Mr. Smith Goes Out On the Web
DG researchers study the culture, practice and innovation of building congressional web sites
By Karen Heyman
For the DGRC

Congress on the Web
	Researcher profiles: Kevin Esterling David Lazer Michael Neblo Project Profile: Connecting to Congress

Congressional offices are a microcosm of a federalized system:

Although they share basic communications infrastructure such as telephones and computer networking, many other decisions, such as which software packages to purchase, are made autonomously by each office. One result of this autonomy that is easily evident to the public: A search of congressional web sites shows that they share few common traits beyond an obvious preference for red, white and blue color schemes.

"There is no centralized, top-down 'Congressional Office of Web Design,'" says Digital Government researcher Kevin Esterling, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. "The upside to that is that each congressional web site reflects the individual style and priorities of the member. The downside is that there's no one place to turn for advice on what works and what doesn't."

Esterling is collaborating on a Digital Government project called "Connecting to Congress," which looks at how members of Congress use their official web sites to communicate with their constituents.

Esterling and his co-PIs - David Lazer, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Michael Neblo, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University - believe that the decentralized nature of Congress makes for a fascinating research project on "institutional determents:" What is it about the structure of Congress as an institution that leads some members to adopt new Web-based technologies faster than others? While most of us are familiar with the formal structure of Congress, the DG team is using the creation of web sites as case studies for examining the "diffusion pattern" of technologies through the informal, social networks where knowledge is disseminated.

"Diffusion pattern" is a term in sociology that closely mirrors a concept in epidemiology - such a pattern can allow one to trace the spread of an idea back to its source.

The example most people are familiar with, both from real life and medical TV shows, is the search for a "Patient Zero" in an epidemic. Doctors trace the spread of a disease backwards to find who was the first person to have it, whom they contacted, and whom those people contacted in turn. It works similarly with ideas - the challenge, of course, is that most ideas are intangible and therefore hard to trace. But design ideas take physical form - find the first congressional web site with an automated mailing system, then you can find the second and so on.

And then you can start looking for patterns. Once discovered, the patterns can be detailed as branching tree graphs.

Like a roomful of bright high school students, it's easy for us to start suggesting some of those patterns: Surely many design ideas will have spread along party lines (Esterling says there's an interesting quirk he discovered in the preliminary data: In the Senate, the Democrats have the most innovative web sites; in the House, it's the Republicans who have the most innovative ones).

Innovation is gauged on elements such as interactivity, " Some websites are models of information and interactivity. Others are just static brochures. And so we're aksing why is it that some are more innovative and some are less." But there are just as likely reasons for bipartisan spread: Members who joined Congress in the same class may have incorporated similar ideas that may have been discussed in orientation sessions.

Surprisingly, one thing member web sites don't carry in parallel is the technological competence of their constituents: "Although there are a few representatives from Silicon Valley who have excellent web sites, there are some from very wired areas that don't have great web sites, and some of the best are from Vermont and New Mexico, and inner city Philadelphia," according to Kathy Goldschmidt, Director of Technology Services, of the Congressional Management Foundation.

"The strongest indicator is political margin," says Esterling of the results of his preliminary research. "Those who won their districts by only a few points have excellent web sites, because they have especial incentive to communicate to the electorate. Those who won by substantial margins know they already have name recognition in their districts."

But what about other reasons for the diffusion of innovative ideas for great web sites? What Esterling and his fellow researchers are hoping to discover is some possible unexpected social networks for technology diffusion: One wouldn't expect, for example, a congressional prayer breakfast to be a hotbed of technological discussion. But what if it turned out that attendance at a particular weekly prayer breakfast was all that the owners of certain very technically advanced web sites had in common?

Latest DG News

• dg.o 2006 Convenes May 21-24, 2006   • dg.o 2006 Early Registration Ends April 10th! • dg.o 2006 Issues CFP - Tutorials • dg.o 2006 Issues CFP - Workshops • dg.o 2006 features Workshops on:    eRulemaking    GeoInformatics • dg.o 2006 features Tutorial on:    •Social Network Analysis • New DG Team Pursues eRulemaking • IEEE ISI2006 Convenes May 22-24, 2006 • eChallenges e-2006 Issues CFP • DG Research Helps Predict Urban Growth • Swapping Secrets of the Double Helix • UK and DO-Wire Launch e-Gov Best Practices wiki • DG Team Develops "Virtual Agora" for e-Gov • Mapping for Times of Crisis • Exploring Detection of Crisis Hotspots • Report: Mass eMail Campaigns Harmful • Scenario-Based Designs for Stat Studies • US, EU Explore Info Integration • DG Team Develops Digital Interpreter • DG Study Gives Teeth to FBI • Research Smooths Road for Small Businesses • DG Researchers Parsing in Tongues • e-Gov Journal Issus Call for Articles • See all news stories Contribute to dgOnline

Once such patterns are discovered, the next step would be to analyze what makes certain networks optimal for the diffusion of ideas: Could it be that what made the exchange of ideas work at the hypothetical prayer breakfast was the fact that it was held weekly, or under a certain size, or that there was just enough social time to allow members to chat informally?

Esterling and his colleagues will be conducting qualitative interviews with a number of House members and their staffs to seek answers. Their measurements of "innovation" will be based on a list of features that an ideal congressional website would include that was developed previously by the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), a non-profit, non-partisan organization that functions as a de facto management consulting firm for Congress.

"There are over 40 items on this list," explains Esterling. "They fall under the headings of appropriateness of the information to the audience (i.e., constituents), information content, interactivity, usability, and adoption of a new innovation. CMF generates an overall measure of quality by creating an index that measures how many of each of these features each website has." As examples of innovations, Esterling mentions, "Improvements in interactivity, such as an online poll feature or an online e-townhall feature. Or improvements in usability, such as a new navigation design or layout."

Esterling says that two sites with CMF ratings among the highest are those of Richard Pombo (R-California) and Chaka Fattah (D-Pennsylvania).

The CMF's quantitative scale will be combined for insights with the "Connecting to Congress" team's qualitative research. The team's analytical results will be published in a series of academic papers and books, and be of especial use to those trying to understand and effectively navigate the American political system, like other political scientists and the next generation of Washington professionals, from Congressional staffers to lobbyists to citizen activist groups.

The results will also be given to the CMF, which will take the academics' research from the analytical realm into the practical one: by mining the academic's results for pragmatic advice that can be given to members about how to improve their Web sites, and possibly how to improve the communication of practical ideas between members, regardless of party affiliation.

"Economies of scale and lots of other information will be identified through this project to help members offices to improve their practices and remove some of the inefficiencies," says Goldschmidt, "The other issue is that improving congressional web sites improves citizen access to the public policy process; the web sites can become a one-stop shop for constituent services."