Idea: Structured Email for Public Well-informedness

Civic Technology Community Group,

Advancing public-sector mailing lists using forthcoming structured email technologies could (including in combination with AI assistants) enhance the well-informedness of the public.

Considered kinds of data to distribute to people from local public-sector mailing lists include: community calendar events and updates, fundraisers, bake sales, local road and bridge maintenance and repair, schoolboard meetings' minutes, city council meetings' minutes, local news articles, and any other data and events that a well-informed citizenry should want.

The IETF Structured Email Working Group (SML WG)<https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/sml/about/> is working to deliver structured email technologies. That is, multipart MIME messages could contain "text/plain", "text/html", and also generally useful "text/turtle" or "application/ld+json" data.

One use for structured email is providing message metadata. Another use is providing various kinds of data objects, e.g., schema.org objects, in messages for software including AI assistants.

Is there interest, here in this mailing list, in gathering together and discussing civic technology use cases for forthcoming structured email technologies, towards sending an email to the IETF SML WG? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski