Wed, 29 Aug 2007
Contacting Congress
Let's say Alan, a regular citizen with no income (at least, that's who I was a few months ago) has a website. Let's say I'm agitated about some issue of national concern, and I want to get my readers to contact their Congresscritter. Let's say those readers don't even know who they elected. How do they do it? That person is missing two crucial pieces of information:
- Who the Senator or Representative is, and
- how to contact that person.
Shouldn't the information of which parts of the country are represented by be information anyone can use to promote democratic engatement?
Okay, so the Senator name is easy - those are two per state, easy to look up. And f you look at the House of Representatives website, they let you put in your ZIP code and tell you who represents you. If house.gov needs more information, it will ask.
But that only tells you who, not how. Different Congress-people want to be contacted in different ways - phone, web form, or email. It would be nice to have a publicly-available database of that. But who will do the hard work to maintain it? And if it's a web form, then those are different on a per-representatve basis. And when Bob uses Alan's website to contact his member of Congress, Alan would prefer to that Bob always see Alan's page templates, advice for what to put in the fields, and so on. So this information should be not only available, it should be machine-usable.
A proposal
So here's a proposal for how to maintain this information:
First of all, a technical note: All the data extraction described below can either be done by a central server that is asked every time someone wants to know, or client-side code that runs on Bob's computer/browser that does the extraction. The advantage of the latter is that it's much harder to block as well as more impressive in the server logs at house.gov.
Who's my Rep or Senator?
It is always going to be easy (in a technical sense) to determine which field on house.gov is the ZIP code entry field. (If Bob doesn't know his ZIP, you can just look it up with e.g. the USPS website.) The responses will be easy to parse, too; just see, of the results returned, which ones actually are a known possible choice according to e.g. Wikipedia.
How do I contact him/her?
All Senators and Representatives do provide web forms. In general they have a common set of fields, and then some have more advanced ones. The central component is just listing which form fields are required; Bob's computer/web browser can just dynamically create a form that matches, all within the look of Bob's site.
If you want to store the results for performance reasons, you don't have to worry about storing it for every possible location or representative. Just cache it once a client requests for about a day, I'd say.
What about reliability?
What to do if the House of Representatives website (or its form handling) is not online at the moment? Recall there are two ways to architect the form submission: Either Bob's computer could directly submit to the form on his representative's web site, or he could submit to a central computer that would do all the submissions. The advantage of the latter is that the central computer can enqueue form submissions that were problematic just like mail servers queue email.
In fact, the same strategy could be used for the form itself! Imagine that Bob wants to submit to his rep's web form but house.gov is unavailable. If the central server doesn't have the form cached, then at least
Why go through all this trouble?
Well, as a public service. It would be nice if anyone could run their own Action Alert site without having to pay or otherwise submit to the will of third parties.
Exactly how much trouble is it?
As I've described it, the whole system is automated. Optionally, a human can call representatives and see how they like to be contacted. If each conversation takes about five minutes, and there are fewer than 600 Senators and Representatives, it takes only 3,000 minutes or 50 man-hours tops to contact everyone and ask their preferred means of contact. This can be done in one shot, or it could be done by volunteers spread across the country.
Now, it would be really interesting to apply this on a state level. Cheap and widely-used action alerts to state senators would make for much more interest from state legislatures in what their constituents think....
