4 ms·

Side thought after reading this. Is there anyway to currently get a feed of high quality summarizations of laws passed by each congress? By that I mean, as a v

by tacLog 5y ago

Side thought after reading this. Is there anyway to currently get a feed of high quality summarizations of laws passed by each congress? By that I mean, as a voting citizen I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details. I want the why, high level what does this change, and high level what was the opposition to this. I feel like one of the things that we struggle with is 'uninformed voters' in a modern democracy. I try to stay informed but I need to cut off my time somewhere. Are there any ways for me to stay lightly informed with low effort on my part?

stevesearer 5y ago
More basic than summaries, in my city there is no way to easily view how an individual city council member voted any any particular motion before them. Or even to see a list of the things the council has voted on. In order to see this information you need to wade through big PDFs versions of the council meeting minutes to find the motions. They are also backlogged by over a year in creating and publishing the minutes.
kovek 5y ago
If only we could use software to query the text of the bills.
- tacLog 5y ago
  I can't tell if your joking or not, but wouldn't summarization at that level require some pretty insane AI? The closest I have seen is pretty decent and runs on some of the reddit news subreddits. But it is far from the work of a person skilled in real summarization, because real summarization requires you to predict what I care about based on the world at large.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law. But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.
    - showerst 5y ago
      That's all available, fairly easily. At the federal level it's at congress.gov, including redlines for (some) amendments and versions. To be fair not every single amendment vote is available, but that's a quirk of how the legislative process works. At the federal level, the US has a great bulk api from GPO/FDSys, including full bill text in plain, pdf, and XML. At the state level Openstates.org does it, including with an API. A lot of us in the space have mess with various "git diff" type solutions, but unfortunately the way bill text changes doesn't lend itself to this.
  - showerst 5y ago
    I know a few people on the commercial side have experimented with automated summarization, but it never out-competes the summaries provided by hand by the Government, and any mistakes will get you ridiculed by customers. There's a bunch of downside for no real upside.
MarkSweep 5y ago
It’s not exactly what are you asking for, but the Congressional Dish podcast attempts to cover bills and hearings. https://congressionaldish.com/ https://congressionaldish.com/
- tacLog 5y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. That appears to be somewhat close to what I was hoping to find. I will check it out.
showerst 5y ago
I co-founded a company in this space, although not focusing on summarization, and not targeted at normal citizens. > I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details. The real answer is "No you don't." Most congresses [1] pass a few hundred bills per year, and up to a thousand resolutions, and most of them are completely uninteresting to most people. On top of that, single bills can be omnibus monsters that touch 1000 subjects. That's not even touching executive orders (which are pretty minor), and regulations, which are not. There are usually a few hundred federal regulatory updates per week, which can be thousands of pages. Jokes about government gridlock aside, the US is very big and the government does a _lot_, it's just that we're to the point where most of it is tweaking very specialized things. It's so much noise that the best way to be an informed citizen is, unfortunately, to find a few news sites you like, because it takes a large team to surface the stuff of interest to the general public. At the risk of turning this into a news bashing political discussion, I think politico and thehill tend to have good content on congress, and are generally up front about political biases. A quick scan of those every other day will put you far ahead of most people. All that said, both congress.gov and openstates.org (for state level stuff) offer searching and alerting, and every federal bill that's going anywhere does get a nice summary, although they are fairly verbose. But realistically you need a gatekeeper to sift through the chaff, because there's just too much happening. [1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics
jumelles 5y ago
You should check out the Federal Register

by tacLog 5y ago

stevesearer 5y ago

More basic than summaries, in my city there is no way to easily view how an individual city council member voted any any particular motion before them. Or even to see a list of the things the council has voted on. In order to see this information you need to wade through big PDFs versions of the council meeting minutes to find the motions. They are also backlogged by over a year in creating and publishing the minutes.

kovek 5y ago

If only we could use software to query the text of the bills.

tacLog 5y ago
I can't tell if your joking or not, but wouldn't summarization at that level require some pretty insane AI? The closest I have seen is pretty decent and runs on some of the reddit news subreddits. But it is far from the work of a person skilled in real summarization, because real summarization requires you to predict what I care about based on the world at large.
- mbreese 5y ago
  It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law. But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.
  - showerst 5y ago
    That's all available, fairly easily. At the federal level it's at congress.gov, including redlines for (some) amendments and versions. To be fair not every single amendment vote is available, but that's a quirk of how the legislative process works. At the federal level, the US has a great bulk api from GPO/FDSys, including full bill text in plain, pdf, and XML. At the state level Openstates.org does it, including with an API. A lot of us in the space have mess with various "git diff" type solutions, but unfortunately the way bill text changes doesn't lend itself to this.
- showerst 5y ago
  I know a few people on the commercial side have experimented with automated summarization, but it never out-competes the summaries provided by hand by the Government, and any mistakes will get you ridiculed by customers. There's a bunch of downside for no real upside.

MarkSweep 5y ago

It’s not exactly what are you asking for, but the Congressional Dish podcast attempts to cover bills and hearings. https://congressionaldish.com/ https://congressionaldish.com/

tacLog 5y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. That appears to be somewhat close to what I was hoping to find. I will check it out.

showerst 5y ago

I co-founded a company in this space, although not focusing on summarization, and not targeted at normal citizens. > I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details. The real answer is "No you don't." Most congresses [1] pass a few hundred bills per year, and up to a thousand resolutions, and most of them are completely uninteresting to most people. On top of that, single bills can be omnibus monsters that touch 1000 subjects. That's not even touching executive orders (which are pretty minor), and regulations, which are not. There are usually a few hundred federal regulatory updates per week, which can be thousands of pages. Jokes about government gridlock aside, the US is very big and the government does a _lot_, it's just that we're to the point where most of it is tweaking very specialized things. It's so much noise that the best way to be an informed citizen is, unfortunately, to find a few news sites you like, because it takes a large team to surface the stuff of interest to the general public. At the risk of turning this into a news bashing political discussion, I think politico and thehill tend to have good content on congress, and are generally up front about political biases. A quick scan of those every other day will put you far ahead of most people. All that said, both congress.gov and openstates.org (for state level stuff) offer searching and alerting, and every federal bill that's going anywhere does get a nice summary, although they are fairly verbose. But realistically you need a gatekeeper to sift through the chaff, because there's just too much happening. [1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics

jumelles 5y ago

You should check out the Federal Register