August 7th, 2006
RSS In: WashingtonWatch.com
Why? It’s about time we have a real-time feed for bills on the floor of Congress. A few early concerns with the service:
- the methodology for generating cost/saving figures is
very weakflawed - public incentive to participate is nil
- if public participation is nil, Congress won’t pay much concern to the echo chamber of comments
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Thanks for the criticism. I addressed tax incidence in response to another post of yours, and I agree that the methodology has weaknesses. I’d be delighted to learn of another methodology that is a) better and b) scalable. I’m more optimistic about the willingness of the public to participate and Congress to listen. But, then, I wouldn’t do the site if I didn’t think so, right? :-)
hey jim, thanks for stopping by. i changed my language regarding the methodology. you’re right, it isn’t terrible, just not very flexible. i left one idea for scalability on the other post…
as for public participation beyond the political junkies and early adopter segments; it’s critical to keep representational pressure on congress. this is currently a great tool to track legislation (as i’m planning on using it), but the true power lies in the participation (read, comment, contact representatives, rate representatives, etc.) of the masses.
what would be great would be a digg-like feature for citizens to seed contextual articles surrounding each bill… that wouldn’t necessarily incentivise a large segment of the population to participate, but a small community would form and your search engine results would increase exponentially. a first step maybe…
Thanks for your ideas. Today’s spike in interest has helped me understand how people are going to use the site (and how some will just reject it out of hand). I definitely want to build that organic information flow that you and I are both thinking of.