On 3 March 2011 16:16, Tom Kaneko <[email protected]> wrote: > > The vision > My vision for YourConsensus is quite big. Please don't laugh, but it can > potentially be: > - The platform of choice for drafting legislation > - The platform of choice for organising actions where hierarchy breaks down > (eg. filling power-vacuums, natural disaster relief coordination) > - A respected democratic institution that keeps governments around the world > in check. > - A platform for direct negotiations between ordinary people in resolving > conflict (eg dare I say it, Israel-Palestine) > More than a few things have to happen before then, but I actually think it > is doable. Blame my youthful optimism. > > Government Bills to be published in this format > I know that a lot of activist groups spend a lot of time scrutinizing > government bills, and it can be an arduous process. Using YourConsensus to > scrutinize Bills would allow people to share notes effectively. > I have been working with Mark Wrangham to publish all UK government bills in > this format, so that they can be scrutinized by the public. This feature > will be added soon, I promise.
I do quite a lot of "activist group" looking at bills and drafting amendments to them. In all cases what we do is confidential. For all kinds of reasons we simply don't want a process that the whole world can participate in. A private version might be usable, a public version - not. Now as I understand it, that's intended. You don't really want activist groups to be using it, because its a tool that works on building consensus, and any activist group is inherently not aimed at consensus. You don't form a group to campaign against a new Bill or a change in the law if everyone agrees about it. So, I suspect that while it would be nice to have a private version, it won't be a core aim - unless I misunderstand you. As to having bills published through it - there is one point. There are, as far as I know, no software tools that are well designed for editing bills, legislation or indeed contracts. In bills, line numbers have an enormous importance which is alien to the way in which most wordprocessors and markup languages think about the world. Bills, legislation and contracts use numbering systems that it is often hard to persuade software to understand or respect. I suspect that without decent editing capability you can have a good discussion of a bill, but maybe not as much useful drafting as you'd like. Certainly someone needs to fix the editing side if its to be seriously used by governments and legislators. Again, I suspect that's a bit off your brief and is a hard problem (given that no-one does it right). I'll be interested to see it working. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
