Have you ever thought you could do a better job writing the laws of our country than those jokers on Capitol Hill? Or have you at least felt the urge to scratch a few lines out of a bill and replace them with something else? Here's your chance.
Every bill currently being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives is available from a single website, and anyone can comment on the legislation or annotate it.
The site is powered by Madison Project, an open source software platform for writing, publishing, and annotating legislation. Like the site itself, the software was created by the OpenGov Foundation, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization co-founded by Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California.
>'We needed a way to hack open the legislative process to bring in all the expertise that was shut out.'
Seamus Kraft
"For people who are not inside of government, it really sucks standing on the outside looking inside seeing the government working on something you know about and not having a way to contribute," says Seamus Kraft, who co-founded OpenGov and served on Issa's staff. "If you're an elected official, you don't have an efficient way to listen to constituents. Those are the two technical things we're trying to solve."
Any government agency or advocacy group can use Madison to gather public feedback on legislation. It's slated to be used in Baltimore and San Francisco, where everything from building codes to LSD laws will be open to public comment. Meanwhile, CrunchGov, a tech politics site run by the blog TechCrunch, and a lobbying firm called the Internet Association use Madison to gather policy ideas from the public.1
Madison is a lot like a wiki or content management system such as Drupal and WordPress, but instead of juggling blog posts or technical documentation, its users manage policy.
For now, the San Francisco and Baltimore sites only let you comment on laws using Disqus (Kraft describes this as a "baby step" toward a full Madison roll-out). And though the CrunchGov and House of Representatives site let you edit policy as well, the changes you make to a bill or law can’t yet be shared with others. Kraft says future versions will include tools for sharing custom versions of a law and a Wikipedia-style system for tracking changes. He also says it will integrate with GitHub, a site originally designed for software developers to share and collaborate on code but now used for a wide variety of other purposes, from wedding planning to public policy.
"This is how people produce information in the year 2013. They use Google Docs, they track changes, they collaborate," Kraft says. "We're bringing that new way of doing business to one of the most old fashioned and most important institutions."
The first bill created with Madison was the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (the OPEN Act) in 2011, a response to a Senate bill called the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and a House bill called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
SOPA and PIPA proposed measures such as forcing ISPs to blacklist certain website -- measures critics like Issa argued were not only draconian but futile. Kraft says Issa, a veteran of the electronics industry, believed the many of the problems with the bills stemmed from the fact they were written with help from the recording and film industries and without input from the technology industry or users. Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) wanted to propose an alternative bill that drew on feedback from the public.
"We needed a way to hack open the legislative process to bring in all the expertise that was shut out," says Kraft. "We looked at the open market for things that would satisfy the production process of congress, and didn't find anything that met our needs." So the team built Madison, and then set to work on drafting the OPEN Act.
Meanwhile, Kraft and Issa co-founded the OpenGov Foundation with the mission of bringing Madison and other projects to other governments and organizations. Issa provided seed funding, and earlier this year the organization received a grant from the Knight Foundation. Now Kraft works full-time for the non-profit.
No policy created through Madison has been passed yet. The OPEN Act was proposed on Capitol Hill, but, according to Kraft, it died with the last Congress in 2012. According to Motion Picture Association of America chairman and former senator Chris Dodd, SOPA and PIPA are also dead and won't be reintroduced to Congress. But Madison lives on.
"Do I pine for the day where everything on every level of the everything in government is done openly, accountably and transparently using Madison or a tool like it? Yeah, of course," Kraft says. "It'll take us a while to get there, but we think Madison is already a pretty good start."
1Correction 10/21/2013 18:17: Originally, this story said that the Baltimore and San Francisco lawmaking sites already used Madison, but that may not yet be the case. This story has also been updated to show that, at the moment, these sites are using the Disqus system to handle comments on laws.
