[Sml] Use Cases for Structured-Email Mailing Lists: Civic Technology

[Adam Sobieski <[e-mail]>]

IETF Structured Email Working Group,

With solutions for addressing recipients' (AI) assistants now at hand, I would like to share a list of scenarios for structured-email mailing lists which pertain to (town- and city-scale) civic technology. People's town and city governments and/or their local newspapers (see: [1]) could use structured-email mailing lists to provide people with new services, features, and conveniences.

For human recipients, the frequency of their communities' emails could be challenging, daunting, or problematic, i.e., information overload. However, people's AI assistants can readily receive more frequent structured-email messages from their local governments and/or local newspapers to process and organize structured data, synchronize these data (e.g., to people's calendar view apps), and prepare to answer users' questions or to offer them well-timed notifications.

In greater detail, town or city governments and/or local newspapers could make use of software extensions or plugins for their content-management systems (CMS's) to manage structured-email mailing lists. These structured-email mailing lists would email subscribed recipients' software tools — their AI assistants — including when various types of content objects were published or revised.

Here is a preliminary list of scenarios and considered services:


  1.
Community calendars and updates.
  2.
Opinion polls or surveys.
     *
These have opening and closing dates and times.
     *
The results of these could be distributed by email.
  3.
Video-call and video-conference events.
     *
For example, online virtual townhalls or committee meetings.
  4.
Other CMS events.
     *
Structured-email content could indicate (to AI assistants) the availability of recordings or minutes from city-council or schoolboard meetings.
  5.
Other information
     *
Local roads, bridges, and transportation infrastructure availability and conditions.
        *
This data could be useful to assistants with respect to enhancing daily scheduling and route-planning.
     *
Weather advisories.
     *
Other alerts and bulletins.
  6.
Elections-related information.
     *
For example, updates regarding polling locations or their hours.
     *
Where can voters find information about candidates and issues?
  7.
Community news.

So, in addition to SML being useful for sharing people's online statuses (available, out-of-office, on-vacation), enabling people to drag-and-drop or to paste special data objects into email-authoring apps, and enabling AI agent-to-agent communication scenarios, structured-email mailing lists intended for recipients' software tools, their AI assistants, could benefit communities and enable new civic-technology scenarios.

Alternatively, for some of these services, search-engines' spiders could receive pings from governments' and newspapers' CMS's to scan their websites to provide up-to-the-minute responses to people's searches and questions.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

[1] https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2024/medill-report-shows-local-news-deserts-expanding.html