Yesterday, e.politics added a post describing how state and local politicians and governments are starting to investigate CRM — usually “customer relationship management” — as a form of “constituent relationship management”. On the surface, this is a good thing, but there are risks to democracy that need to be kept in mind as these sorts of systems move forward.

To the extent these sorts of systems represent a database, managed by the governments, that track specific problems that need to be addressed, we’re probably OK.

However, it is a short hop from there to situations where these systems are deemed the only way citizens can provide feedback to politicians and take positions on issues. For example, there is a non-profit in the Pacific Northwest that helps governments better manage their email inboxes, where a lot of the issues arrive that eventually might pour into a CRM system. So far, so good. However, it is eminently possible that this system will evolve into “contact your representative using this-and-so Web form, within politician-defined limits, or you will be ignored”.

And that is bad for democracy. Governments cannot be in the role of telling the citizens what the citizens collectively think. Rather, citizen-led extra-governmental projects need to take on that role, so citizens are the ones telling government what the citizens collectively think.

It’s all a question of transparency. Any means of aggregating opinion, from official ballot boxes to Web polls, has to be transparent to be believable. “Black boxes” can result in vote rigging not just in formal elections, but in other areas as well — do you really believe that every “tracking poll” the media puts out is 100% honest in how the poll is conducted and how the results are portrayed?

Perhaps what citizens need what Doc Searls refers to a “vendor relationship management” as a counter-weight to the “customer relationship management” that governments use.

So, as long as the CRM solutions governments use are for tracking whether Great Aunt Millie gets her Social Security check, that’s just fine, even exemplary. We need to be watchful that such projects don’t evolve into government-run and government-controlled means of communicating with the government. The current intentions are good, but there’s a road somewhere around here that’s reputedly paved with good intentions…