Issue/Topic: Public Engagement and use of Mass Email for Public Comments
From the Open Government Directive Workshop, January 11, 2010 at the US Department of Transportation
Session Number – Space/Location Letter 1- B
Convener: Daniel Bennett, eCitizen Foundation
Notes-taker: Bryan Martin Firvida
“Tags” for the session - Open Government Topics discussed:
Email, Public Comment, eadvocacy,
Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
- BLT – (Business, Legal, and Technical) issues – need to understand the process for comments and rulemaking:
- The public comment period and process differs from the Legislative and Executive branches. In the Legislature, there are no rules what they do with public comments; completely at the
- Agencies need to understand the impact of mass emails on the public comment process
- An email that looks different, may look better during the review process. Although the fact that someone put effort in drafting, there’s no reason to place additional import to that comment
- First myth – if you write it differently, it matters – not necessarily true. Congress isn’t reading emails, but may be relying on IQ (Internet Quorom) to aggregate and review the trending and comments
- Second Myth – Congress cares about all communication – not true; they care about comments from their district.
- Daniel has developed topic codes; which allows groups to have their messages aggregated to help them self-identify the campaign; Topic Code allows people to self identify. The topic code becomes a URL, and participants of the campaign use the URL/topic code in the message
- Commenters should include URL of law, URL of the campaign site
- Has the prevalence and success of online commenting actually made it more difficult for non-advocacy oriented emails to get read? Has the success/ease of online communication actually discouraged the value of comments received?
- Best case scenario: 100,000 messages sent in;99,000 through a campaign – 1,000 are personal written comments – the use of a topic code would allow the offices to spend more time with those 1,000 messages
- Topic Tags have been incorporated into IQ
- Agencies, Department/Offices, members of Congress can create and use their own topic code (example: www.dot.gov/publiccomment/carseatsafety2010 or house.gov/member/topicoftheday
- Everyone needs to be involved in the decision making process, from IT to Management to Legal
- Working with the “Get it Done Gang” to establish a pilot project to implement and utilize