Reboot

Congress doesn’t work. But it can.

Reboot helps citizens win a voice and participate meaningfully in the legislative process.

Problem:

In American society, the act of voting is a poor expression of citizen values. Both low frequency and low signal, voting does not allow citizens to meaningfully express their political desires. Despite wide adoption of new information and communication tools that allow citizens to self-educate and self-organize, we have yet to develop a higher frequency, higher signal form of civic participation in the legislative process.

Our Approach:

Results:

- See the full case study below. -

In American society, the act of voting is a poor expression of citizen values. Both low frequency and low signal, voting does not allow citizens to meaningfully express their political desires. Despite wide adoption of new information and communication tools that allow citizens more easily than ever to educate themselves on an issue and organize around a response we have yet to develop a higher frequency, higher signal form of civic participation in the legislative process.

The problem manifests itself in a legislative process that is widely regarded as inefficient, ineffective, and hostage to minority interests that do not represent the larger public good. For almost two decades, the American legislature has repeatedly disappointed, and citizens are disillusioned with their ability to input into a broken system. Despite this reality, hope is on the horizon.

How do we educate citizens on the policy issues they care about, and give them meaningful ways to input their collective values into the legislative process?

Complicating Factors:

Most congressional legislators and their staff want to get the policy decisions right. Staff, however, suffer from homogeneous information inputs and are hard-pressed to consume the broad swaths of knowledge they need. More often than not, this leaves them dependent on the readily available and relevant (if partisan) information offered by lobbyists.

Lobbying in and of itself isn’t a problem; or rather, it’s not the only problem. Collective interest groups expressing their desires to government is an underpinning of participatory governance. In many modern western forms, however, and particularly in America, policymakers’ aforementioned information and process constraints creates barriers to participation. Only actors with the most current and relevant information and with privileged access are able to make their voices heard. These barriers prevent the undistinguished citizenry from participating in the process and results in policy outcomes that don’t represent the broader public good.

Our Approach:

Our collective future is one of robust citizen participation in the process of governance: from decision making, to budget planning, to inputting on current policy direction. This model doesn’t haphazardly accumulate static from an imagined wisdom of crowds; rather, it strategically constructs an educated and informed community of empowered participants that can meaningfully input into the governance cycle.

Working with the Center for American Progress, our goal was to address problems around information, access and input, and to find ways to educate, empower, and organize a wider collection of voices to increase and broaden citizen participation in the legislative process.

Historically, citizens have been limited in their access to meanintful civic participate. Intermittent elections are a poor system for expressing values. Likewise, high frequency methods such as petition drives, phone campaigns, and even in-person rallies suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio and are constrained by recently irrelevant legislative principles such as constituency.

But new, market-driven social mechanisms can facilitate greater citizen participation in the governance. By March 2010, the vast majority of US Congress had begun using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Some used the tools solely to publicly broadcast their activities, others tried experiments in digital two-way dialogue and public e-diplomacy. Suddenly, citizens had a new channel to convey their values and priorities to legislators — and the public, immediate nature of these channels made them harder to ignore.

One of the key barriers to citizen participation in governance is the average citizen’s lack of up-to-date political information about the issues they care about. Is there legislation pending? Have policymakers made speeches about the issue? And on and on. With families, jobs, and busy lives, people don’t have the time or attention to stay abreast of every policy development they might care about. Curious citizens do not professional policy-watchers make. With the right information and opportunities to act, however, they can quickly become effective participants in social reform.

We recognized that think tank and advocacy groups like CAP often have access to high-value political intelligence and policy data in already distilled forms. We decided to use a narrative-based approach to share this information to targeted communities who expressed interest in the issue area. The goal was to empower them with the same timely knowledge that is normally only accessible to well-paid, well-connected lobbyists in Washington.

Implementation:

We designed a unique advocacy campaign for CAP to push for the successful passage of legislation targeting the mining of illicit conflict minerals from the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite relatively broad bi-partisan support of the legislation, significant opposition from industry lobbyists threatened its passage just as it was making serious progress.

We recognized that if grassroots supporters had a mechanism to counter the lobbyists’ efforts, their collective efforts could shore up the legislative support that was needed to carry the legislation forward. Thus we designed, launched, and managed an integrated communications program — combining e-mail, social media and in-person events — to organize the grassroots constituency. Leveraging CAP’s deep knowledge of and access to the policymaking process, this organized group remained informed, in near real-time, about the latest developments in the legislative machinery. Once notified of the opposition to the legislation being pushed by industry lobbyists, the grassroots activists were eager to make their voices heard.

With such energy among an organized group of citizens, we needed a way for them to express themselves, a way that would force lawmakers to take notice of the countervailing voices to the lobbyists. A group of 10 key lawmakers controlled the fate of the legislation from their seats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Recognizing this group as key targets, we also found that all of them had a presence on Facebook, providing a public forum to aggregate activist support.

Using CAP’s political intelligence, we provided activists with a strategic message — founded in political pragmatism - to use during a week when the bill could be moved for a final passage vote. Targeting two lawmakers daily, activists poured out support, making several thousand comments on the target Facebook profile pages, urging the lawmakers to move the legislation.

Results:

Over the course of the week-long campaign, thousands of activists’ requests to support the legislation were lodged in online channels. Because citizens were making these requests in the modern, virtual equivalent of the public square, lawmakers could not ignore them.

Reaction from Capitol Hill was clear and decisive. A bi-partisan group of eight new Representatives agreed to sign on as co-sponsors of the legislation and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee agreed to move the legislation to the House floor for a final vote. Soon thereafter, the legislation was added to the Senate Financial Reform Act and the conflict minerals act was entered into law.

Such swift progress for a niche foreign policy issue, with bi-partisan support and in an election year, was unheard of in legislative circles. The development of a new mechanism for citizen participation effectively changed how the legislative process worked. Congressional offices expressed gratitude for this new approach to engaging with constituents. One chief of staff even remarked, “All we ever hear from are the lobbyists. For once we could see a visible group of opinion on the other side of what the lobbyists were saying. That made it much easier for the Member to take a contrary stance.”

Because we were able to engineer an interested community, empower them with relevant and timely information, and guide them in how to engage and effect meaningful change, we set a new precedent in how everyday citizens can partake in the legislative process.

Challenges and What’s Next:

As with all novel and experimental models, this approach had significant shortcomings. Firstly, we were adapting existing communication channels, namely Twitter and Facebook, that are not optimized for citizen participation in governance. Because many other conversations take place in these channels, focusing on the policy-oriented ones can be difficult. Likewise, a certified system for verifying a citizen’s voting constituency would increase recognition of their voices by lawmakers. Realizing the need for a dedicated interface for citizen-governance interactions, we have been working with the non-profit Independence Year Foundation to develop a new platform to facilitate this.

In addition to our efforts with IYF, there are numerous groups doing some great thinking and work in this area, and we support heir efforts. PopVox, led by Marci Harris, is taking an insiders’ approach based on the legislative workflow and providing value to the legislative staff who drive the process.