The Congressional Management Foundation has been tracking how Congress uses the web since before most members of Congress had websites. (That may or may not be true.) But they've found something that seems to have even surprised them. The set up is that CMF, curious about how people responded to online townhalls, organized 21 such events -- 20 with representatives in 2006, and one event with a senator in 2008. They invited a bunch of people, told some of those who were interested that they couldn't come (control group!) and then assessed what was different amongst those who had had the pleasure of kibitzing with their congressperson online and those who hadn't. There's some academic thinking behind the experiment: CMF has this idea of a Madisonian feedback loop, where elected representatives have the freedom to both be persuaded by and persuade the people who put them in office. Do online townhalls help facilitate that flow?

To conduct the townhalls, CMF made use of what was then called Macromedia Breeze, and now goes by the name Adobe Acrobat Connect.

The findings? Well, naturally, they're detailed far more extensively in the report, but we'll give you the highlights. One is that online townhalls seem to help people actually like their elected representative more; CMF says that the approval rating of the members of Congress who participated in the events went up, on average, in the neighborhood of 18 points. Second, those people who got waved into the online townhall were both more likely to vote than the people left in the cold, as well as more likely to persuade other people to vote. And third, we the people don't come off so great. To set a baseline of participation, the folks who took part in the townhall were quizzed beforehand on topics to be covered during the event. When it came to immigration, for example, CMF found that how participants answered a set of factual questions about the subject were no more accurate in their answers than had they pretty much thrown a dart at the quiz.

Still, the experience seems to have been a good one for just about everyone involved. Members of Congress spent a few minutes online answering questions, and they very often saw their approval ratings shoot up. And a whopping 95% of the voters who took part said that they liked the experience so much, they'd do it again.