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Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.
by SMrF 16y ago
Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.
- theli0nheart 16y agoIf only Congress had an API... POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=expel POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=elect&candidate=329183
- nowarninglabel 16y agoThere is actually an API available. I'm currently working with it to produce a longer lasting version of this same concept, though the concept is kind of not interesting now that like a dozen different people did this...
- andrewparker 16y agoHere is a usable API that's live for accessing government data: http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/Sunlight_Labs_API http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/Sunlight_Labs_API Doesn't support write quite like that yet ;)
- catshirt 16y agoi'd rather ?action be part of the method than the query string. in case they're reading.
- jderick 16y agoWould be interesting to see how people vote, even if it has no direct effect.
- theli0nheart 16y agoWorking on it...
- awakeasleep 16y agoDon't forget that 'defense spending' encompasses a huge swath of technology research that may benefit NASA as much as anything else.
- anigbrowl 16y agoI've wanted that level of civic participation for many years too - but when you think about it, it's only in the last decade that this has become even remotely practical. But someone should indeed implement such a thing - if they can attract enough traffic, the aggregated preferences would start to become extremely useful, though not always in obvious ways. The only ones I've seen so far tend to be sponsored or created by lobbying groups that want a highlight a particular positive or negative policy outcome - you know, the sort of thing that says 'on current trends, everybody in the US will be employed as a member of the general staff by 2073, and safety razors will have 48 blades.' ...although a recent careless razor purchase turned out to have 6 blades - and I didn't even notice we'd passed 5. So what do I know?
- heresy 16y agoI've often wondered what the result would be if budgets were determined by something like that. Just the line items of potential things to spend money on, and citizens indicating their preferences, without any emotive rhetoric to color their choices. Since my personal discussions with people end up with a lot of agreement on how much one should be allocating to things like education, R&D, infrastructure and healthcare, but it all seems to go pear shaped when it reaches the voting floor, due to the large role external, non-voting actors can play in shaping those decisions. I don't want a hundred million here and there to go to rubbish projects as a sop to a politician with a certain amount of influence who just received a donation to add an extension to his house. Of course, now you have the problem of how things end up on the list to vote on :)
- jasonkester 16y agoTo an extent, it does work like that on a local level, and it's generally pretty disastrous. People will vote to lower their car registration fees if you let them, then they'll complain that the roads are falling apart. It's fun to watch if you can step back and simply watch it happening.