Sending Your Government a Message: E-Mail Communication Between Citizens and Government

In 1995, RAND published a book exploring the feasibility and societal implications of providing universal access to electronic mail within the United States (Robert H. Anderson et al., Universal Access to E-Mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications). Among the nine policy conclusions and recommendations in that report were these: It is critical that electronic mail be a basic service in a national information infrastructure; it is important to reduce the increasing gaps in access to basic electronic information services, specifically, access to electronic mail services; there are no fundamental technical barriers to providing universal access to electronic mail services. This book explores the possibility for expanded citizen-government personalized electronic communication. Of particular interest are interactions between government agencies and individual citizens--interactions involving personal information, iterated communications between an individual and a government agency, and the use of a personal electronic mailbox for the individual. It provides an informal survey of current state uses of such communication, supplemented by two case studies of potential use. It also uses 1997 Current Population Survey data to update the electronic access trends in the United States that were highlighted in the 1995 study.

Robert H. Anderson (Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, Harvard University) is a Senior Information Scientist at RAND. Research areas include social implications of the information revolution; security and safety of internetted networks; computer languages and support environments for modeling and simulation; human-computer interface; use of computers for C3I and defense

Tora Kay Bikson (University of California at Los Angeles, Ph.D., Psychology) is a Behavioral Scientist at RAND and Technical Consultant for the Information Systems Coordination Committee of the United Nations.