Re: Idea: Structured Email for Public Well-informedness

Civic Technology Community Group,

Brainstorming, structured email messages sent from one or more public-sector mailing lists to interested recipients (and their AI assistants) could contain:


  1.
message metadata.
     *
for example, tags and categories including for organizing and searching through messages.
  2.
past and future community events.
     *
for example, information about communities' fundraising events.
  3.
past and future online opinion polls or surveys.
     *
these opportunities have opening and closing dates and times.
     *
the results of these, or hyperlinks to view their results, could be distributed by email.
  4.
communities' video-call or video-conference events.
     *
for example, online virtual townhalls or committee meetings.
  5.
online resources and data.
     *
for example, recordings or minutes from schoolboard or city council meetings.
  6.
new websites and services.
     *
as governments continue to modernize, they should be able to apprise interested people of their new websites and services.
  7.
local roads, bridges, and transportation infrastructure.
     *
this data could be useful to assistants with respect to enhancing daily scheduling and route-planning.
  8.
weather advisories.
  9.
other alerts and bulletins.
  10.
election-related information.
     *
for example, updates regarding polling locations or their hours.
     *
where can voters find information about candidates and issues?
  11.
community news.
     *
these could be full news articles in email messages or news article summaries with hyperlinks to local newspapers' websites, if available.
     *
these could be digests of community news stories occurring over periods of time.
  12.
email addresses, e.g., those involved with services available to AI assistants.
     *
a structured email message could include email addresses to be added to end-users' or their AI assistants' contact lists.
     *
AI assistants could use email to perform tasks (i.e., "MCP over email").
     *
AI assistants could email structured messages to other AI agents and services.
     *
AI agent and service discovery by structured email.

Traditionally, email messages have contained text and/or hypertext and have been intended for human recipients. Structured email messages intended for AI assistants is a relatively new concept. Software systems, e.g., AI assistants, could extract and utilize structured data. End-users could authorize (digitally-signed) structured email messages from specified trusted senders to automatically inform their software systems, e.g., AI assistants.

Any thoughts on these initial 12 ideas? Are there any more use cases or ideas to consider? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2025 12:21 PM
To: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: 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

Received on Monday, 11 August 2025 05:00:06 UTC