Vision: In our contemporary convergence culture, the interests of policy wonks, Huff-po readers, and Wikileaks fanatics can be integrated in a single platform that features social annotation of congressional bills. The design of such a platform could easily draw from several other successful projects (or worthy ideas) we have previously discussed at Pleasestealthisidea- namely, remixable legal textbooks; social, cross-platform annotation on e-readers; and crowdsourcing our election system. Imagine how such practical technology could enhance civic participation, by, say, enabling annotators to parse the language of debt-ceiling bills on their own and pinpoint specific measures they support or oppose (not to mention the effects this would have on pork barrel). Social annotation of legislation would be a major step towards transparency of the sort called for by Lessig's FixCongress.org.
Implementation: Online annotation is becoming increasingly pervasive, as evidenced by sites like annotateit.org and crocodoc.org, along with the increasing pervasiveness this feature in e-readers. However, the Councilmatic project at Code for America may offer a viable model for other cities, states, and even the federal government to follow. Working with the Philadelphia City Council, the CFA folks have prototyped a platform that offers users the followings features: “voting” and commenting on bills; receiving notifications of changes to bills through email, RSS, or social media; explaining the legislation in plain English on a wiki to other users. Popvox.com, currently in public beta, offers similar tools tailored for organizations, lawmakers, and regular web users, replete with visualizations and easy ways of sharing your virtual votes through social media. Doubtlessly, we need more ideas like these.
Attribution: Andrew Magliozzi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.