Since January 20, 1993, the Clinton administration has distributed, press
releases, executive orders, transcripts of speeches, press briefings and other
presidential documents in electronic form over the Internet. In addition, the
public is currently sending email messages to the President, Vice-President
and some other government officials, at addresses on the Internet. These
communication flows between government and public arguably represent an early
stage in the development of an online public space for multi-faceted political
discourse. Some observers have already raised questions regarding control,
access, privacy and influence in this public space. These issues and the need
to plan facilities that will support the electronic flows underscore the value
of data which helps dimensionalize this space and tells who gets the
electronic documents, how they get them and how they use them.
At the end of January, 1994, we sought such data, using a recently developed form processing technology, suitable for the management and analysis of online interactive, branching, multi-part surveys. Initial survey instruments were distributed directly to current and past subscribers of certain mailing lists and posted on certain servers, with instructions to return the surveys within a week. By the end of that period, about 1600 individuals had returned this instrument and 1100 of them had also completed their respective follow up surveys. This report describes our survey methodology and data analysis, presents our principal findings, discusses their implications and outlines future work plans.
Our survey was informed by some knowledge of the document distribution
and recipients. It grew out of the Intelligent Information
Infrastructure Project at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
whose work includes the development of knowledge based routing systems
and their application to managing information flows between government
and public. One prototype system in current operation segments the
White House electronic publication stream into five content oriented
mailing lists. Having more than 4000 active subscribers, including
embedded mailing-lists, FTP servers, gophers, commercial information
networks, bulletin boards and news groups, the system directly or
indirectly accounts for much of the electronic public distribution of
White House documents. Project members also maintain close working
relations with other distributors of White House publications, notably
the Extension Service of the US Dept. of Agriculture and Sunsite at the
University of North Carolina.