How Smart is E-Government?
The idea of information technology empowering citizens is as old as the Internet, and with the spread of more computing and communications power throughout the population, the dream of connecting citizens more closely to the levers of political power can become a reality. One can ask, however, is government ready?
The vote counting debacle in Florida last year suggests that a governmental body still using punch cards for any reason, especially vote counting, is hardly ready to connect more closely with its citizens. But at the state and federal levels, a number of new initiatives have started pushing government to apply IT more intelligently to help make citizens’ voices heard.
Write your congressman, again and again.
In a tradition as old as representative democracy itself, citizens write their elected officials to share opinions on public policies or seek help in their dealings with government services. As correspondence has progressed from letters to fax to e-mail, citizens have gained more and easier tools to let their officials know how they feel. But with the greater ease in correspondence has come greater volumes of correspondence, and at the federal level at least, officials are not coping well with it.
The Congress Online Project, a program conducted by George Washington University and the Congressional Management Foundation and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, issued a recent report on what it calls “the e-mail crisis in Congress.” Its report, says the volume of e-mail to Congress has more than doubled in two years, and continues to increase at a rate of one million messages a month. Together, the House and Senate received about 80 million e-mail messages in 2000, but neither office budgets nor technologies have kept up with the load.
The results, according to the group, seem to increase the misunderstandings between Congress and the citizens, just the opposite of the desired effect. The report says, “Rather than enhancing democracy – as so many hoped – e-mail has heightened tensions and public disgruntlement with Congress.” The expectations raised by corresponding with elected officials are often dashed by the lack of response. The group’s report says, “The growing number of citizens are increasingly frustrated by what they perceive to be Congress’ lack of responsiveness to e-mail. At the same time, Congress is frustrated by what it perceives to be e-citizens’ lack of understanding of how Congress works and the constraints under which it must operate.”
The Congress Online Project blames much of the flood on spamming techniques used by lobbying organizations. The majority of e-mail messages to Capitol Hill offices come from outside the members’ jurisdictions, and as a result offices just ignore them. The group urges lobbying groups to get real about using e-mail. No one likes spam, even elected officials.
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