Recrafting Government As an Open Platform 233
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.
Technology is not the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Elected officials get "fired" (Score:3)
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And the layer below that. And one more below. And another.
All originating from the society - with the system of governance reflecting...the society.
Re:Technology is not the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 t
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The USPS sucks for many reasons not the least of which is a strong union that blocks any changes to improve efficiency.
Other more compelling reason include:
Universal Service - The post office must deliver everywhere, 6 days a week.
Postal Regulations - Any changes to postal regulations must go through a convoluted approval process with testimony, federal register publishing, Postal Rate Commission and Board of Governors approval required.
Congress - 535 people with a vested interest in making sure none of the
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 don't think that would give much; those people would stil be basically told how to vote, and would go with it.
But making party affiliation clear (at least if there are actually lots of choices...) is quite convenient. Yes, optimally one should research candidates before going to the polling place, but even when there the grouping makes clear in which part of the ballot you'll find your choices, greatly speeding the process (and didn't stop me from voting sometimes, during the same elections (two houses of
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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.
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People enable that; essentially want that.
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Repeal the 17th? Really?
I'm from Illinois where Roland Burris was appointed to fill Obama's vacant senate seat by a then under investigation governor/ since then impeached with his trial slated to start next month. So leaving the senate process at the state legislature level would just be a disaster in some states.
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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 like a couple of your ideas but I think people have gone too far in deciding that a balanced budget is always the best way to go. I'm not defending our current spending by any means, but just like a balanced budget isn't always in the best interest of an individual's finances, neither is it for a country. When you borrow money for college, or to pay for a house, you are spending your future earnings, investing in yourself. This is wholly acceptable for an individual if done wisely and the same can be d
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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, stat
Likely the best websites from the US Government... (Score:5, Informative)
...are the Library of Congress [loc.gov] site and the Supreme Court [supremecourt.gov] site. Both of them are extremely informative, and have a massive wealth of information that is readily available.
Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or Git? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [nongnu.org], Subversion [tigris.org], Mercurial [selenic.com], Git [git-scm.com]) 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.
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Whatever makes you think that any government, anywhere, wants its citizens (or anyone else) to be able to track individual changes and who made them?
We don't entirely *want* government to be ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Fun Fact (Score:2)
Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
"Old" days? This sounds pretty much like America since 9/11 (and in some cases, before 9/11).
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Uh... that all sounds pretty recent, some more than others.
What would be nice is a gov that doesn't 1) Let companies do stuff that, in the case of shit+fans, has the potential to ruin lives and livelihoods without backup plan after backup
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The number of benevolent kings and dictators are extremely small.
"Benevolent" is a truly misleading factor, and should probably ignored when choosing someone to run a country.
For example: Mathias I [wikipedia.org]
High taxes, mostly falling on peasants, to sustain Matthias' lavish lifestyle and the Black Army (cumulated with the fact that the latter went on marauding across the Kingdom after being disbanded upon Matthias's death) could imply that he was not very popular with his contemporaries. But the fact that he was elected king in a small anti-Habsburg popular revolution, that he kept the barons in check, persistent rumours about him sounding public opinion by mingling among commoners incognito, and harsh period known witnessed by Hungary later ensured that Matthias' reign is considered one of the most glorious chapters of Hungarian history. Songs and tales refer to him as Matthias the Just (Mátyás, az igazságos in Hungarian), a ruler of justice and great wisdom, and he is arguably the most popular hero of Hungarian folklore.
Compare to his successor, Vladislas II [wikipedia.org]:
He was a cheerful man, nicknamed "Vladislaus Bene" because to almost any request he answered, "Bene" (Latin for "(It's) well"). During his reign (1490-1516), the Hungarian royal power declined in favour of the Hungarian magnates, who used their power to curtail the peasants' freedom.[2] His reign in Hungary was largely stable, although Hungary was under consistent border pressure from the Ottoman Empire and went through the revolt of György Dózsa.
Mathias was not a nice guy. He wasn't elected (being the son of a warlord rising in power), increased taxes, ran the country on his own, suppressed the nobility and called his troops "the Black Army". Incidentally, he also knew how to run a country, and how to protect it.
On the other hand, Vladislas was elected, was a truly benevolent kin
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It doesn't seem the article advocates "faster" government, only more transparent government. If we're actually going to have a republic, it would be nice for people to be able to see what their representatives are doing with the money they take from us, and to see if our president is actually defending the Constitution. (ha)
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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
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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.
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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
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(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.)
That seems to be one thing the Confederacy would have gotten right during the US Civil War. From the Confederate Constitution (S 7.20):
(20) Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.
Of course, then they kind of blow it with this one...
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed
Still... talk about babies and bathwater ;)
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Pork barrel politics would become much stronger. Generally it would become an impossibility to push unpopular, but neccessary decisions - sure, govs are not great at making them already, but...
Plus the problem is that too many people don't strive to be "informed and make reasonable choices".
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You really think a slower market would be less susceptible to speculative pressures?
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At least humans could monitor and have some control over trading. This, opposed to letting fully automated programs trade several times a second based on some other programs' sub-second trading, instead of basing trades (somewhat) on qualitative bases.
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"We" don't want intraday trading? You want all transactions handled in 24-hour batches, then? That was too slow for the horse-and-buggy days, let alone now.
Usually you handle positive feedback by turning the gain down, not slowing the loop to a crawl. I admit I have no idea how to do the former, but I don't think the latter is an option. Also, there are positive feedback mechanisms in the market which have nothing to do with daytraders. Short-covering is one, stop-loss orders are another; both can be s
Not who wrote, but who paid for. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 wa
Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 [wikipedia.org] - 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.
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How does any interest in government not end with the conclusion that there's a non-choice between Tweedledum or Tweedledee (or Joe Lieberman if you can't decide either way)? The only thing that really matters is candidate selection, and as you already noted, no honest candidate stands a chance against the Mob's candidate (take a bow, President Obama).
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You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.
I keep saying it--anyone who wants a job in politics should not by any means be allowed to take the job.
I think someone else said that before me, but I forget who.
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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
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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 astronomical
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The problem is, with a few rare exceptions, you have a choice between a Democrat candidate who supports pork over principles and a Republican candidate who supports pork over principles.
The only difference is which particular items of pork they support (and that is determined by whether they choose to accept the suitcase of unmarked bills from lobbyist A or the suitcase of unmarked bills from lobbyist B)
Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for. (Score:5, Informative)
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:
Government Transparency (Score:3, Informative)
Including Open Source Software and Open Document Standards.
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Also, see also America's Freedom of Information Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_States) [wikipedia.org]
The U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law ensuring public access to U.S. government records.
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I think the very broad 'national security' excuse has taken care of cases where FOIA is inconvenient.
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Minutes? They should, at a minimum, make audio recordings, with a "voice key" that identifies each speaker. The amount of data required wouldn't be too bad using decent voice codecs. Video would be nice as it restores the non-verbal communications channels that you miss out on.
Minutes rarely convey the actual content of a meeting, in my experience.
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All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny...
You mean national security through obscurity?
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Unfortunately, most journalistic outlets (on both sides of the conservative / liberal spectrum) are too busy pushing their own editorial biases to produce fair & factual reporting, and most people are too busy reading about Lindsay Lohan's scandalous cleavage-baring shirt to give a fuck.
You could publish every minute of every government meeting ever, and they would be lucky to get a handful of views, until long after the time when it'd be
Easier question to answer: (Score:2, Interesting)
agreed (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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Probably not a wiki; we should be using git repositories for working on laws.
Anybody can commit their suggested changes, but getting them merged will be really difficult.
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Nah, you just build a citizen reputation system alongside it, like slashdot.
One requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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So you're asking for evidence-based legislation?
Why don't we just demand death panels for legislators ;)
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All laws must have a measureable objective, defined in advance of their passage ...
I support above even if it did not cause the law to be repealed.
The bill to improve health care never defined what improved meant
in a simple way. That I could find; never read all 2000+ pages.
Does it mean lowering costs?
Or, maybe increasing the average age at death?
Or, does it mean increasing the average age, at death, of the people
in the party in power?
Tim S.
WIKI Laws (Score:2)
>> I have one simple requirement: 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.
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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 w
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I know it's counter-intuitive, but... people only polarize 50-50 on issues they really, really don't care about. If the signal to noise ratio is good enough in your wiki, you'll see very clear biases in the public opinion as well.
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In an ideal world I love the idea of cutting government almost completely out of the picture and having Society create the laws to govern itself.
However, one thing you need to consider is that there are many groups out there, PETA comes to mind, that would take advantage of an open system to enact crazy stuff. If the issue is only pe
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You can get plenty of up-to-date books or online databases that contain, for inst
laws must be written in a Wiki with full history. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
fix ? (Score:2)
Any attempt to fix current government systems fails to explain why its #1 pre-assumption should be taken as correct: That the government system is fixable.
We all know that there are things that you can repair, and then there are things that are broken far beyond repair. Before going about to fix the government system, one should prove that it is actually fixable, and not simply kaputt.
The mistake that most attempts at fixing the system make is the same one that the security industry has been making for the
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Probably true, but the alternative is dissolving the system and starting over. That wasn't even done during the US Revolutionary War (the state governments remained basically intact, as did the system of comm
Earmark your tax dollars (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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LawCAPTCHA!
git for law. LawML. (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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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...
The current situation, where a citizen has no hope of really ascertaining if a prospective action will be legal or not, is a huge problem. But trying to make law even more rigid and codified is not necessarily the answer. It does appeal to many in the Slashdot crowd, since we like and understand computer languages, but has numerous problems when applied to real laws.
1. The average person will have great difficulty parsing a truly unambiguous and machine-readable language. Elsewhere in this discussion som
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You've caught me out.... I oppose electronic voting systems for exactly the same reason - that they are incomprehensible by the average citizen and thus impossible for them to audit. I even note that geeks love to noodle with the ideas for implementing a successful e-voting system because they love a complex problem.
Thanks for clarifying an extra benefit though - not being a lawyer I wouldn't have thought about laws being composed of what is effectively a stream of patches, that the user has to read verbati
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Tyranny (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Um, wrong questions, sort of... (Score:2)
"for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government."
I'm not sure I want my government enabled any more than it is. Ineffective oversight of offshore oil drilling, failed immigration control, failed financial oversight, my government needs to do some things that are just not that hard, and don't need technology to do them. Only three of many examples shown. C'mon, Obama, fix your own house, eh?
"I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history."
Of all the
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Term limits probably eliminate at least as many good representatives as they do bad.
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Term limits probably eliminate at least as many good representatives as they do bad.
My mind boggles at the implication in your post that the ratio of good representatives to bad representatives is 1:1.
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I'd prefer we adopted the relevant portions of the Constitution of New Texas.
Setting things up so that harming/killing a "practicing politician" is only a crime to the extent that his public acts didn't deserve such harsh criticism would probably work fairly well....
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So at the end of their term, they would not give a shit. Apart from setting up favors that need to be repaid to them.
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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 stru
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Direct Democracy has another name: Tyranny of the Majority. (All Apologies to Plato)
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I'll take this over the oligarchy I live in any day of the week thank you very much.
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Spoken like someone who is a part of the majority.
Given my druthers, I wouldn't trust the majority of my fellow citizens with drivers licenses, let alone the right to directly vote on every issue.
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What people want isn't to see the laws, what they want is "cvs blame" so they know when those must pass bloated piles of crappy bills come up, they know who actually added each little bit of pork.