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Event Review: CongressCamp

While much of the attention of the day was focused on tea party protests, I was in DC on Saturday for a different purpose: The CongressCamp unconference, which looked at a specific subset of the Government 2.0 question: How to use social media and online community tools to encourage and support citizen engagement with Congress.

Obligatory unconference topic board photo.

I say it a lot, but even though I’ve spent most of my career in the tech industry, one of the neat things about being in the DC area is that even with all the tech, there’s a whole entire other world of federal government and the infrastructure that supports it (including contracting companies and advocacy groups), that you can pick up on through osmosis.

However, osmosis doesn’t necessarily lead to a deep and robust knowledge. So to learn more about the particular needs, challenges, and opportunities for social media and Congress, CongressCamp specifically reached out to Congress and congressional staffers, in order to get more than just the usual gang of suspects.

CongressCamp was the full weekend, though I arrived late on Saturday and bagged Sunday because I wasn’t feeling well. So I’ll just offer up a few notes and impressions:

* Many of the challenges we heard about are universal to big institutions — inertia, confusion about the tools, reluctance to “give up control” (to the extent that it exists in the first place). Within the federal government as a rule, there are additional cultural and technological hurdles (which we’ve seen raised at other government-focused unconferences, like Government 2.0 Camp and Transparency Camp). With Congress, this shows up with stuff (as in actual laws governing behavior, like franking rules that affect communications with constituents), as well as policies set forward like technology approvals required by the Senate Sergeant at Arms.

* We often speak about “Congress” as a whole, though a participant noted that each member’s office also does its own thing, meaning there’s a network of 535 members’ offices, plus committees, caucuses and other entities, acting like their own small businesses, with their own comfort level with and implementations of social media tools.

* An important part of the policy process is engaging with Congressional staffs, down to the subcommittee level, where a lot of the policy sausage gets made. However, individuals with expertise, who aren’t affiliated with an organization, may run into mechanisms that filter out folks who don’t live in the member’s district, which is a problem that advocacy organizations and corporate lobbyists don’t have.

(In what was probably my one interesting idea for Q3 2009, I asked if there’s a Help A Reporter Out (HARO) for Congressional staffers, and if not, should there be one. Hey, I just raise the questions — I leave someone else to do the actual work…)

* I also saw a bunch of different apps, from 3121, a social network exclusively for Congress; GovLuv, a work-in-progress tool to help track government Twitter posts (and responses); and Legistalker, which tracks the online activities of members of Congress.

The first day’s wrapup session was a little contentious, though I have to admit that I was a little frazzled from fatigue and therefore not exactly sure what the debate was about. I did get the sense that there was a push-pull between the representatives of private and public sector (call it the irresistible new shiny thing of new tech meets the immovable object of government and institutional inertia). Though it was particularly useful to see actual Congressional staffers talk about what they needed and wanted from technology (and not all of it can be solved by data standards and hashtags).

So, it was a good session, followed by a good happy hour. You can see the rest of my CongressCamp pics on Flickr, the Twitter search results for #congcamp, and more roundups and notes (including all the stuff from Day 2 that I missed) at the CongressCamp site.

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