7 ms·

American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blam

American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists. * Simple diffing would prevent deliberate obfuscation tactics like burying provisions deep inside piles of irrelevant stuff. * You could build a sweet github-style outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation. * Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it; force them to write these in simple english. This alone would spin 'em around so hard they wouldn't know what day it is. * Use your imagination. I'm sure you can think of 100 reasons why this would be awesome. Build it, open source it, then start your own lobbying/PR machine to demand that they use it. Constantly ask for justifications as to why they are not willing to use it, given the massive, obvious benefits it would bring. Ask what they have to fear from the extra scrutiny and accountability it would bring. Surely the "social media generation" can out-lobby the lobbyists? That sounds like it should be the kind of thing we're good at. Or just forget about that entirely and try to think of some way to decimate the lobbying industry in the same way that hackers are destroying the content distribution industries and all that other stuff.

eli 15y ago
Sunlight Foundation is actively working on this sort of thing. Join their mailing list. http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  The Sunlight Foundation's APIs look great and some of their projects are pretty cool (and well-designed). Unfortunately none of them are a really coherent integrated system that people can use to track what's going on with government. They're more like cool research tools for political scientists and economists. PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org) is trying to build more of the version control system talked about above, but it would be significantly better if some of the Sunlight Foundation's APIs were integrated. http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html
- cellularmitosis 15y ago
  Holy cow! The clerk of the house will start hosting all bills in XML on Jan 1st 2012! http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/house-approves-sweeping-open-data-standards/ http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/house-approves-sweeping-op...
chaostheory 15y ago
Better transparency and awareness is only one part of the solution. I strongly feel that people need to create a crowd-sourced lobbying group in order to get things heard and done. Money has always spoken louder than words in Congress.
agentultra 15y ago
Combined with open-data tracking it could also be possible to track the economic effects of individual policies faster and more efficiently. I suspect that you'd see far fewer people getting into politics with a system like this.
epenn 15y ago
This would indeed be great, but as Clay pointed out software like this would need to be housed on hardware belonging to Congress. That being the case, it could be very difficult to get them to agree to something having the sole purpose of holding them to a greater accountability. I'm not saying it isn't an idea worth pursuing; just that it may not be a walk in the park to get them to use it.
- steauengeglase 15y ago
  Dunno, they picked up twitter pretty fast.
  - saraid216 15y ago
    Twitter is designed to let you pop soundbites. How could politicians not pick it up fast?
awt 15y ago
I often reflect on how much the executive branch resembles a machine executing code. Government based on written laws has been around for such a long time that I am surprised (when I think about it) that more safeguards and tools such as version control that have evolved in the world of computer science have not naturally evolved in the world of government. There is no reason bills could not be developed in the open over Github.
- count 15y ago
  Aside from a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics actually works in modern governments, yeah, there's no reason.
CWuestefeld 15y ago
Nice thoughts, but resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists. In some cases you might be able to attribute a clause to a lobbyist, but this isn't the general case. And how could this be enforced? outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation. This exists, and doesn't seem to be helping. See thomas.loc.gov. For example, concerneing SOPA: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./temp/~bdNuye::|/home/LegislativeData.php?n=BSS;c=112| http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./temp/~bdNuy... (Suggestion for enhancement: easy permalinks) Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it ... force them to write these in simple english There are already requirements that bills specify the authority on which they're grounded. Most of these just wind up saying "Interstate Commerce". In other words, you'll never be able to enforce this in any meaningful way.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  >Most of these just wind up saying "Interstate Commerce". In other words, you'll never be able to enforce this in any meaningful way. In my imagined utopia, all these justifying messages would be listed on a lawmaker's github profile-style page next to a big picture of their face, and any lawmaker with a long list of "interstate commerce" type messages would look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public. I'd put the messages in speech bubbles emanating from the headshot photo, like you see in some commenting systems, just to drive the point home.
  - jerf 15y ago
    And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Do you want to bring Democracy back to the system (or your choice of roughly equivalent question), or are you just trying to put your own political ideals on a privileged pedestal? I think one of the key reasons we have been unable to successfully reform things is that in general, people want the latter a lot more than they want the former. And DC knows what to do with those types... embrace, extend, embed.
msy 15y ago
IBM's Many Bills (http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com/ http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com/) did much of what you're suggesting. The problem is making people interested and engaged enough to use these tools and push their congresscritters to act in the interest of their constituents rather than their paymasters/lobbyists.
arrel 15y ago
I think this misses the point for getting software into congress - it has to be something they want to use, not just something we want them to use. These are awesome ideas, but once we get into the "force your legislature to start using..." then it's pretty much dead in the water. We need to make software that makes parts of their jobs 10x better, and unfortunately that'll have to include a few ways for politicians to obfuscate and make decisions behind closed doors.
steauengeglase 15y ago
I started work on a "somewhat" similar project* around the beginning of the year. This was for the state level, not the federal level. There were quite a number of issues. The most annoying being that the state archives only went back so far. Checking it now, it goes back to the mid-70s (very encouraging, 9 months ago, it only went back to the mid-90s). If you need a reference on why this is important go back and read the Patriot Act (hint, without access to the legal code going back very far, it is futile). As far as your bullet points, we already do much of that (ok, not in "real time", not with commit messages (you could have it, but everyone would quickly fill it in with "cause it's good for America"), but much of this is publicly available). Anyone who adds or votes for or against is very well documented. For my state it is a real PITA to parse out and apply but that information is provided and in a usable manner. The only thing missing is the speed and pretty ui. Also, Sunlight has already done a great deal of work in this area (when I last checked they were still working on the API). *Since, I've let the idea lay dormant for months now, I'll share it. The original idea was to setup a Facebook type "game" where bored housewives or whoever get a list of 5 random bills. They get the summary and it links to the bill's text and any current laws that will be affected by that bill. What they don't see is the bill's name and who the sponsor and co-sponsors are. After reading the summary they fill out a short survey of who and what party they think the bill came from, do they think the bill is a good or bad idea and any tags they think are appropriate for the law ("pork","insurance","nice", etc) and even add their own notes. After they do that they find out who the sponsor/co-sponsors are. The idea was to give people an incentive to read pending legislation without an instinctive bias. Though my code is ugly, I may GitHub what I have so far.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tibbon 15y ago
  Do Github it. At best, someone works with you to expand on it. At worst, nothing ever happens with it. Ugly code or not, sharing is beautiful. I find it incredibly rare for someone to go through Github and "steal" an idea of someone else's. People just don't have the time for that.
tibbon 15y ago
I've been thinking about this too. It seems that some solutions do exist. Yet, the downside is that in reality there is too much data created and in the world of US politics facts matter much less than you'd hope (see the recent debates and Poltifact). However, I do dearly want this system. I want it to be accurate and I want it to be useful. One difference however is I was thinking of it as a Wiki. Discuss pages are transcripts of conversations in committe or on the floor. That way you could see line for line diffs, etc. Although a Git-style thing would be neat too.
gilgad13 15y ago
Open Congress: http://www.opencongress.org/ http://www.opencongress.org/ seems like something pretty close to what you are describing. I think its just a layer on top of the thomas.loc.gov system someone else mentioned, but it also does tracking of who changes/supports what. Judging from the number of comments, it isn't very heavily used.
- mpgoetz 15y ago
  I like Open Congress. In about 2 minutes, I was able to find out more about the SOPA bill ( http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show). Fun fact: you can send a letter to your congressperson straight from the page!
thinkcomp 15y ago
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on PlainSite. http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org We don't have bills yet, but we allow diffs on the text of laws and proposals to improve them. If you're interested in helping add features (we have a long list), e-mail info at plainsite dot org.
- wizard_2 15y ago
  Where's SOAP? I can't search for open "problems".
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    Add an issue!
DannoHung 15y ago
Legally enforce accountability?! GREAT IDEA! Let's get it passed as a... oh. Fuck. Fundamentally, if you believe that the organization that determines the organization of Government is broken, there is no way to fix it with means that go through the regular system. An aberration in normal operational procedure is needed. This is called revolution in the political space.
klbarry 15y ago
Counterpoint: There are some strong arguments that a senate operating behind closed doors would be more effective at ignoring special interests and working together than otherwise. The writers of the constitution did just this (they swore secrecy of anything they talked about in the convention to avoid voter backlash) [1] This is why they initially wanted health care debates behind closed doors - the lobbyists can make much more use of transparency than the uninterested voter can. Fareed Zakaria wrote a lot about this in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. {1} [A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution by Carol Berkin]
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Up voted for a strong argument even though I'm not sure I agree... One thing to consider is that while secrecy might a way for congress to create consensus free of outside influences, modern technology has somewhat foreclosed the possibility - so we may as well have the best openness we can get instead. Another point is the atmosphere of each congressman constantly campaigning has forced them effectively outside of Washington and so barely know each and thus have a hard time finding consensus. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/01/03/no-more-washington-wives-and-it-s-our-loss.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/01/03/no-more-was...
- alex_c 15y ago
  The problem with that argument is that it requires voters to trust their representatives' competence and motivations to represent their best interests behind closed doors. That trust is in really short supply right now.
  - snowwrestler 15y ago
    I could make an argument that it is transparency itself that is helping to erode that distrust, as each side seizes on (and/or misrepresents) details to portray the other side as corrupt. When in fact most legislative fights are simply translations of differences of opinion into the legislative realm. Accusations of corruption are a common framing argument; if I can get you to believe that my opponent is corrupting the system, I can make you believe almost anything about the issue or their point of view. This is much harder to do if both sides negotiate privately and then jointly present a compromise.
mjwalshe 15y ago
realy not surprised that some on brings up version control - oh dear yes parliamentary based organizations have version control predating any IT use. Go read Citrine or for US types Roberts. The trouble is executives have a lot of ways of playing the game - they controll the agenda. However of they don't do it it all ready It would be a good idea to see who proposed and seconds any amendments (is this not in the public domain already) As the UK parliament and Lords do (they have fined expelled and put in jail MP's and Lords who asked questions for money or proposing amendments)
caseysoftware 15y ago
The concept you're looking for is Citability - http://citability.org/ http://citability.org/ The lead on the concept - Silona Bonewald, a good friend - pushes the concept that we should be able to cite bills down to any granularity we want under any version we want. The quick and dirty solution right now is to mine Thomas and load it into Git.. but we still lose the "who did it" part. :(
JoshTriplett 15y ago
The measures you describe would help track huge volumes of data. That Congress produces huge volumes of data seems like the problem in the first place. The Constitution includes a clause stating that Congress must meet at least once a year, because the founders thought that otherwise Congress might have so little to do that they needn't bother meeting. Let's get back to that situation, please, and then it won't require excessive tools to track what Congress does. Let's get back to a world where Congress actually doing something makes the national news as a rare occurrence, and then we'll have transparency as a matter of course. Have you ever read through the list of what Congress passes in a single day? For every SOPA that gets people's attention, Congress passes thousands of random subsidies, one-off import tariff exceptions or tax exceptions that just scream "paid special-interest".
- jberryman 15y ago
  > Let's get back to that situation, please That situation was an America that was mostly an agrarian society, pre-industrial revolution, pre-globalization, pre-climate-change. Are you suggesting the huge problems of the day could be addressed by a congress that meets once a year?
  - mindcrime 15y ago
    Are you suggesting the huge problems of the day could be addressed by a congress that meets once a year? I would argue that, yes. Then again, I believe that most of our problems don't need Congress to be involved in the first place, and/or that Congress is the cause of most of our problems, not the solution.
city41 15y ago
Isn't this just us trying to "fix" congress exactly how the media industry is trying to "fix" piracy? Just like the pirates will work around SOPA or any other law that gets passed, the lobbiests will work around anything that gets put in place and find ways to get their influence into the laws. The solution to piracy is to make the legitimate route so enticing most people don't bother to pirate. Isn't that the same with congress too? If we simply create an environment where it's advantageous for congress to do the right thing, then they will. No patches, laws, systems or oversite will prevent corruption.
cpeterso 15y ago
I read a story about an Australian government experiment to use a publicly-editable wiki for drafting (and commenting on) proposed legislation. Unfortunately, I can't find a link now.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Nice fantasy, but you have a bootstrapping problem: how is this to be implemented? If you are living in a fantasy world where you can change any process why not merely put forward the idea of passing a law with this content: "congress should stop being dumb"? Besides which, you are attacking a symptom. The root problems here lie in the amount of power that congress has, the nature of the news media, and the nature of the election process. Those are much, much harder to fix.
rmg 15y ago
Some of this reminds me of https://openparliament.ca/ https://openparliament.ca/, an opensource project covering Canadian politics. Runs off Django and uses a few different data sources. Great site.
georgemcbay 15y ago
There are two huge problems with your proposal: 1) We've already gotten ourselves into a situation where people who don't want changes to the system have immense power. It would be very difficult to force this (or any) solution on them without our own equal or greater power which would require a much larger population than just us geeks and would cost a fuckton of money. 2) What makes you think having this stuff be transparent would actually change anything? The saddest part of US politics in 2011 is the politicians and lobbyists don't even try to hide the fact that they are bending you over the barrel anymore, they just do it mostly out in the open and blatantly. The majority of the population is too numb at this point for knowledge to really matter much. If we can't get them to vote rationally (and so far we can't), who cares if they know who is screwing them? We know SOPA (and other bad legislation) was bought and paid for. We know who was bought, who bought them and we know how they are going to vote. None of this information is going to help kill it or stop the same from happening in the future. When you come up with an idea of how to mobilize the non-geeks en masse and you figure out how to do so in a "bi-partisan" enough method to get critical mass, then get back to us. But VCS for Congress isn't going to solve anything.
pillbug88 15y ago
It's funny cos before Obama was elected I told my friends that under this administration the internet would become regulated. This is in stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach the Bush administration took towards the internet. You can argue whatever else you want about him, but it is undeniable that more legislation regarding the internet has passed under the current administration than under Bush -- he even fought off the UN's (read: china/russia) attempt at taking over ICANN.
- vectorpush 15y ago
  I have few kind words for Obama, but SOPA clearly transcends party lines. You're deluding yourself if you think things would have been any different under Bush. The truth is, we don't know if Obama will sign SOPA. This bill is universally reviled among Obama's base (probably more than any other individual issue since the start of his presidency), and that same wave of enthusiasm that put him in office threatens to become a tempest of rage as anti-Obama as the tea party. We'll see.
chernevik 15y ago
This already exists, it's called legislative history, it's in the Congressional Record. It's a document of all submitted bills and their admendments, floor discussion, hearings, etc. If we presume that Congressmen are actually trying to get away with something, even parsing all that stuff won't help. B/C they'll take the real discussions some where else, they'll "amend" the first bill to completely replace it just before the vote, etc. And when we consider the enormous dollars at stake -- these guys are managing 25% of the US economy -- there will be so much going on that it's just not possible to follow what they're doing. If you want transparency, you have to build for transparency. You may have to sacrifice some things to get it. If complexity is generating opacity, you need more simplicity. If _size_ generates complexity, and / or diversity of purposes, you have to scale and or scope down. If that means government "does less", that's a tradeoff for transparency. Me, I think transparency is a pretty high priority in a democracy, I'm not sure how you have reasoned debate without transparency. That fits happily with my opinion that free people generally do a pretty good job of taking care of themselves, but there are other opinions of our current situation. But if we _must_ have a big government to do this that and the other, we are going to sacrifice some degree of accountability and reasoned discussion to have it, because we are clearly at the point where it's just about impossible to tell who's doing what in our government. That is, unless you believe the rhetoric of whomever it is marketing some viewpoint seemingly closest to your own, and prefer to blame the other guys for the whole mess. There is, of course, no transparency problem with making such assessments.

eli 15y ago

Sunlight Foundation is actively working on this sort of thing. Join their mailing list. http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightfoundation.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/ http://sunlightlabs.com/

thinkcomp 15y ago
The Sunlight Foundation's APIs look great and some of their projects are pretty cool (and well-designed). Unfortunately none of them are a really coherent integrated system that people can use to track what's going on with government. They're more like cool research tools for political scientists and economists. PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org) is trying to build more of the version control system talked about above, but it would be significantly better if some of the Sunlight Foundation's APIs were integrated. http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html http://www.plainsite.org/contact/contribute.html
cellularmitosis 15y ago
Holy cow! The clerk of the house will start hosting all bills in XML on Jan 1st 2012! http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/house-approves-sweeping-open-data-standards/ http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/house-approves-sweeping-op...

chaostheory 15y ago

Better transparency and awareness is only one part of the solution. I strongly feel that people need to create a crowd-sourced lobbying group in order to get things heard and done. Money has always spoken louder than words in Congress.

agentultra 15y ago

Combined with open-data tracking it could also be possible to track the economic effects of individual policies faster and more efficiently. I suspect that you'd see far fewer people getting into politics with a system like this.

epenn 15y ago

This would indeed be great, but as Clay pointed out software like this would need to be housed on hardware belonging to Congress. That being the case, it could be very difficult to get them to agree to something having the sole purpose of holding them to a greater accountability. I'm not saying it isn't an idea worth pursuing; just that it may not be a walk in the park to get them to use it.

steauengeglase 15y ago
Dunno, they picked up twitter pretty fast.
- saraid216 15y ago
  Twitter is designed to let you pop soundbites. How could politicians not pick it up fast?

awt 15y ago

I often reflect on how much the executive branch resembles a machine executing code. Government based on written laws has been around for such a long time that I am surprised (when I think about it) that more safeguards and tools such as version control that have evolved in the world of computer science have not naturally evolved in the world of government. There is no reason bills could not be developed in the open over Github.

count 15y ago
Aside from a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics actually works in modern governments, yeah, there's no reason.

CWuestefeld 15y ago

Nice thoughts, but resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists. In some cases you might be able to attribute a clause to a lobbyist, but this isn't the general case. And how could this be enforced? outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation. This exists, and doesn't seem to be helping. See thomas.loc.gov. For example, concerneing SOPA: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./temp/~bdNuye::|/home/LegislativeData.php?n=BSS;c=112| http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./temp/~bdNuy... (Suggestion for enhancement: easy permalinks) Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it ... force them to write these in simple english There are already requirements that bills specify the authority on which they're grounded. Most of these just wind up saying "Interstate Commerce". In other words, you'll never be able to enforce this in any meaningful way.

JonnieCache 15y ago
>Most of these just wind up saying "Interstate Commerce". In other words, you'll never be able to enforce this in any meaningful way. In my imagined utopia, all these justifying messages would be listed on a lawmaker's github profile-style page next to a big picture of their face, and any lawmaker with a long list of "interstate commerce" type messages would look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public. I'd put the messages in speech bubbles emanating from the headshot photo, like you see in some commenting systems, just to drive the point home.
- jerf 15y ago
  And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Do you want to bring Democracy back to the system (or your choice of roughly equivalent question), or are you just trying to put your own political ideals on a privileged pedestal? I think one of the key reasons we have been unable to successfully reform things is that in general, people want the latter a lot more than they want the former. And DC knows what to do with those types... embrace, extend, embed.

msy 15y ago

IBM's Many Bills (http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com/ http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com/) did much of what you're suggesting. The problem is making people interested and engaged enough to use these tools and push their congresscritters to act in the interest of their constituents rather than their paymasters/lobbyists.

arrel 15y ago

I think this misses the point for getting software into congress - it has to be something they want to use, not just something we want them to use. These are awesome ideas, but once we get into the "force your legislature to start using..." then it's pretty much dead in the water. We need to make software that makes parts of their jobs 10x better, and unfortunately that'll have to include a few ways for politicians to obfuscate and make decisions behind closed doors.

steauengeglase 15y ago

I started work on a "somewhat" similar project* around the beginning of the year. This was for the state level, not the federal level. There were quite a number of issues. The most annoying being that the state archives only went back so far. Checking it now, it goes back to the mid-70s (very encouraging, 9 months ago, it only went back to the mid-90s). If you need a reference on why this is important go back and read the Patriot Act (hint, without access to the legal code going back very far, it is futile). As far as your bullet points, we already do much of that (ok, not in "real time", not with commit messages (you could have it, but everyone would quickly fill it in with "cause it's good for America"), but much of this is publicly available). Anyone who adds or votes for or against is very well documented. For my state it is a real PITA to parse out and apply but that information is provided and in a usable manner. The only thing missing is the speed and pretty ui. Also, Sunlight has already done a great deal of work in this area (when I last checked they were still working on the API). *Since, I've let the idea lay dormant for months now, I'll share it. The original idea was to setup a Facebook type "game" where bored housewives or whoever get a list of 5 random bills. They get the summary and it links to the bill's text and any current laws that will be affected by that bill. What they don't see is the bill's name and who the sponsor and co-sponsors are. After reading the summary they fill out a short survey of who and what party they think the bill came from, do they think the bill is a good or bad idea and any tags they think are appropriate for the law ("pork","insurance","nice", etc) and even add their own notes. After they do that they find out who the sponsor/co-sponsors are. The idea was to give people an incentive to read pending legislation without an instinctive bias. Though my code is ugly, I may GitHub what I have so far.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tibbon 15y ago
Do Github it. At best, someone works with you to expand on it. At worst, nothing ever happens with it. Ugly code or not, sharing is beautiful. I find it incredibly rare for someone to go through Github and "steal" an idea of someone else's. People just don't have the time for that.

tibbon 15y ago

I've been thinking about this too. It seems that some solutions do exist. Yet, the downside is that in reality there is too much data created and in the world of US politics facts matter much less than you'd hope (see the recent debates and Poltifact). However, I do dearly want this system. I want it to be accurate and I want it to be useful. One difference however is I was thinking of it as a Wiki. Discuss pages are transcripts of conversations in committe or on the floor. That way you could see line for line diffs, etc. Although a Git-style thing would be neat too.

gilgad13 15y ago

Open Congress: http://www.opencongress.org/ http://www.opencongress.org/ seems like something pretty close to what you are describing. I think its just a layer on top of the thomas.loc.gov system someone else mentioned, but it also does tracking of who changes/supports what. Judging from the number of comments, it isn't very heavily used.

mpgoetz 15y ago
I like Open Congress. In about 2 minutes, I was able to find out more about the SOPA bill ( http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show). Fun fact: you can send a letter to your congressperson straight from the page!

thinkcomp 15y ago

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on PlainSite. http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org We don't have bills yet, but we allow diffs on the text of laws and proposals to improve them. If you're interested in helping add features (we have a long list), e-mail info at plainsite dot org.

wizard_2 15y ago
Where's SOAP? I can't search for open "problems".
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  Add an issue!

DannoHung 15y ago

Legally enforce accountability?! GREAT IDEA! Let's get it passed as a... oh. Fuck. Fundamentally, if you believe that the organization that determines the organization of Government is broken, there is no way to fix it with means that go through the regular system. An aberration in normal operational procedure is needed. This is called revolution in the political space.

klbarry 15y ago

Counterpoint: There are some strong arguments that a senate operating behind closed doors would be more effective at ignoring special interests and working together than otherwise. The writers of the constitution did just this (they swore secrecy of anything they talked about in the convention to avoid voter backlash) [1] This is why they initially wanted health care debates behind closed doors - the lobbyists can make much more use of transparency than the uninterested voter can. Fareed Zakaria wrote a lot about this in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. {1} [A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution by Carol Berkin]

joe_the_user 15y ago
Up voted for a strong argument even though I'm not sure I agree... One thing to consider is that while secrecy might a way for congress to create consensus free of outside influences, modern technology has somewhat foreclosed the possibility - so we may as well have the best openness we can get instead. Another point is the atmosphere of each congressman constantly campaigning has forced them effectively outside of Washington and so barely know each and thus have a hard time finding consensus. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/01/03/no-more-washington-wives-and-it-s-our-loss.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/01/03/no-more-was...
alex_c 15y ago
The problem with that argument is that it requires voters to trust their representatives' competence and motivations to represent their best interests behind closed doors. That trust is in really short supply right now.
- snowwrestler 15y ago
  I could make an argument that it is transparency itself that is helping to erode that distrust, as each side seizes on (and/or misrepresents) details to portray the other side as corrupt. When in fact most legislative fights are simply translations of differences of opinion into the legislative realm. Accusations of corruption are a common framing argument; if I can get you to believe that my opponent is corrupting the system, I can make you believe almost anything about the issue or their point of view. This is much harder to do if both sides negotiate privately and then jointly present a compromise.

mjwalshe 15y ago

realy not surprised that some on brings up version control - oh dear yes parliamentary based organizations have version control predating any IT use. Go read Citrine or for US types Roberts. The trouble is executives have a lot of ways of playing the game - they controll the agenda. However of they don't do it it all ready It would be a good idea to see who proposed and seconds any amendments (is this not in the public domain already) As the UK parliament and Lords do (they have fined expelled and put in jail MP's and Lords who asked questions for money or proposing amendments)

caseysoftware 15y ago

The concept you're looking for is Citability - http://citability.org/ http://citability.org/ The lead on the concept - Silona Bonewald, a good friend - pushes the concept that we should be able to cite bills down to any granularity we want under any version we want. The quick and dirty solution right now is to mine Thomas and load it into Git.. but we still lose the "who did it" part. :(

JoshTriplett 15y ago

The measures you describe would help track huge volumes of data. That Congress produces huge volumes of data seems like the problem in the first place. The Constitution includes a clause stating that Congress must meet at least once a year, because the founders thought that otherwise Congress might have so little to do that they needn't bother meeting. Let's get back to that situation, please, and then it won't require excessive tools to track what Congress does. Let's get back to a world where Congress actually doing something makes the national news as a rare occurrence, and then we'll have transparency as a matter of course. Have you ever read through the list of what Congress passes in a single day? For every SOPA that gets people's attention, Congress passes thousands of random subsidies, one-off import tariff exceptions or tax exceptions that just scream "paid special-interest".

jberryman 15y ago
> Let's get back to that situation, please That situation was an America that was mostly an agrarian society, pre-industrial revolution, pre-globalization, pre-climate-change. Are you suggesting the huge problems of the day could be addressed by a congress that meets once a year?
- mindcrime 15y ago
  Are you suggesting the huge problems of the day could be addressed by a congress that meets once a year? I would argue that, yes. Then again, I believe that most of our problems don't need Congress to be involved in the first place, and/or that Congress is the cause of most of our problems, not the solution.

city41 15y ago

Isn't this just us trying to "fix" congress exactly how the media industry is trying to "fix" piracy? Just like the pirates will work around SOPA or any other law that gets passed, the lobbiests will work around anything that gets put in place and find ways to get their influence into the laws. The solution to piracy is to make the legitimate route so enticing most people don't bother to pirate. Isn't that the same with congress too? If we simply create an environment where it's advantageous for congress to do the right thing, then they will. No patches, laws, systems or oversite will prevent corruption.

cpeterso 15y ago

I read a story about an Australian government experiment to use a publicly-editable wiki for drafting (and commenting on) proposed legislation. Unfortunately, I can't find a link now.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Nice fantasy, but you have a bootstrapping problem: how is this to be implemented? If you are living in a fantasy world where you can change any process why not merely put forward the idea of passing a law with this content: "congress should stop being dumb"? Besides which, you are attacking a symptom. The root problems here lie in the amount of power that congress has, the nature of the news media, and the nature of the election process. Those are much, much harder to fix.

rmg 15y ago

Some of this reminds me of https://openparliament.ca/ https://openparliament.ca/, an opensource project covering Canadian politics. Runs off Django and uses a few different data sources. Great site.

georgemcbay 15y ago

There are two huge problems with your proposal: 1) We've already gotten ourselves into a situation where people who don't want changes to the system have immense power. It would be very difficult to force this (or any) solution on them without our own equal or greater power which would require a much larger population than just us geeks and would cost a fuckton of money. 2) What makes you think having this stuff be transparent would actually change anything? The saddest part of US politics in 2011 is the politicians and lobbyists don't even try to hide the fact that they are bending you over the barrel anymore, they just do it mostly out in the open and blatantly. The majority of the population is too numb at this point for knowledge to really matter much. If we can't get them to vote rationally (and so far we can't), who cares if they know who is screwing them? We know SOPA (and other bad legislation) was bought and paid for. We know who was bought, who bought them and we know how they are going to vote. None of this information is going to help kill it or stop the same from happening in the future. When you come up with an idea of how to mobilize the non-geeks en masse and you figure out how to do so in a "bi-partisan" enough method to get critical mass, then get back to us. But VCS for Congress isn't going to solve anything.

pillbug88 15y ago

It's funny cos before Obama was elected I told my friends that under this administration the internet would become regulated. This is in stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach the Bush administration took towards the internet. You can argue whatever else you want about him, but it is undeniable that more legislation regarding the internet has passed under the current administration than under Bush -- he even fought off the UN's (read: china/russia) attempt at taking over ICANN.

vectorpush 15y ago
I have few kind words for Obama, but SOPA clearly transcends party lines. You're deluding yourself if you think things would have been any different under Bush. The truth is, we don't know if Obama will sign SOPA. This bill is universally reviled among Obama's base (probably more than any other individual issue since the start of his presidency), and that same wave of enthusiasm that put him in office threatens to become a tempest of rage as anti-Obama as the tea party. We'll see.

chernevik 15y ago

This already exists, it's called legislative history, it's in the Congressional Record. It's a document of all submitted bills and their admendments, floor discussion, hearings, etc. If we presume that Congressmen are actually trying to get away with something, even parsing all that stuff won't help. B/C they'll take the real discussions some where else, they'll "amend" the first bill to completely replace it just before the vote, etc. And when we consider the enormous dollars at stake -- these guys are managing 25% of the US economy -- there will be so much going on that it's just not possible to follow what they're doing. If you want transparency, you have to build for transparency. You may have to sacrifice some things to get it. If complexity is generating opacity, you need more simplicity. If _size_ generates complexity, and / or diversity of purposes, you have to scale and or scope down. If that means government "does less", that's a tradeoff for transparency. Me, I think transparency is a pretty high priority in a democracy, I'm not sure how you have reasoned debate without transparency. That fits happily with my opinion that free people generally do a pretty good job of taking care of themselves, but there are other opinions of our current situation. But if we _must_ have a big government to do this that and the other, we are going to sacrifice some degree of accountability and reasoned discussion to have it, because we are clearly at the point where it's just about impossible to tell who's doing what in our government. That is, unless you believe the rhetoric of whomever it is marketing some viewpoint seemingly closest to your own, and prefer to blame the other guys for the whole mess. There is, of course, no transparency problem with making such assessments.