“Okay Google, Call My Senator”

By Manasvi Menon

Reimagining civic engagement for a new world

The recent election and early weeks of the new presidential administration have made one thing clear: citizens want to be heard.

Between record turnout for last month’s Women’s March on Washington, ongoing protests in cities across the country, and the staggering volume of calls, emails, and letters from constituents to elected officials, we’re seeing the power of citizen engagement and mobilization in action.

Civic technology is transforming the way citizens engage with government — from participatory budgeting to voter registration. Now more than ever, technology plays a critical role in ensuring an ongoing two-way conversation between elected officials and we, the people.

A number of new tools such as Countable, Democracy.io, dailyaction.org, and phonecongress.com are making it easier to contact elected officials and keep momentum going around issues — all it takes is a few clicks to send a message directly to a representative. These tools have broken down many outreach barriers by providing legislation cheat sheets, contact information for elected officials, and fill-in-the-blank scripts for what to tell them.

Similarly, elected officials are increasingly turning to social media as a direct channel to the public, and platforms like Twitter have revolutionized the ways in which politicians reach their constituents and frame complex policy issues. At home and abroad, Twitter has been influential in sparking protests and political movements. In 2011, organizers across the Middle East “used Facebook to schedule protests… Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” Finally, tools like Periscope and Facebook Live not only let politicians talk directly to constituents, but also allow everyday people to become independent and on-the-ground journalists.

While these digital tools have eliminated many of the friction points around citizen education and outreach, looking ahead, innovation in consumer tech will make it even easier to bridge technology gaps between citizens and government. Artificial intelligence, virtual assistants, chatbots, and machine-to-machine communication are just a few of the technologies that are going to transform how citizens and governments connect. You can now ask Alexa for information about your representatives and senators by stating your zip code. In the past month alone, a programmer has written a custom script for Dash using an Amazon Web Services IoT button that makes it effortless to donate to the ACLU with a single click.

Activists are increasingly turning to bots to engage with citizens and bring accountability and transparency to government. Wonk is a chatbot embedded in Facebook Messenger that was developed last fall to keep people informed about the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Users could message the bot to learn about debate schedules, get real-time updates, and fact check statements made by the candidates. Stay Woke, a Twitter bot developed last year, tweets the names and phone numbers for the U.S. senators representing a user’s zip code by auto-replying to tweets that include a geographic location. Congress-edits, another twitter bot, detects and tweets anonymous edits to Wikipedia that come from Congressional IP addresses as a way to bring transparency to the way lawmakers shape political narratives.

What these technologies have in common is that they are embedded in the tools that people use every day, from virtual assistants to social media. They demonstrate how technology can be used to scale activism to reach a broader audience, getting more people engaged in a national conversation.

In the future these technologies will enable citizens to connect with government in new ways: cognitive and machine learning will allow communities to access services and connect with lawmakers across languages; sensors will proactively report on the state of infrastructure and the environment, helping local communities hold their elected officials accountable; artificial intelligence will enable engagement to become increasingly personalized as citizens continue to mobilize around issues that are important to them.

As new tools emerge around civic engagement, the ones that will be most effective are those that will leverage innovation in IoT, machine learning, and open data to educate people about issues, facilitate communication with lawmakers, advance policy recommendations, and hold lawmakers accountable for their actions.