Insider’s Perspective

Technology has advanced to a stage where the technical development of this platform is almost trivial, especially when compared to the political and cultural complexities of its design and implementation. It must simultaneously meet the needs of members of Congress, citizens, and advocacy groups. Each has a unique set of interests that must be appealed to, and each presents unique barriers to adoption that must be accounted for. This also means that each must be involved in the creation of the platform.

Amongst the three, citizens are the most forgiving. There is a hunger among them for legitimate communication with their elected representatives. In addition to the proof provided by the myriad political blogs, discussion forums, and social networks, the Obama campaign successfully tapped this hunger to great success. People have opinions, and we will provide tools that lower the barrier to communicating those in a meaningful way.

Advocacy groups are slightly more complex and are a main driver of the volume of communications that are directed at Capitol Hill. Their goal is to advance their issue. In terms of communication, this requires two things: 1) a large email list, and 2) the ability to have the messages they send be heard and understood. The platform provides both of these things.

Members of Congress are naturally the most difficult of the three groups to please. They are overwhelmed with incoming communications in addition to their legislative duties. Their time is at a premium, and they exist within constraints and a culture that are unlike any other organization on the planet. In order to be successful, the platform must meet their needs by providing immediate and tangible benefits without displacing the systems that they are currently using. Automatic aggregation and constituency verification are the two main benefits that we will provide to Congressional offices.

In order to simplify balancing this complexity, we will engage with members of the three groups when development of the platform begins. These members will aid in refining the full feature set of the platform, perform usability testing on the early designs, and beta testing on the completed system prior to taking it live. Not only does this ensure that the system is designed with an insider’s perspective, it also provides a ready-made set of initial users that will be anxious to see the product that they developed come to life!