Last night, in a start-up-y co-work space in the South-of-Market (SOMA) section of San Francisco, entrepreneurs, advocates, Congressional staffers and some folks who just found the topic interesting came to hear Brad Fitch , President of the Congressional Management Foundation, talk “ #SocialCongress .” That included how Congress perceives constituent communication: the good, the bad and the somewhat surprising.
POPVOX Advisor and Gov 2.0 champion, Tim O’Reilly kicked off the event with some perspective. “It’s not just about reaching Congress,” he emphasized, “but can we use technology to make Congress smarter?”We at POPVOX are big CMF fans — we comb their reports, we meet with their staff to bounce new ideas, our co-founder and CTO, Josh Tauberer, participates as an advisor on their efforts to standardize formats for incoming messages to Congress. CMF studies the space between the information Congress wants to receive and the information constituents want to provide — and we at POPVOX are working to bridge that divide.
The report reflects the attitudes of Capitol Hill staff surveyed by CMF:
1. The internet has increased civic participation and lawmaker accountability but has not necessarily led to a more informed constituency. 2. Citizens have more power than they realize. 3. It’s not the delivery method, it’s the content. 4. Staff have mixed feelings about grassroots advocacy campaigns 5. Social Media is used to gauge opinions and communicate the legislator’s positions. We are grateful to Nader Ghaffari and matthew Melmon of ShortForm.com , who hosted the event at SOMA Central and look forward to making more events like this happen. And many thanks to the wonderful tweeters from far and wide ! There was a wonderful feeling of community, and we plan to make this a much more regular occurrence (with video next time!) Please email info@popvox.com if you would like to be notified when the next event is planned.
