SMS Text Your Government with Validated Feedback – Great Idea IF…

A U.S. Senator’s team was allegedly talking about the implications of setting up a mobile application to track citizens’ feedback on government issues. Just as Obama’s campaign has connected with citizens via easy-to-access SMS campaigns, this idea would make it easier for the average, busy American to give input on governmental policies and new ideas while on the go.

But the Legal group apparently began to ruminate. Uh-Oh! There goes the simple, user-friendly flow! After all, Legal regularly brings up important and sticky compliance questions, such as “how do we know the person is in possession of the handset”, etc., that sometimes derail good ideas.

Before nixing the idea of government feedback as undoable because of compliance issues, let’s talk about possible solutions. Perhaps we can take a use case from the credit card domain.

Ok, so with your credit card:

1. User sees an item and purchases it with a credit card.
2. How does the credit card company know a person is in possession of his/her own credit card? The user must enter an account PIN.
3. How can the user verify authorized transactions against the credit card? The user checks the monthly statement for details by date-time, merchant/purchase details, and dollar amount of transactions.
4. How can the user reverse unauthorized transactions against the credit card? The user begins a complaint process with the credit card company.

With the mobile phone, the flow could reuse this same pattern to allow citizens to give secure text input to their public officials. The flow would be altered slightly to ensure that a legislated API is adopted by all carriers for regulated SMS campaigns.

1. User sees a call-to-action to give governmental input and sends an SMS Message Originator (MO) with a keyword, a code, open text comments, etc. A carrier-provided API legislated to be standard across carriers logs all SMS Message Originators (MO) sent by the user’s mobile phone to the user’s billing details.
2. How does the regulated mobile application know a person is in possession of his/her own mobile phone? The user enters a carrier-generated PIN validated against a carrier-provided API legislated to be standard across carriers.
3. How can the user verify authorized transactions against the mobile phone number? The user checks the monthly mobile phone billing statement for details by Date, Organization, Time, Short Code, SMS text MO, Quantity of Text Messages Sent, and dollar amount of transactions, if applicable. For example, the user’s monthly mobile bill may look as follows:
   

   Date	Organization	Time	Short Code	SMS (MO)	Qty Sent	$ Amt
   1/09/09	Fedex	3:49 PM	433339	Tracking # 1234	1	0.20
   1/09/09	Fedex	3:52 PM	433339	Where is my package?	1	0.20
   1/09/09	Senator1	4:47 PM	777779	Feedback	1	0.00
   1/09/09	Senator1	4:48 PM	777779	User Pin: 5555	1	0.00
   1/09/09	Senator1	4:49 PM	777779	Category: Environmental Feedback	1	0.00
   1/09/09	Senator1	5:00 PM	777779	All communities should be incented with federal funding to implement community gardens. This ensures if national transportation is disrupted for any reason, all communities still have access to food.	1	0.00

4. How can the user reverse unauthorized MO transactions sent under the mobile phone? The user begins a complaint process with the carrier, which for regulated mobile applications reverses both the charge on the statement and text transaction sent to the mobile application under that mobile phone.

Where there’s the will of the people, there’s a way…