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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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"?
Maybe they'd be forced to do so in order to compete with the new cohort of younger, technology-embracing politicians which will sweep to power on the crest of a wave of louis ck-style "OMG finally someone who understands" sentiment from the reddit generation, bumrushing congress in much the same way that the tea party has done.
I fully admit that these ideas are not workable in this form. I'm trying to "dream big." That's why I used the phrase in my imagined utopia.
That will never happen because too few of the Reddit generation are willing and/or capable of pulling out their checkbook (err, PayPal account) to cover the cost of that. In fact, too few of them are even willing to show up at the polls (40ish% compared to over 70% for age 55+[1]). Until those change, nobody is getting kicked out by the Reddit generation.
One problem is that the 55+ demographic is able to vote in the civic centers they grew up with. Let us vote from our civic centers (e.g. the net) and we'll do so in much higher numbers. Increasing the barrier to political participation has the effect of excluding all but the highly motivated, thus pushing politics toward extremes.
The important barrier to (effective) participation is not the drive to an inconvenient polling location. The barrier is learning about the candidates and the issues, and enough background to fit all the pieces together.
That is, making an optimal choice for your vote is an extremely expensive undertaking. Thus, relatively few people do it well.
Clearly people don't agree with my original comment. I'll see if I can figure out where I've strayed, and make my original idea clearer.
If I may, I'd like to squish the content of your comment into the single word "motivation." At present, it takes a high enough amount of motivation to either take time off work to vote early, vote by mail, or wait in excessively long lines after work, that far fewer than a majority of people participate. The arguments I've typically heard suggest that highly-motivated voters are more likely to make correct choices, and well-informed voters are more likely to be motivated.
My (untested) conjecture is that, rather than trying to increase motivation, we should decrease the level of motivation required by making it ridiculously easy to vote. Allowing larger numbers of less-motivated voters may lead to an improved "wisdom of the crowd" effect[0][1], counterbalancing the vocal minorities that we often see controlling local and national politics.
I think buried in your statement is the idea that democracy is inherently better, an end in itself. I strongly dispute this: I think that it's more important to get to the best answer, than to follow the herd, whatever direction it might go in.
In your second link, it notes two problems. First, it says that Crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics. I submit that this is quite the opposite of political questions.
But more importantly, it also discusses one of the big problems of "Wisdom of the crowd", although it couches it as an advantage. The effect is enhanced through communication between individuals, as would (and should) be the case in any political question. To this I reply with two words: "witch hunt".
History is replete with examples wherein the common, accepted ideas of society have stood in the way of progress -- I don't think I even need to recite any. And the whole point of the United States is to protect the minority, or even the one, against the will of a strong majority. So I don't think it's wise to strengthen further the crowd-based aspect of our political system.
That Wikipedia article used to explain how democracy was not an example of "wisdom of the crowds"; I'm disappointed that I can't find an older revision with that segment intact.
But that said, it's important to distinguish "crowd" from "people". I've lately been trying to explain to people that the vote is the least important (while still being necessary) part of a democracy. The effort of explaining to the whole population why a certain law needs passage is the soul of democracy; votes are merely to maintain a formal record of dissent and to resolve deadlocks. They're decision making tools of last resort.
Sure, but they were far from being a place I'd like to revisit, especially not on election day. The Internet is the community commons of today just as much as a library or city building was 30-40 years ago.
If you want to play this game: try growing up as a liberal, atheist geek from out of town in a rural bible-belt town of ~7,000. Then, try becoming an adult and getting over it so that you can perform your civic duty.
I think you'll find that much of the power that Congress wields is due to the interstate commerce clause. It is one of a few bits of constitutional authority that Congress can use to justify laws.
It would be more apropos to talk about "commit messages" that were a long list of : "typos", "bugfix"... not that I have commit messages that look like this... nope, not me...
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) 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.
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.
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. :(
Open Congress: 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.
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). Fun fact: you can send a letter to your congressperson straight from the page!
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.
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.
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.
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.
IBM's Many Bills (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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of this reminds me of https://openparliament.ca/, an opensource project covering Canadian politics. Runs off Django and uses a few different data sources. Great site.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
While I understand the value of secrecy for a dozen or so people to work things out free from the outside influence of special interests, I think this argument severely discounts the benefits of having lots of interested people discuss the issue in a forum.
In Brazil, we've have a lot a of success drafting some documents in a public space. The beauty of doing things in the public is that ideas cannot be presented separately from the person responsible. Every idea is traceable to its author. TBH, I can't think of one idea that I would want to become law where the author shouldn't be held accountable.
This is very true... however, I think that the solutions addressed above would be most beneficial to the bill markup periods where amendments are made and things re-written.
There could very easily be a closed door aspect to the initial drafting of a bill. So that the entire committee would get the "blame" for the initial draft.
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)
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.