2006. In our research section, David Karpf measures influence in the political blogosphere, while Christine Williams and Girish Gulati look at the political impact of Facebook on the 2006 elections and the 2008 presidential race. The full list of authors and articles are below and click here for the PDF version.

Drafting an American Hero
Lowell Feld (Editor, Raising Kaine, Editor, Badlands Blue, Netroots Coordinator, Judy Feder for Congress)
Nate Wilcox (Senior Advisor, WebStrong Group)

The Political Impact of Facebook: Evidence from the 2006 Midterm
Elections and 2008 Nomination Contest
Christine B. Williams (Professor of Political Science, Bentley College)
Girish J. “Jeff” Gulati (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Bentley College)

Uncreative Commons?
James Valentine (U.S. Coast Guard)

No Time, No Emails, No Problem: Translating American Online
Strategies into a Successful Latin American Campaign:
Rodrigo Lugones (Executive Director of Duran Barba & Asociados)

Measuring Influence in the Political Blogosphere: Who’s Winning, and
How Can We Tell?
David Karpf (PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)

Cyber-libertarians: The Internet Unleashed, A Government
Challenged?
Christopher Wimbush (The Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet)

The Web, the Cell Phone and the Mubarak Death Crisis of 2007
David M. Faris (PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)

Scandal and the Possible Emergence of a Fifth Establishment:
The influence of partisan blogs and the mainstream media in political scandal
coverage
Alex Kellner (The Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet)

P.S. We made a mistake in the publication and forgot to include the bio of one of our fantastic authors, Lowell Feld. We’ve included it below and we are very sorry that it didn’t make it to the publication.

Lowell Feld runs *Raising Kaine*, the largest Democratic political blog in Virginia. In December 2005, Feld co-founded the Draft James Webb movement, which was integral to the defeat of incumbent Sen. George Allen, widely believed to be the Republicans’ leading 2008 presidential contender. After helping Webb win the Virginia Democratic primary in June 2006, Feld joined the Webb for Senate campaign as its netroots coordinator. In this capacity, Feld helped the Webb campaign raise more than $4 million online m(out of $8 million total), and coordinate its “rag-tag army” of nearly 10,000 grassroots and netroots activists. Today, Lowell is a political consultant, blogger, and author of the forthcoming book, “Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics.”

Mobile Voter, the group that innovation voter registration by text message, recently launched a program to turn people with a few minutes to spare waiting for a train or in line at the grocery store into volunteers. The program is called Volunteer Now, and it connects volunteers with projects through text messages. The combination of technology and civic action fits neatly into Mobile Voter’s mission to use technology to empower civic life and political engagement, with a specific focus on youth

Ben Rigby, Co-Executive Director of Mobile Voter, filled me in on the details about Volunteer Now. (Rigby is also the author of a ne w book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0.)

What does it do?

Volunteer Now enables people to spontaneously offer their expertise via mobile phones. Missed your train? Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non English speaker. Identify craters for NASA. Give back in your spare time!

What inspired you to do it?

Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good.

How can people get involved?

They can contact me: ben@mobilevoter.org. We’re looking for programmers, designers, and creative people with great ideas to volunteer for the project. It’s an all volunteer/open source project.

This year, IPDI is teaming with our favorite GW publication, the student-run political science quarterly GW Discourse, to produce the inaugural edition Politics & Technology Review. The deadline is slightly over a month away.
More Information:

The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (www.ipdi.org) and GW Discourse are currently requesting submissions to Politics & Technology Review, an annual publication whose inaugural issue will be released at the 2008 Politics Online Conference (http://polc.ipdi.org).

The deadline for submissions is Friday, January 11, 2008. Guidelines and instructions can be found at http://polc.ipdi.org/uploadedfiles/GWD-IPDI-Instructions.pdf.

Articles can run up to 5,000 words in length and should look at one or more of the many intersections between technology and politics. For more information, view our memo titled Instructions for Authors (insert url) with further information about submission requirements and the review process.

Unfortunately, IPDI and GW Discourse cannot accept articles that do not meet the requirements in the Instructions for Authors attachment. These requirements aren’t intended to be cumbersome or prevent you from authoring insightful, creative pieces. Rather, we designed them to help us insure that potential authors do not waste their time on marketing and advertising pieces and that our editorial staff does not waste its time reading them.

POLC 2008 will be held on March 4 & 5, 2008. Registration is available at https://www.online-donation.com/ipdi-polc/.

Articles and questions can be submitted to Chris Wimbush, director of the IPDI Ideas series and publisher of GW Discourse, at cwimbush@ipdi.org. Read the author instructions before you submit. They can be found at http://polc.ipdi.org/uploadedfiles/GWD-IPDI-Instructions.pdf.