Great thoughts & articulations, @konklone, wanted to add my support. David here, our non-profit PPF created Contact-Congress project on OpenCongress in 2010 and launched the first version publicly in 2011 to automate delivery of digital messages to Congressional webforms. Really excited to see the evolution of the Contact-Congress toolset, now with the launch of Sina & EFF's & team's Democracy.io.

Our primary goal was a positive user experience for OpenCongress visitors, who mostly arrived via search for official information about bills in the news or legislative issues they cared about - to walk these interested bystanders up the ladder of engagement, enabling them to write an informed letter (using info aggregated uniquely by OpenCongress) directly on the page where they learned about a bill in context (both its official status and social comments / plain-language summaries).

A secondary goal of Contact-Congress was to give users an immediately-shareable permalink to their letter to their members of Congress (if set to public, as opposed to private) - to demonstrate the potential of Congress treating constituent communications in an open CRM, a public queue, with tools to enable constituents in-district to share helpful resources, timely updates, and organize around their initiatives. My PPF Blog post on this potential for in-district organizing, from May 2014: http://goo.gl/gCS0fy

A tertiary goal of Contact-Congress was to demonstrate public demand for open letters and open priority lists for their Congressional offices, and highlight the potential of open data standards for more constituent communications. This is what I've described as the greatest #opengov potential in my nine years in this field (http://goo.gl/crVivS) - better listening tools, as per @cjoh's priority request - I wrote: "Government staff have new access to dynamic, data-rich dashboards for opinions and feelings of their constituents – crucially, that integrate with their official CRM & CMS solutions, so a bigger-picture is generated, gathering more public feedback & specific expertise." Exactly such an open data standard already exists and has been successfully tested, a few years ago, with a U.S. Senate office. So what's holding back development and adoption of such a standard for delivery & verification of more communications, such as petitions, questions, volunteer offers, public testimony, community events? In my view, it's simply a lack of charitable funding support for open-data infrastructure for engaging with government offices - I believe this can implement more & better constituent messages to Congress, including geolocation features for constituent verification in cases where implemented, and better analytics tools for Cong. offices to respond to messages without being buried in a queue.

That’s a huge opportunity for non-profits and for-profit civic startups to provide the next generation of CRMs to government – investing in the infrastructure to make that possible now, by supporting the work of PPF and other non-profits, will help open up that data as widely as possible and ensure the participation tools developed on top of it are, at least in part, open-source for remixing. (My Dec. '14 blog post: http://goo.gl/AprZns).