Letters to the President: Process Improvement
Posted: May 19th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: politic | Tags: correspondence, letters, obama, transparency, white house | 2 Comments »In response to the recent NYTimes piece about the process by which the White House sorts through thousands of letters addressed to Obama, I was thinking about the process that they use.
This is the CURRENT PROCESS:
This is what they COULD DO:
To what extent are they running the email, snail mail, and faxes through recognition software and statistics & charting software to summarize the contents of incoming correspondence? I hope that Mr. Kelleher is providing some additional info in addition to hand-selecting a few letters.
The point is to find compelling/”emoting” letters as Mr. Kelleher said. Scanning in documents would just be a waste of time/money. And let’s be honest, it’s probably more of a symbolic gesture that the administration is “listening” more than anything. The job probably takes about an hour to do, if that.
that would be a definite improvement. I especially like the idea of tallying letters from each zip code and then plotting them on a map for the President to see. If someone is reading all those letters, hopefully the reader is at least scanning them and tagging them.