How should a government listen to and respond to its people? In America, we listen in many different ways. Government is ultimately accountable to the people in that the people elect our leaders on a routine basis and if the leaders do not listen and respond to the desires of the people, they are removed from office when they are not reelected. In addition, many states and the Federal government employ a rule making process to develop their regulations, and the process provides an opportunity for the public to comment. The media also provides a direct avenue for people to reach out to the government, through op-eds and stories covering what people want. And finally, the people can reach right out to the government, scheduling meetings, sending letters, and talking directly to officials and the bureaucracy.

Has the Internet changed this? During his 2008 campaign, President Obama was able to harness the power to the internet to reach out to and engage the electorate. He didn’t just claim to empower people and then ignore them, but rather he gave them real power thru MyBO, his social networking site. People were able to form groups, raise funds, engage with other voters, write blog posts, and more. At times they were even scored on how active they were, so that there was a direct incentive for volunteers to try and rack up a higher score in a competitive fashion. President Obama listened to the people online; when they disagreed with his Senate votes at the time, he posted explanations and showed his online following that he cared.

In 2012, President Obama added another key piece to the puzzle. In addition to empowering volunteers to pursue his goals using their own initiative, he added extreme micro-targeting. Through the use of his Narwhal software, his team could analyze a voter. The data was routinely updated and Obama camp was able to target the people likely to vote for him and work to get them to the polls. There still was an element of persuasion to convince people to vote for Obama, but there was far more of a Get-Out-The-Vote effort to get those already inclined to vote his way to the polls.

But could these impressive IT techniques and tools be translated to good governance? What would that look like? Could the President find a way to keep this group of engaged citizens involved and excited? In 2009, he set up the Organizing for America website (OFA2.0, following his Obama for America original site-now known as Organizing for Action). He tried to mobilize the people who put in the effort and supported him during the election. OFA2.0 was to provide Obama a grassroots arm to mobilize popular support for his policies and convince key elected officials to support him. However, except for some work on the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act, OFA2.0 has really not been marshalled by the President to help put his ideas into action.

The President’s team has also put in place a significantly more digital White House presence, including the We-The-People petition site. 152 petitions have received a response (including releasing the White House beer recipes and admitting that there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life), and more are being worked on. This is a good start.

But it seems like more could be done. Why hasn’t the government engaged citizens in the same way that the Obama campaign targeted and engaged voters? There probably is an issue of scale and having to treat all citizens equally and fairly. Additionally, the people tend not to speak in a unified voice (as opposed to the Obama campaign where their one message generally was ‘Elect Obama.’ This probably also involves privacy rights and issues of different government agencies (and Federal vs State vs Local levels) sharing information. It just seems that if we are able to use these tools to elect officials (and in private industry-see Facebook, Amazon, and my post on Filter Bubbles), then we could use them to find the problems in peoples’ lives and work on them. There already are things being done, like the IRS accepting online tax forms or the ability to review pending congressional legislation online. However, there is definitely still more to be done to create a more customer-friendly government that can harness the power of the internet to listen to the voices, needs, and desires of the people.