Marci Harris is the founder and CEO of POPVOX and has been one of the leading voices for democratic engagement in the U.S. over the past 15 years. HData CEO Hudson Hollister caught up with Marci for a recent interview. The two reminisced on their time as staffers on Capitol Hill pushing for the use of technology for better and more effective governing. Marci described the connection between constituent-oriented platforms like POPVOX and a Data First approach to congressional modernization and why, currently, she is optimistic about the more mature discussion around the role of technology. Conversation shifted to the future with a discussion outlining a “Star Trek” future vision for digitizing policymaking.
Hudson Hollister
We are so excited to be joined by Marci Harris, who is the founder of POPVOX, and has been one of the leading voices for the electronic connection between Congress and its constituencies and its people for the past 15 years. Marci, welcome. We’re excited to have you. First, we’d love to have a paragraph or two on your original brainwave for the founding of POPVOX.
Marci Harris
Thanks, Hudson. So, we’ll go in the Wayback Machine! When we first met, I was a staffer on Capitol Hill. From 2007 to 2010, I worked with the personal office of Pete Stark and the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, which he chaired. This was during the drafting of the Affordable Care Act, so I had the enormous privilege of being a part of that team. It was intense and constant, with a LOT of information. We were on the receiving end — working across three committees in the House and two committees in the Senate — of massive amounts of constituent input and input from organizations, companies, and other stakeholders.
There was a tremendous volume of information flowing through and it was rough. As you remember, back then a lot of the processes on Capitol Hill were not digitized.
I think it was around that time I saw the first members show up with a laptop to a caucus meeting and everybody stared at him. I’ll actually say, it was Jared Polis.
Hudson Hollister
Of course!
Marci Harris
He was ahead of this time!
But I was very frustrated with the way that information flowed and also realized that so many staffers, in every office, were replicating the same kinds of things that I was doing. It was just a massive wasted effort for things like letters of support or opposition to be collected many different ways in many different systems.
I used to tell people, I would get stacks of one pagers all week long, that would pile up on my desk, and then I would clean my desk and get rid of the one pagers. And then two weeks later, the bill would be introduced that related to the one pager that I’d gotten rid of two weeks before.
So the idea for POPVOX was basically my colleagues in my office listening to me complain about these information systems and how somebody ought to do X. I really thought that there needed to be one place where all the bills were listed, organizations could post their positions, constituents could weigh in, and I could find the answers to the three questions that always came up when it was time to make a bill recommendation:
- First, who’s on it? Meaning, who are the co-sponsors, because, of course, the members usually travel in packs. If you see that the members you normally align with are on the bill, that’s a good indication that you might be interested.
- The second question was always, where are the groups? So environmental, business, labor, etc. Members know how they usually line up with those groups.
- Finally, third, are we hearing about it from the district?
So with those three questions almost before reading the bill, you could tell whether a member would support or oppose the bill.
The original goal of POPVOX was to provide all of that information in one place and make it publicly available. I like to tell people, we solved that technical problem pretty quickly out of the gate, and then found about 20,000 others that needed to be addressed. We’ve been working our way through those ever since.
Hudson Hollister
That first technical problem that you solved, that was being able to aggregate those aspects that you’ve just listed off for us?
Marci Harris
Correct. POPVOX 1.0 was — here are the bills, organizations can create an account and post their position to support or oppose. The same applied for a constituent. They create an account, they get placed in the correct district, and can choose to support or oppose a bill. They can write a message and we deliver it to the lawmaker.
Back then the innovation was: we’re gonna make this really easy for the offices to process by making the subject line really clear: “support or oppose H.R. 1234.” For offices trying to generate a response very quickly or run a count of where positions on a particular bill, having clear metadata in the email subject line was very helpful. Systems have gotten more sophisticated since then there’s more ability to batch and recognize language in a variety of formats, but it’s still not perfect and there are still a lot of staff hours dedicated to grouping and batching and responding to constituent mail.
Hudson Hollister
What were some of the initial wins that gave POPVOX its first notoriety? What issues?
Marci Harris
That’s a good question. Interestingly enough, the issue that trended on POPVOX for the first several years that we existed was repealing the ACA. That was a bit of an irony, but I always thought that was great for our nonpartisan cred — that I had worked on that bill for years and repealing it was the trending topic for the first several years of POPVOX.
Marci Harris
Beyond that, we always had cohorts that come in waves when an issue is really hot. I remember for one of the first government shutdowns, there was a question about whether military families were going to be paid. We had a large number of military spouses who weighed in on that issue.
Very tragically, we have always seen a wave of activity in the wake of mass shootings. Gun control advocates would come first and then a corollary wave of the Second Amendment advocates.
Something that I always thought was interesting about POPVOX is the opportunity to see the issues that never make the headlines, whether it’s animal rights or certain niche issues like research funding for certain illnesses. Those issues have very strong and numerous advocates and sometimes that’s the majority of what congressional offices see in a week but that’s not always apparent from the outside.
Hudson Hollister
When you think back on the story of POPVOX, does it have a definable beginning, middle, and maturity?
Marci Harris
We’re still evolving, as I would say is true for the civic tech world itself — the equivalent of the technology hype cycle Years ago we were experiencing optimism about the potential for technology to rebalance the relationship between the public and their government and to democratize access; “just add tech and beautiful democracy will result and we’ll all live happily ever after.” I think there’ve been several cycles of optimism, realism, even at times pessimism since then. Today again, I feel optimistic about the potential for using tech for better and more effective governing, but with the benefit of years of hindsight and perspective.
For us at POPVOX, we had to figure out what we were when we first started. At first, we thought we were a typical startup. I pitched VCs and even went to the SXSW festival — and won their startup competition! But ultimately, we didn’t end up taking venture capital money because we realized that typical startup economics didn’t sync up with our civic mission. Whether it’s an ad-driven model or clicks as an engagement metric, those measures of success for a typical startup don’t always work with a civic mission. You can get a lot of people to click if you make them mad or scare them, but that’s not necessarily good for democracy. We always rejected that approach and a lot of people thought we were crazy for many years… until they didn’t.
Hudson Hollister
What were the developments that gave you that, that increased legitimacy a few years ago?
Marci Harris
A few years ago, it became more widely understood that Facebook was not a panacea for democratic engagement; that the drive for clicks and ad model were incentivizing some pretty bad things that had ripple effects beyond what was immediately apparent. More than a few times, we’ve been very glad we didn’t take that road.
Hudson Hollister
What would you say are the two or three reasons why you’re optimistic now?
Marci Harris
For the civic space in general, I would say, I’m optimistic because I think we’re seeing a much more mature discussion about the role of technology and public participation and expertise in the policymaking process, whether that’s early in policy formation, or throughout implementation, or even to the oversight process. I’ve been having some very exciting discussions about ways to help Congress use more efficient processes, more responsive, lawmaking and more accountable oversight — leveraging both public participation and data at each of those stages. And not to mention all of the exciting developments I learn about in the Data First newsletter!
Hudson Hollister
That brings us so smoothly to the present. What would you see is the connection between constituent-oriented platforms like POPVOX, and the democratization in a good way that can be brought about through those platforms, on the one hand, and the data-first, drafting and comparison, and transparency of legislation on the other?
Marci Harris
Well, as you know, there’s been a really exciting development over the past two, three years with the creation of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in 2019. The committee has been a wonderful catalyst for those of us on the outside, and some on the inside, who’ve been thinking a lot about ways that Congress can use technology better or change its processes or update the way it does things. I was invited to be a part of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Congressional Reform to make “Tech and Innovation” recommendations for the committee. Working with political scientists, Claire Abernathy and Kevin Esterling, we had the opportunity to do a really, really deep look at the tech issues and opportunities that were in the House.
It was a lot of work and we learned a lot, but one of the recommendations that we settled on, that relates to your question, is that a modern legislative process should incorporate what we call the “SIDE elements.” That’s an acronym for Stakeholders, Individuals, Data, and Evidence. That recommendation grew from an “aha moment,” in which we realized that oftentimes, when people talk about contributions to a policymaking process, it’s treated as a binary that you either get input from the public or you use data and evidence. Our aha moment was, this doesn’t have to be an either/or (public input vs. data and evidence) but rather BOTH: You can have public input, and you can even the public be better informed with data and evidence, and then have the public contributes to the data and evidence that you are considering. Ideally, it’s not a straight-line continuum but rather, a circle.
I am optimistic in seeing some of the progress that happened in response to COVID, to digitize House processes, get digital signatures in the Senate, have lawmakers trying new things like remote hearings and getting testimony from people who cannot travel to DC. Much of this progress built on the ongoing digitization and standardization that has been happening for years.
I think the biggest misconception when it comes to “modernizing” Congress and providing new ways to hear from constituents and experts is that tech is the missing piece. On the contrary, we could have built the technology ten years ago — and many have in various forms. But the missing piece is not tech, it’s: “are there members on the inside listening and ready to incorporate this kind of input into the policymaking process?” Increasingly, we’re seeing quite a few who are — not just in their personal legislative activities but at the committee level. That, to me, is the most exciting piece, actually seeing committees step up and want to incorporate both public input and data and evidence into the early stages of policymaking.
Hudson Hollister
That’s fantastic. And another good segue. What opportunity do you see to integrate either public input or evidence with capabilities of data first drafting?
Marci Harris
So this is my Star Trek view. I think it was a House Republican initiative, a few years back, requiring a constitutional statement in drafting of new bills, where every bill had to have a constitutional authority statement. Similarly, I would like to see every bill start with a statement of its goal and the identification of several metrics (or direction for the agency to set metrics) by which progress toward the goal will be assessed.
That kind of clear definition of desired outcome and metrics for assessing progress is going to be more and more necessary as artificial intelligence is applied to the policymaking process. And we don’t need to have agencies and courts reaching to figure out what Congress intended to do, we need a clear statement of a goal and key indicators of progress towards those goals baked into the legislation.
Hudson Hollister
Electronically baked in?
Marci Harris
Exactly. You can imagine if legislation clearly established its goal and a few datasets that would be considered in the evaluation of progress towards the goal how the legislation itself could connect to that data.
Hudson Hollister
And even perhaps provide an opportunity for repeal if the goals aren’t reached?
Marci Harris
An opportunity for refinement or carrots and sticks. I think there are lots of really interesting automated incentives that could be baked in.
Hudson Hollister
It’s possible, wow!
Marci Harris
It’s all technically possible, right? But there’s so much groundwork that has to happen — data standardization, permissions, privacy protections that have to get the pieces ready to fit together. But it’s totally possible.
Hudson Hollister
What would you say are the top three foundational tech things that Congress needs to do, or that legislators need to do, in order to create the foundation for that vision?
Marci Harris
I don’t think it can be done at a meta level initially. We will need to see pilot legislation that not only establishes goals and metrics, but also provides the funding and incentives for implementers, — whether at the federal level, or local agencies, or nonprofit organizations — to set up their systems and reporting in a standardized way.
Another big step is preparing an entity to be able to receive and analyze that kind of information within the government. I personally think that that the GAO is is well suited for that with its new office of Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics. That office or one like it could receive and monitor the data, build dashboards and algorithms that look for patterns and outliers and learn from what is happening in the real world — in as near to real-time as possible — to inform policymakers for further refinement or oversight or just just learning how it’s going.
So I think pilot programs in discrete policy areas are the way to test this new way of doing things. And then, as always, ongoing data standardization and provisions for linking data across silos in a way that protects privacy — such as through distributed computation — will be very important.
Hudson Hollister
Are there any legislative technologies that had the hype cycle, over the last 10-15 years, that in your view have proved to be true blind alleys?
Marci Harris
I think some of them maybe were just before their time. Again, it really was never a question of the technology. In most cases, it was always a question of adoption by lawmakers or readiness within the institution.
For example, we have been so privileged to reuse the open source code developed by the OpenGov Foundation for their Madison platform, which as you know, allows for inline comments from the public on documents like legislation or proposed rules. We updated their code that had been shelved in 2017 and used it in a project with the Natural Resources Committee on their environmental justice bill and got 360 amazingly substantive comments from advocates all around the country. I think there’s a lot of potential for that kind of deeper engagement in the future. And again, that engagement has been technically possible for a long time but the magic was not the technology. It was the Natural Resources committee on the other side saying: “we’re going to accept these comments, and it’s going to directly influence how we write this bill.” THAT’s what’s new.
Hudson Hollister
And yet that approach has not scaled yet.
Marci Harris
It has not scaled yet. There’s so many challenges to scaling. It’s not just “does it work?,” it’s: “how do you get the word out to the committees that this exists?,” and “how do they have enough people within the committee with the technical chops to implement?” The challenges are capacity and sometimes just basic communication — even for folks like us, who live and breathe Capitol Hill and are in constant contact with staffers.
Hudson Hollister
Final question, what would you tell someone, perhaps a young Hill staffer right out of college, who has had a thunderbolt hit in the form of inspiration for a technological innovation? Perhaps in the same way as you have and who might understand, if they pursue it, it might send them up for decades of work. What would you tell them?
Marci Harris
I’m a big believer, and I think this happened to you, too, that when you get an idea that obsesses you, and it’s all that you talk about, you can’t fight it.
It’s almost better to just recognize early, “Oh, I’m obsessed with this new thing. I’m gonna need to like go down this road,” you know, and at least just see where it takes me. The thing that happens — and you know this well — is once you start down that road, the path just kind of continues to appear. You don’t necessarily know where you’re headed, but one foot in front of the other and all of a sudden you’ve traveled a few miles. I really think the most honest advice I would give is that if you’re waiting to know what you’re doing, you’re gonna be waiting forever.
There are so many staffers and others working within other areas of government with good ideas of ways to improve processes or do things better. One thing I find so encouraging about the Modernization Committee process in the House is that it’s catalyzed a lot more openness to experimentation within the institution — whether in the CAOs office, or the Office of the Clerk or the Committee on House Administration. And I would not have said that several years ago.
There is momentum for this work now. There’s more collaboration and I think more understanding that the digital infrastructure of Congress is essential. I remember when we first had the idea for POPVOX — my two co founders and I, — I took the idea around to everyone I knew in Congress. I found that there was no entity that was concerned with the digital infrastructure of Congress as a whole. You could build tools for House Democrats or a Senate Republicans, but no resources for Congress writ large, no “Architect of the Capitol (AOC)” for digital infrastructure. It’s still a little bit like that, but it’s changing…. slowly.
Hudson Hollister
I have many more avenues we could take, so let’s do it again. But for now, we are very grateful for your time. Thank you, Marci!
Marci Harris
Thank you!
