Recrafting Government As an Open Platform

itjoblog writes "How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive? Technology has revolutionised the way that we do business, but the public sector has traditionally moved more cautiously than the private one. Now, a report from the Centre for Technology Policy Research in the UK has made some recommendations for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government." I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a wiki with full history.

Comments

Technology is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Governments are less responsive because there is no penalty for being unresponsive. When nobody can get fired for incompetence and there is no competitive choice, you get less responsive outcomes.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[bunratty]

Elected officials regularly get "fired" and have to be rehired, often every two, four, or six years.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[jimbolauski]

How about a permanent demotion that causes your maximum level of office to be restricted? Lose a senate seat, you're in the house (if elected). Lose the house, you're in the state congress, lose that and it's city council, etc. Forced permanent demotions would prevent bad politicians from remaining in government at a level they can continue to do harm. A further stipulation would be that you could no longer be in-line for the presidency should disaster strike.

Too Bad it would never work people are fickle by nature and what they want one one year "Hope and Change" the next year "Limited Government" has more of a bearing on who is reelected. Now lets apply that to the real world and see how well it works there were many kids that were fired from low wage jobs should they have to spend the rest of their lives working at even lower jobs, what is lower then working at a fast food restaurant?

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Demonantis]

And the unelected ones continue being unresponsive.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[rolfwind]

Losing an election does not mean you deserve punishment or are a bad person. Winning an election does not mean you are a good person.

I would like an appeal of the 17th amendment. Senate was supposed to be the voice of the states. People are already represented by the House.

I would like ballots to contain only a Name, DOB, and Residency and not political party. I hate parties, can't outlaw them, but at least we can stifle their effectiveness. If you don't know who you are voting for besides party, you don't deserve to vote. If you would like a single checkmark to vote down the line, you should be severely disappointed that you are made to think.

I would like the apt-tax to replace all national taxes. I would like in times of peace (no declared war, and no war on terror doesn't count) there be a balanced budget amendment.

I would like the electoral college either strengthen so that the electorate actually can vote something different as representatives... or cast out entirely and have a democratic vote. I would like the president to have lots of powers yanked away in either case.

The congress too should stop abusing the general welfare and interstate commerce clauses to turn a limited government into an unlimited one.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[jackspenn]

Elected officials regularly get "fired" and have to be rehired, often every two, four, or six years.

Not bureaucrats. Not government union employees.

Why does the post office totally suck compared to either FedEx, UPS, or others when it comes to deliver times, quality of package handling, number of lost, open or damaged items, ability for customers to track packages, customer services, cleanliness of facilities, etc? Because the workers there don't care, they feel entitled and see working for customers as inconvenience. On every level the USPS is last, except one, pension payments and benefits paid to retirees.

Government sucks, so why people want more of a crappy monopoly I don't understand. Government creates nothing, for anything it "provides to one group, it must have taken or borrowed it form another group".

Government is a parasite on the people. We should always be working to having the minimum government required and majority of the power should reside as close the the people so that it will be better managed by feedback. States should be stronger in our Republic and the Federal government should be confined back to only the 17 powers it was authorized to do in the Constitution, that would provide a better quality of service to the people.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Lil'wombat]

The problem I have with Parties is not the designation on the ballot, but the fact that the two parties have written all of the election laws effectively preventing other parties from being on the ballot.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The congress too should stop abusing the general welfare and interstate commerce clauses to turn a limited government into an unlimited one.

Congress isn't increasing the size of the government, it's moving governmental functions from the state/local level to the federal level. The total amount of government is remaining the same.

As for why they do it, well, you can blame progress for that. As I write this over the internet, I am interacting with people in many states, and even some countries. Sorry, states cannot regulate this at all and the federal government has to step in. Progress intertwines us all.

Likely the best websites from the US Government...

[Pojut]

...are the Library of Congress site and the Supreme Court site. Both of them are extremely informative, and have a massive wealth of information that is readily available.

We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[jra]

an open platform, for the same reason we don't want daytraders on Wall Street, or intra-day trading at all, really. It's really nasty positive feedback, and has the bad effects positive feedback always has.

Whatever you think of Congress, it's a pretty handy damping loop to keep the Peepul from trashing the Constitution, and hence, the country.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Dishevel]

Too late congress and the supreme court have already trashed the constitution. You know there is bullshit going on when the right to make 90% of the laws they pass is power they say is given to them by the commerce clause of the constitution.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[NervousWreck]

That's only when they get challenged and need an excuse. Usually they simply don't care. Side issue: Does it strike anyone else as odd that Congress rarely tries to justify their actions based on the "necessary and proper" clause? Seems to me that means even they admit most of the laws they pass aren't "necessary and proper."

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[BrentH]

And this is what a lot of people seem to forget: we have all this bureaucracy, all these checks and balances not solely as a job program, but most also because we shouldn't want a government that moves fast. People crying for strong leadership and action forget that we had light governments that could do that in the past, and they were called monarchies and dictatorships. The number of benevolent kings and dictators are extremely small. A society has to have negative feedback loops to prevent any government from moving to fast and to meddle too much. We have a legislative branch to prevent crimes, an army to prevent invasions, and that is about the fastest I want a government to move. I don't want fast action and strong leadership, because the same happens what happened in the bad old days: leaders that go to war, are only interested in their own agendas, start idoitic programs to suppress minorities, are susceptible to corruption and lobbyists etc etc. I advocate good government, and good government should know what to do and what not to do, and moving fast is not one of those things.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Thanshin]

Positive feedback, seems to be a minor drawback compared to the problem of uninformed decision.

To make an open platform work you'd first need an informed population, and once you have an informed population (plus democracy), you don't need the open platform anymore.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[JustinOpinion]

Can you be more specific? I certainly see the negative effects of feedback in high-speed trading (volatile reactions, etc.), though there are some benefits to having all those day-traders and millisecond traders (liquidity, closing price gaps, etc.).

In the case of governance, I can't really see what kind of problematic feedback loops would be generated. Obviously some government data needs to not be open (e.g. military secrets), but having the lawmaking process open and transparent (clear, easy to access information on who supported/didn't-support a given law (perhaps even on a section-by-section basis), revision histories, public debates, etc.) seems like a good thing. Obviously there will always be some amount of "off the record" conversations between politicians (which can be bad, e.g. backroom deals; or good, e.g. frank discussions). With respect to feedback, the main danger I see is that "voter fickleness" could get amplified, where elections (and thus important lawmaking) end up turning on trivialities. (E.g. with more and more transparency and record-keeping, it's almost certain you'll eventual find a sound-bite of your opponent saying something that seems stupid or wrong or evil.)

But I would argue we're already deep into the territory where such fickleness is having an effect. Commentators and voters who have already made up their minds already have enough specious data for their confirmation biases. As such, increased information to voters is a good thing because those voters who want to actually be informed and make reasonable choices will have the ability to do so (and won't have to take the word of a commentator).

Damping effects are still necessary, of course. But the inherently long-term voting cycle serves that purpose nicely, preventing voters from changing their representative on a daily basis or on a whim. This averages out many of the spurious and pointless "scandals" while allowing data (if available!) on important issues and voting records to build. I do indeed agree that other damping effects should be considered in a transparency roll-out, but to me that is just a matter of "doing transparency right"--the case for transparency itself is quite solid.

(Incidentally, one change that I've often thought about, which would serve both transparency and damping, is that any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.) This would give the public/voters/media/commentators time to examine it in detail, identify problems, and make their voices heard to their representatives. Having representatives act as a smoothing effect for the (sometimes irrational) public can be very good... but the way in which proposed laws currently mutate so rapidly and are modified at the last minute, so that the public isn't even sure what is finally put into law, is corrosive to democratic and transparent society.)

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[TheRaven64]

I prefer Frank Herbert's idea of a Bureau of Sabotage, a part of the government expressly created to ensure that the government doesn't become too efficient. It seems like it would work better than just hoping that doing everything badly will even out in the end. Especially when phrases like 'think of the children' manage to get small bits of the system to run very efficiently, at the cost of the whole.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[maxume]

You really think a slower market would be less susceptible to speculative pressures?

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[eln]

The necessary and proper clause just says they get to make laws deemed necessary to carry out their various duties as outlined in the Constitution. Every Congressional bill is implicitly backed by the necessary and proper clause because it's the only thing that gives them the ability to pass laws at all. However, in order to be Constitutional the law they pass has to be necessary and proper to carry out one of their enumerated Constitutional powers. Regulating interstate commerce is one of their enumerated powers, and happens to be one that's vague enough that you could claim all sorts of things are necessary and proper for carrying it out.

So, a law being backed by the interstate commerce clause means that the Congress has deemed that law "necessary and proper" for carrying out their duty to "regulate interstate commerce".

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[BrentH]

That's pretty much the point: seems like nobody notices that America is moving towards what Europe is moving away from.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[quanticle]

Well, a government can't be too ineffective either. A lot of people forget that the Constitution wasn't the first government of the United States of America. The founders tried an even weaker form of government with the Articles of Confederation. That government was so weak that the newly independent colonies were almost separate countries. The chaos caused by that state of affairs is what prompted them to create the Constitution and lay out a form of government that could move boldly and decisively in times of crisis, but still have the checks and balances of a more deliberative system.

Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[TaoPhoenix]

We know well enough "CongressCritter X voted for Bill Y".

What seems to be tough to fix is the lobbying lockdown. "If you don't support us in the War Against Z, we'll sink any other bill you ever submit for a vote."

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[drinkypoo]

What seems to be tough to fix is the lobbying lockdown. "If you don't support us in the War Against Z, we'll sink any other bill you ever submit for a vote."

If Americans wanted representatives who would vote their principles, they would vote for representatives with principles. They don't; they want pork.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.

From all I gather, that is hardly the case in most districts, and even where it appears to be, you can't be certain. I know over here in Germany it took the founding of a new party (the pirate party) before I considered voting to be a possibility to express my preferences properly at all. All the others are either bought scumbags (major parties) or lunatics (minor parties) or both or somewhere in between.

I know the solution is to go and do it yourself. Thank you, I've held an elected office for several years (and stepped down on my own), I've had enough of politics for life. Anyone who enters that arena with good intentions and manages to keep them has my respect, and if I can, my vote.
But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic. My personal choice was to step down just before I became the later, but it was damn close (and as you may have noticed, I did take a good share of disillusion with me).

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Unfortunately, people with principles have a much harder time raising funds. The politicians without principles can easily make up for it by running five times as many ads claiming they have strong principles and their opponent is a fickle traitor. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that uncapped corporate political spending, the least principled have even more advantages. The average payday for the top 25 hedge fund managers last year was over a billion dollars, which is roughly the cost to run a modern presidential campaign. Congressional seats are much cheaper; you could buy and sell half of Congress with that kind of money.

PR is far more important than principles, and a lack of principles can buy a hell of a lot of PR.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Sheep,
I find it ironic that you blam Fox News, when it's CNN and NBC pushing for more shiny trinkets, and Fox shilling for the deficit reduction.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[scamper_22]

Unfortunately, you are correct, but the answer is regulation of government.

You talk to people... and they recognize the need to regulate industry. Just look at the BP oil spill. Oil companies need to be regulated to make sure their oil rigs are safe.

The banking sector needs to be regulated to make sure transaction are fair and externalities do not spread to bring down the entire system.

Industries that use chemicals need to be regulated to make sure they don't cause undue harm to people.

Monopolies need to be regulated to make sure they don't abuse their power. Heck the EU goes nuts over Microsoft bundling a media player with their OS.

Yet, how about the most power monopoly in any country... the government... doesn't it need regulations in how it operates?
Bundling unrelated laws in bills to gain support... don't we need regulations to ban this?
Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?

I could go on with other examples, but then I'd show my various political biases :P
So I'll leave it at this relatively straight uncontroversial example of regulations of government.
Of course this is what a constitution is for... but when you have a living constitution... that's like having living regulations created by industry itself. Yet, the constitutions are still useful. People still have the rights... especially the ones they exercise on a daily basis. Americans still own guns no matter what governments have done to curtail it. We still largely have freedom of speech. We still largely have freedom of religion... We still have separation of powers and a court system... We just need to fix all the loop holes...

Unfortunately, the ability to write government regulations in a sane manner is rare... normally just when a country is formed. So we don't often get this chance. And you can't really write it while the 'game of life' is in play. There are too many special interests that would fight it. If we were to say

"Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?"

Public sector unions would go nuts, because they know they benefit immensely from the money of government.

And no... the courts don't offer us the regulation of government. They should... but they don't. The courts in any country are a political body with political views... often appointed by political parties.

Ultimately, it is up to good citizens and the public at large to insist government obey its regulations.
But yeah... I'm pessimistic about any real change until society collapses and we can rewrite the regulations on government.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[dkleinsc]

No, there's a much easier answer, that's more inherent in the job: you're dealing with (among other things) the allocation of a significant amount of cash. When you have a significant amount of cash to distribute, most people will try to get as big a share of that pile of cash as they can muster, and one way they'll do that is to butter up the people who are making the decision about how to distribute the cash.

And the next step, of course, is that too many people try to butter up the actual decisionmaker, so a new set of people comes up who's job it is to decide who can butter up the decisionmaker, and they now get buttered up by the people who want extra cash.

This is not limited to government - corporate purchasing departments and the like are also get caught up in this.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic.

But why is that? It's because voters are easily led sheep, who vote for shiny trinkets. It's never going to change unless people get interested in their government, instead of what they're told by Faux News &c.

Bread and circuses - some things don't change even after 2000 years. People will vote for the politicians they think will give them what *they* personally want. What's good for the town/county/state/country doesn't enter into it.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Sheep,
I find it ironic that you blam Fox News, when it's CNN and NBC pushing for more shiny trinkets, and Fox shilling for the deficit reduction.

It's pretty amazing how they (both Fox News and Republicans in general) are only for deficit reduction when the Democrats are in power.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[michael_cain]

Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages. Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff.

Speaking from my experience as a permanent non-partisan staffer for a state legislature, which required that I spend a lot of time with both state and federal bills, statutes and legislative processes, some remarks:

• Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills. A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read," followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with the intended modifications indicated. The bulk of the actual changes may be small — a sentence removed here, three words added there — but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute as well as the changes.
• Some of the bulk is a consequence of the size and complexity of current statute. I'm a BIG fan of simplifying government, but what is, is. What starts out as a modest change in policy becomes enormous in terms of the bill bulk simply because it may touch many other parts of statute. That is, repeat the previous point 20 or 80 times.
• Many legislators are as unhappy as you are as they watch a bill grow to enormous size right before their eyes as staff adds the pieces necessary to keep the overall body of statute consistent.
• Philosophically, the US Constitution makes Congress the primary power within the federal government (the executive branch is charged with "executing" policies set by Congress). There are limits to how much of the policy setting Congress can delegate (probably the most far-reaching Supreme Court decisions ever made were the ones late in the 19th century when the Court ruled that Congress could delegate at least some policy details — rule writing — to executive agencies). Sometimes Congress is simply exercising its prerogative to write a detailed design document instead of a high-level functional spec.
• In many cases, the detailed design is appropriate. Consider the case where statute allows a factory polluting a river to be shut down. Under exactly which conditions can this be done? What pollutants count? Which don't? At what levels? What procedure must the agency follow to implement the shut down? Are there exceptions, say, in the interest of national security? Is there an appeals process? If so, what documentation must be submitted and on what schedule? Absent the detailed Congressional design, the agency and/or the courts are going to make it all up as they go along.
• Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous, in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail. The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

but they are right on-target when it comes to how large and wasteful the government is

I claim that is largely a myth.

Please show actual evidence of the government being large and wasteful. I mean evidence as in hard numbers, used in proper comparison. All such that I've seen so far were deeply flawed and clearly manipulated. For example, many state-run companies are labeled as "inefficient", and privatization at first seems to prove it. But in almost all cases, a few years down the road you suddenly realize that the state-run company offered secure, adequately paid jobs instead of minimum wage, it invested in sustainable infrastructure instead of short-term growth, and its prices were more long-term realistic than the private competitors who undercut them at first, only to raise them later.

I know one market here in Germany where privatization really worked largely to the benefit of everyone. In all other areas, there are many cases where it looks like it works, but only so long as you don't look too closely. For example, in the privatization concepts of the german train system, all calculations looked great - and completely ignored that the value to be given away had been built up over a hundred years with taxpayers money. As soon as you priced it at a realistic market value, it turned out that the concepts proposed could not possibly provide a sustainable train system. In fact, in the years leading up, the management had already made the company "ready" for going public, and the deterioration of quality, infrastructure and workers' rights was so bad that when bad markets delayed the initial plans, and all the crap slowly floated to the surface prior to instead of - as probably planned - after privatization, public outcry forced even the government party that had pushed for privatization the hardest to put a hold on the plans.

It was government entities that put men into space and on the moon, not private corporations. Sure, today, they can get someone into orbit for a tenth the cost of NASA. It's impressive, but while NASA did it at 10 times the cost, they did it more than 40 years ago. A lot of things in technology have dropped further in price than factor 10 in those 40 years.

So, in summary, please do provide actual hard evidence. To me, the claim that government is large and wasteful is largely (there are small areas of exception) a myth. And worse, a myth that is being spread with bad intentions.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jwhitener]

The citizens united ruling is even worse than you describe. In addition to unlimited and anonymous political ads on tv, radio, print, etc.., corporations can now fund blatantly politically motivated third party organizations, who work around the clock promoting/demoting candidates, issues, and bills.

The candidates are even further from taking responsibility for the political vibe around a given issue/race now.

I am positive that the level of 'crazy talk' on radio, tv, etc.. is going to increase astronomically in an attempt to shift the political window to wherever the money is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Government Transparency

[solevita]

See also government transparency: http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/government-transparency/

Including Open Source Software and Open Document Standards.

Easier question to answer:

[Captain Courteous]

"How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive repressive?" Great! Thanks for asking!

agreed

[atisss]

Also history and diff mechanism with comments (as in reviewboard).

So I can know that Senator A commented exactly that point with such note upon discussion. Actually they could use reviewboard as tool for creating laws.

Re: Elected officials get "fired"

[Errol backfiring]

No they are not. The "tomato-catchers" are replaced. The ministers that stick their neck out and have to "take responsibility" when things go too wrong to be publicly acceptable. The layer directly below that remains, and they are the ones that make all the plans...

One requirement

[Hijacked Public]

I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.

I have another:

All laws must have a measureable objective, defined in advance of their passage, that they must meet or otherwise be repealed.

Re:One requirement

[JustinOpinion]

I like the concept. As hard as it is to get a law onto the books, it's almost impossible to get a law off the books. This leads to bloated and overly complex legal systems, innumerable special rules and exceptions, and so on. I also think that most laws should have time limits on them in the first place. Basically something that requires them to re-vote on the issue after X years, perhaps with a sliding scale if the law is always well-supported. (Something like 4 years, then possible 8-year extension, then 20-year extension, etc.)

I also like the idea of discouraging adding unrelated things into a bill. You don't want your pet project to be canceled just because the larger bill it was included in didn't meet a target!

There are of course potential problems:
1. Some legal changes that involve massive changes in infrastructure. Having these kinds of things be erected/deconstructed (perhaps repeatedly, as political climates for some issues can oscillate) might be even less efficient that the current situation.
2. Corporations could temporarily break a new law (or collude, etc.) in order to force it to miss a target, thereby getting legislation repealed. (But then again, this is just another variant of the already-well-entrenched "powerful companies can cause problems" issue.)
3. Issues not considered in the original objective target could arise. (E.g. an anti-pollution bill that misses its target because of a sudden environmental disaster in some other country that spreads...) Obviously the "targets" listed in laws would have to be crafted very carefully.
4. Related to #3, it is tempting to have a target in a law that is tied to the action of the law itself... but society is far too complex for this to generally be true. Laws may try to address issues of the environment, economic stability, employment, or whatever; but all of these things can be drastically affected by other things going on in society, unrelated to the law. So a very successful and well-supported law could be automatically repealed just because of a recession or other event.

As I said, I like the idea. But a blanket "measurable objective or repealed" rule might not work. At a minimum, I see no reason why laws shouldn't have an explicit statement of what the law is trying to accomplish, so that voters can more specifically assess whether the law is doing what it aims to. And we really do need better mechanisms for repealing laws.

laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.

[smchris]

You want to give people a heart attack? I had to read the Federal Register and my state's Register as part of one job I had. Thank whatever deity, power or force of luck you hold dear that not everything that gets proposed makes it out of committee. Not just anyone should be exposed to that knowledge. The horror. The horror.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[maxume]

Term limits probably eliminate at least as many good representatives as they do bad.

Earmark your tax dollars

[rwa2]

I'd love to be able to control where my tax dollars go... so I'd be able to say, "30% to education, 10% to research, 20% to paying off national debt, 0% to the DoD". Congress can still fight over what's left.

Hell, they could even phase it in slowly... maybe let people earmark even just the first $100 or $1000 of their taxes, so everyone gets a nearly equal say, and it would serve as a great data collection tool as to the political priorities of most people... better than anything else I can think of.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Why would the private earmarking have to come only out of taxes you pay? And why should the rich get to earmark more? The entire point was to keep the private earmarking on the 1 person/$100 of earmarks level

Simple Requirement

[rlp]

I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history

I have a simpler one - legislators must read the laws before voting on them.

Re:WIKI Laws

[st_adamin]

The solution I was thinking of a few years back seems even better. Not a law history type of law wiki, but a bill wiki.

Picture It: Any number of proposed bills, weighted by community voting, then split directly in half for dissent. The dissent would take the form of comments... lolcats and flamers would be suspended, but not forever. Comments would also be weighted by community voting. We would need some impartial moderators to summarize. That would be very hard to get, but I think people would be willing, if it meant a more effective, efficient, transparent means of legislation.

So the important bills are discussed, split, combined, perhaps dumped all together, discussed again, *condensed* and finally approved (by some vote margin), all by the community. Then forwarded on to Washington (or your capital of choice) with the digital signature of all the participants. They can't necessarily ignore us (the people) forever, not if we have a forum that reaches a wide enough audience. I don't, obviously, suggest this as the sole method of legislation, but as a supplement to a laboriously slow and innefficient system that we have in place. Plus by the end, it would not be lawyer speak, but human speak. I'm a smart dude, but I cannot slog through most of it, heck neither can politicians. They pay advisers to summarize. We shouldn't have to, not if we are a government of the people.

This would also help us scream "absolutely not" loud enough for someone to hear. Not sure about other places, but Washington seems to laugh off absolutely nots (the system was designed to prevent this, but the people have short memories). Additionally, this could be done for all levels of government, from city through national (or international maybe?)

Several weaknesses that I see: People tend to polarize 50-50. I don't know why that is, maybe its worthy of a psych experiment, but it would be tough to get anything done.

An online legal discussion proposition forum would, by definition, exclude vast segments of the population. Perhaps newspaper posting in the final stages might help, but vote counting there would take a massive infrastructure. Additionally, it would be a certain demographic (tech/geeks) that had a disproportionate weight for this forum. What is rule by the 'smart?' Oligarchy? Or something... I don't recall, but I'm against it.

Websites that can rally vast numbers of people could offset disporportionatly on single issues (like the Colbert toilet). I can't see any way to get around it. Maybe we shouldn't even try, I guess.

Non Participation. Just like voting, people would biznitch about what was done, but not take the few minutes to participate on the bills they care about. Emailing Washington does not work, but no one writes letters. A five hundred page letter (mit abstract), with 60,000 signatures, though should garner some attention.

Any thought/suggestions/criticisms would be most welcome... that's what this whole comment was about.

git for law. LawML.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Perhaps make the law accessible via a wiki. But most wiki revision control systems aren't very sophisticated.

Keep the law in git branches. If people wish to amend the law, let them branch the law, make their amendment, and propose it for merging to the master branch. What the proposed changes are become very easy to track, as does the person responsible for each and every line.

Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...

Re:WIKI Laws

[necro81]

all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history

Sounds a like a do-able community project. How many laws within a particular scope change every day? Don't think all laws at first, start smaller.

Most laws go by for years without change.

If your government is not willing to do this, and it is still not happening then its just the laziness of everyone at large ; so stop complaining if you would like to see this happen.

You can get plenty of up-to-date books or online databases that contain, for instance, the complete US Legal Code. You can also get information here and there about the history and intent of a law, and what it may actually mean in plain English. For some of the really arcane and abstruse stuff (and some of it really defies simplification) hire a lawyer.

But what I think the comment in the summary was getting at was all the changes that go on while a bill is being written. Lawmakers, especially when they are going for a soundbite, carp on about last-minute changes that were made in the dead of night and buried in the text of a 1,000-page bill, giving us a billion dollar boondogle pork project in someone's district. They are right to do so - that kind of behavior is inexcusable. Lawmakers get away with it because it is so buried and unaccountable.

Wikifying the bill-writing process would allow you to know that the text of a bill has been changed, and when, and by whom. Permit only elected members and the Congressional support staff (ya know, the people actually writing things) editing powers. As far as I know, Congress has absolutely no way to track changes to a bill as it makes its dirty, sausage-making way from concept through committee, debate and amendation, to conference, and finally ratification. For all I know it's just a Word file that gets spit out into a pile of paper. This kind of change-management system is common practice in many businesses where versioning and history are important - software vaults, part databases, etc.

I can think of no place where this is more needed than Congress.

Tyranny

[Archangel Michael]

The problem with Democracy and most other forms of governance is tyranny.

We try to keep tyranny of the majority from affecting the rights of the minorities, and then we end up with tyranny of the minority, which infringes upon the rights of the majority.

LIBERTY, is the ONLY governance that works. It says each is responsible for his own actions, to the end that he doesn't infringe upon the liberty of others.

The problem with Liberty, is that all the do-gooders who want to tell others how to live, because they think they know better, and those that want to rescue everyone from themselves.

That is why we have things like "war on drugs" and "war on poverty" (porn, terror, big oil, pharma etc) and all the "do it for the children" and whatnot being the driving forces of laws that infringe upon everyone's rights and liberties.

So, the fight is always against tyranny, which is the natural course for man.

Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or Git?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Likely the best websites from the US Government...are the Library of Congress site and the Supreme Court site. Both of them are extremely informative, and have a massive wealth of information that is readily available.

Development of legislation is quite byzantine and revision (mis)management during the drafting can make for some very serious readability problems. Currently it is nearly impossible to have time, even for a full-time politician with staff, to have time for their team to individually work through all changes and revisions of a draft of a bill.

Using a version control system (CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Git) makes it very easy to track individual changes and who made them. It also makes it trivially easy to integrate all the changes and show a snapshot of the current draft or one from any arbitrarily earlier version.

Code bases for large software projects are unwieldy, constantly changing and have many authors yet need full transparency and accountability to succeed. So are drafts of legislation. Using a versioning system in our legislative process is long overdue.

Re:Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or G

[atisss]

Everything sounds great until "older versions" :)

Well, you could keep them in different country(state) but single country is usually the machine laws are running on.. On the other hand, something like UN could actually be the central repository developing, etc..

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[DragonWriter]

With Term limits they would have to go get real jobs after say 12 years total.

I can't see why in any job with significant responsibility, you'd want to cap the experience that someone can have in the job.

What term limits due is shift power from elected representatives to non-elected staff, interest group lobbyists, and others, who don't have term limits capping their experience.

The main problem term limits seek to address is the lack of meaningful choice in elections, which is a product of an electoral structure which assures that there will be at most two viable choices, one of which is usually the incumbent.

Fixing the underlying electoral system to not use plurality or majority/runoff elections in single member districts would do far more to promote real choice than term limits do, and would avoid the undesirable effects of term limits.

With, say, 5 member districts with legislators elected by STV, you'd have far more real choice than with the U.S.'s current electoral systems (even with term limits added), and probably more change in individual representatives year-to-year, though it would still be possible for candidates that really did a good job in the eyes of the voters to keep doing the job as long as they retained the support of the electorate.