An Activist Plan For The Democratic Trifecta

by: Chris Bowers

Mon Dec 29, 2008 at 13:36


In eight days, the 111th Congress will begin. Amidst the pomp and circumstance of the swearing in ceremony, the focus on the economic stimulus package, and the continuing circus surrounding vacant Senate seats, one of the more unheralded events will be the introduction of several hundred new pieces of legislation. Two years ago, by January 5th, 2007--only two days after the swearing in of the new Democratic majority--318 new pieces of legislation were introduced to the House, and 192 new pieces of legislation were introduced to the Senate. You can see them all here.

In every case, the day after new legislation was introduced, it was referred to one or more relevant congressional committees. From that point, in 95% of all cases, Congress never again took any action on the legislation. During 2007-2008, this mass-death by committee was fairly unremarkable, since the divided federal government made it difficult for virtually any legislation to become law. Requiring approval from both George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi is a difficult obstacle course indeed.

The next two years, however, will be very different. With President Obama in the White House, Republicans reduced to 41 seats in the Senate, and with total Republican irrelevance in the U.S. House, this will be a time period when Democrats and progressives actually have an opportunity to pass a lot of legislation. The large Democratic trifecta has presented us with what I have previously called a progressive window: a once in a generation opportunity to make quick, strong, progressive change in the country.

During this progressive window, mass death-by-committee of progressive legislation will not be an acceptable outcome. Over the past couple of weeks, while huddled in our West Philly apartment and traveling to Upstate New York, Natasha and I have spent a while developing a plan to try and prevent it from happening in the 111th Congress. Here is what we plan to do:

  1. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings when Congress is in session, we will publish a round-up thread of all new legislation introduced into Congress by Democrats the previous day (legislation is typically introduced on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday). Exceptions will be made for bills about renaming courthouses or resolutions congratulating organizations on their recent or historical achievements.

  2. From Wednesday through Sunday, we will work with the Open Left and BlogPac communities to identify, among all legislation that was introduced the previous week, the best progressive legislation that we would like to see passed and the most damaging legislation that we feel needs to be stopped.

  3. On Monday and Tuesday, we will contact the offices of the Democratic members of the relevant congressional committees to which this legislation has been referred. The contacts will be simple and straightforward: does the member of congress support bills x, y and z?

  4. Once the contacts are complete, I will publish the results. This will, in theory, act as a committee whip count for all of the legislation we are currently tracking.

Producing this whip count should have the following benefits:

  1. Early Warning System: Over the past few years, all too often the netroots has only started taking action on dangerous legislation once it has already passed out of committee. By that point, of course, it is usually too late to stop the legislation. This system should help us to engage the fight much earlier in the process.

  2. Positive Activism: I have grown pretty tired of almost always opposing legislation that has appeared before Congress these past eight years. This system should provide us with a road map to help pass progressive legislation. By letting us know which members of each committee need to be flipped in order to push good legislation out of the committee stage, and onto the floor of the House or Senate, we can advocate on behalf of good legislation, rather than just opposing bad legislation.

  3. Beyond Voting Records: Congressional voting records only measure congressional opinion on legislation that has already passed out of committee. Given that 95% of all legislation never makes it out of committee, this system should allow us to compile a more in-depth picture of the sort of legislation Democratic members of Congress are supporting or opposing.

  4. Increased Transparency: The committee process is pretty murky, even though it is a huge percentage of the work performed by every member of Congress. This will help shed some light on a process that largely takes place without media coverage or quantifiable voting records.

Anyway, that's the idea. We plan to start it up when Congress convenes on January 6th, and it has us pretty excited. It will be accompanied by some neat maps and activism tools we are working on, too. I can't wait to show you guys those!

Of course, since it is still a work in progress, not to mention an entirely theoretical project, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Does this strike you as a useful project? What critiques, changes or suggestions do you have for it? Would you like to participate in it? Let me know in the comments. The upcoming progressive window really is the sort of opportunity that comes around once every fifteen or twenty years, and we want to make a difference during it. This is one idea. Is it a good one?
Chris Bowers :: An Activist Plan For The Democratic Trifecta

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An Activist Plan For The Democratic Trifecta | 84 comments
Yes! Terrific idea. (4.00 / 8)
Do you need help?  If so, in what way?

By the way - did I mention that I'm running for president?
I imagine we will need help (4.00 / 5)
We will need help, in several areas:

1--Help sorting through all the legislation. We can't track every piece of legislation (there were over 11,000 during the 110th Congress), so we will need help identifying the best and the worst for our tracking system. I plan to use polls, comments and emails for this at first, so participation is essential.

2--Some weeks, when there is a lot of legislation, we might need help contacting congressional offices. This will be both because of the volume of the calls and because, in some cases, we will probably need constituents to call their members of Congress (always easier to get through if you are calling your members of Congress).

3--Money. At some point, we may have to hold a fundraiser. As the commenter below says, this is probably a part time job for between one and three people. We will need money to pay them.

These are the basic idea. For now, we will play it by ear. Any help you can give would be great. The best way to start helping is to participate in the project through comments when it begins next week.  

[ Parent ]
Is there any benefit to suggest legislation.. (0.00 / 0)
or if not legislation then to connect "things that need doing, in the way they should be done" to Congress Critters who can wrap it in legalese?

Or any action, as with FISA during the primary?

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
There will be action (4.00 / 1)
I have no doubt that, once this gets going, there will be calls to action to encourage members of Congress to vote certain ways on our targeted legislation. So yes, this is intended to lead to activism.

As far as suggesting legislation goes, I actually had thought this would be an alternative to such suggestions. We can suggest policy until the cows come home, but really unless it is introduced in Congress, such suggestions are talking to the void. However, since so friggin' much legislation is introducted (like I said, 11,000 bills, and that doesn't even count ammendments to those bills), there should be legislation  out there to match just about every suggestion someone would have.

The way I figure it, we need to identify the good legislation that already exists, and help pass it, rather than talking more generally and theoretically about what we would like to see passed.

[ Parent ]
your earlier idea was better (4.00 / 1)
you will waste endless time tracking stuff that will never matter

and you will miss the essential discussions that occur behind the scenes

at the committee mark-up, main thrusts need only be introduced (on paper -- not electronically) 48 hours in advance, and 2nd degree amendments can be sprung on the spot

to be effective, pick a dozen topics, and find a sympathetic member.  collaborate.  get your bill introduced

then do your calling to committee members, get reactions, see what you need to change to get it passed, etc

this will put you in a great position to evaluate other bills on the same topic:  how worded differently, who wants what

more focus will be more effective

[ Parent ]
Not all for us (4.00 / 3)
Easily accessible public information about Congress' doings is scarce and expensive. It has value in its own right, even if we ourselves can't make use of it all.

Also, even though amendments can be put through in a hurry, those amendments don't usually come out of the clear blue. They're usually put forward by someone who's been working on the topic for a while, in concert with people who've been working with them behind the scenes.

That comes to your other point about finding a few people to work with and engaging in an ongoing collaborative relationship. It seems that it would be a lot easier to identify potential allies if we knew more about what they were doing when the cameras are usually off and few of us were listening before. It might also help identify broader points of agreement - if you see that such and such a legislator really seems to care about an issue that you support but hadn't especially focused on, it seems that'd be a chance to engage in mutually agreeable, cross-issue efforts that benefitted both of your favorite causes.

While it's important to begin to understand and work with the committee structure, it's also important imo to refuse to put on the sort of issue blinders that the structure suggests. We have a little more flexibility than many advocacy interests and should perhaps be looking for more opportunities to make use of that.

[ Parent ]
you have limited resources (4.00 / 1)
2 years ago

Kos was going to have an army of volunteers track the every move of every committee and subcommittee

it soon collapsed

Also, you want to have info about what is going on?  you must be a player in the process.  otherwise, no one has any significant reason to talk to you, and no one will -- until later, after the choices have been framed by the specific committee language that must be voted up or down (as a practical matter, for procedural reasons)

if you can command quick attention to drafting issues, as they happen (mark-ups), then people will talk to you.  And you will better understand what you are hearing

[ Parent ]
What an awesome idea (4.00 / 1)
Is there any way to automatically whack up the text of bills so they appear as diary posts? Or maybe imported into Google docs. You could sort it by committees to which the bills have been referred. Commenters could commit to being members of "shadow committees" which would have responsibility to review and rate all the bills before it. Essentially, create a parallel legislative aide structure made up of OpenLeft commenters.
[ Parent ]
Actually (4.00 / 1)
The text of the bills should be available online at the Thomas.loc site for the library of congress and house of representatives. You will be able to see the legislation immediately, and we can link to it.
[ Parent ]
Yeah, I know (0.00 / 0)
I meant there could be a way to make it more friendly for the review process, by turning each bill into a diary or collaborative document that a few people could append comments to.
[ Parent ]
Maybe model something on PublicMarkup.org? (4.00 / 3)
Or partner with them in some way?

PublicMarkup.org. They're a project of the Sunlight Foundation, and they post the text of actual pending legislation as well as proposed legislation section by section, allowing for comments on each.

[ Parent ]
Exactly (0.00 / 0)
I was thinking the initial cut would be taken by whichever member(s) were responsible for bills referred to a particular committee (with some mechanism to coordinate review with other committees with concurrent jurisdiction). Once that review was done, the bills which were deemed worthy of further action could be promoted up a level where people could sign up as members of a community following that bill, and giving them lobbying tools.
[ Parent ]
I'm in CA-1 (4.00 / 2)
I'd be happy to contact my Congressman, Mike Thompson.  He's an anti-war Blue Dog and a member of Ways and Means.  Just e-mail me any time.

You should hold a fundraiser.

[ Parent ]
Great Idea But You Need Parttime Staff... (4.00 / 4)
to pull this off and keep it current.

Ask us for contributions to hire someone to help you for maybe 15-20 hours a week for three months on a trial basis.

That is certainly true (4.00 / 2)
I can use myself as a part-time employee to start, and we can also use some of our existing funds to get this off the ground, but in the future we probably we will need a fundraiser and regular staff.

I'm going to try and pay for it with organizational sponsorships at first. We shall see how those go during January. If we need more money in February, we might hold a fundraiser.

[ Parent ]
I will post this (4.00 / 3)
on the Florida Progressive Coalition blog (www.flaprogressives.org), and will also share it with our local Dem Platform and Issues discussion group.  Thanks so much for all the work you and Natasha are and will be putting into this project.
thank you (0.00 / 0)
Spreading the word always helps. Much appreciated.
[ Parent ]
Just Democrats? (4.00 / 2)
Or will you include vulnerable 2010 Senate Republicans in these whip counts?  
I was thinking just Democrats (4.00 / 1)
I was thinking just Dems in order to reduce the number of calls, but targeting vulnerable Republicans, especially in the Senate, seems like a good idea. And it wouldn't up the number of calls by that much.

I do wonder about Republicans returning my calls, though. Specter will do it, because I live in PA, but otherwise it might be tough.

[ Parent ]
Chris - do you have a lawyer on this? (4.00 / 2)
It just occurs to me that you're talking about collecting funds (to pay a staffer) to influence legislation. Have you jumped through the IRS hoops?
[ Parent ]
Good point (4.00 / 5)
We will be seeking legal counsel before progressing beyond monitoring their activities. It'll take a while to sort out a scope of work and specific plans for activism.

While this project idea came from our deep frustration at being in a perpetually reactive position, it will still be reactive in the sense of working with legislation as offered by members. So aside from certain issues that we already know we're interested in, we have to allow for the possibility that different opportunities will present themselves, or that reader enthusiasm will spring up around unforeseen topics, and also that even regarding topics that we pay attention to already, we don't know what legislation is going to be introduced this coming year. We allow therefore that a lot of what we're going to end up doing will be a more organic outgrowth of information we have yet to encounter. But still, it gives us a lot more freedom to act because we'll be involved so much earlier and as I wrote below, developing the kind of institutional memory needed to be even more proactive in future.

So, yes, we will want to talk to a lawyer before setting out additional plans. But at present, the project plan centers around collecting public domain information and commenting on it, which afaik is relatively uncontroversial from a legal perspective.

[ Parent ]
Smart (4.00 / 1)
at present, the project plan centers around collecting public domain information and commenting on it, which afaik is relatively uncontroversial from a legal perspective.

Yep. That's pure First Amendment activity.

We allow therefore that a lot of what we're going to end up doing will be a more organic outgrowth of information we have yet to encounter.

I think one of the more exciting possibilities is to give people the ability to organize themselves by creating communities by congressional district in support of or in opposition to a bill. That would give them the tools to not just make phone calls and send emails, but potentially set up face-to-face meetings with members of Congress on relevant committees or their staff, which is the most effective lobbying.

Whatever you put into your business plan as the initial goals, you're smart to make it modular, i.e., you can add on functionality down the road.

I am sure there are lots of readers here would be glad to donate their time to help get things going, as well as their money. I would.  

[ Parent ]
Sounds Like A GREAT Plan! (4.00 / 8)
The one thing that's missing is FUNDING.

Sure, it's good to hold our own fundraiser down the line. But this is the sort of project that ought to get significant foundation support.  Have you talked to Mike about this?

Seriously, Chris, if you have one major fault it's that you sell yourself short.  This is a very important, and well-conceived project, and it deserves solid financial support.  Talk to Mike.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

Seconded. (4.00 / 2)
[ Parent ]
Thirded n/t (4.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
Fourthed. (4.00 / 3)
Great, great idea! It deserves--and requires--dedicated financial support.

I did essentially the same kind of work during the late '80s-mid-90s monitoring, info gathering and reporting on bill status/support-opposition in the CA legislature for my firm's progressive environmental, energy, social justice client base.   During those pre-Net days, I had interns who helped me by daily schlepping over to the state Capitol building for the most recent info/ staff analysis from the committees and by combing through the daily file.  Keeping track of the byzantine workings of the committees often was job in itself.

The info we produced was faxed out to our network statewide. While technology certainly has advanced to make this basic info gathering much easier (and no need to be on the ground in DC, obviously), you're still severely underestimating the workload here.  

Just as it was 20 years ago when I did this, it is not enough to just sort through the legislation and post.   To make this truly useful, besides linking directly to bill language, someone will have to sift through the language and explain in plain English its significance--why it matters!  Easier said than done.  Kaleidoscope's points below are important too...links to mark-ups and eventually interest group involvement are important to consider from the get-go.

I guess my point: it was a full-time gig...and then some!  

[ Parent ]
I do have a funding idea (4.00 / 1)
Thanks for the kind words. I do actually have a funding idea, but I figure it will probably require a proof of concept in order to work. It will be based on the model of the way we sold ads on MyDD in September and October of 2006. Hopefully it will work. If not, we will look into a more general fundraiser.
[ Parent ]
Need To Think Both Ways (4.00 / 2)
This isn't just about us getting funding for our good idea.  This is also about changing funders' ideas about what constitutes the sorts of things they should be funding.

This is an argument for seeking out "conventional" funding sources as well as the sorts of "innovative" stuff that we're more used to.  Just the fact that we get a $10,000 grant from some sort of establishment funder can have all sorts of unexpected benefits.

So, once again: talk to Mike.  (I'm a broken record, aren't I?)  

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
This is change I can believe in. (0.00 / 0)
I don't know who Mike is, but I think you should talk to him and everybody else.  I can't donate much, but I will help.
 

They're asking for another four years -- in a just world, they'd get 10 to 20. ~~ Dennis Kucinich  
[ Parent ]
With each new day, encouraging news from openleft. (4.00 / 4)
I commend this to all. I have a suggestion. This needs to be top of eyes - most noticed. Not to put any article in comparison, but as its a terrific development and a new start to openleft's efforts, it might be best to put it at the top of page for a while, a week or so, and a shorter version (clcik through) for a while more. I assume that the ongoing narrative of Congressional developements will announce what is going on but sticky for a while seems like a good idea.

Fundraising and staff is an excellent, very encouraged idea.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

This is the kind of ACTION (4.00 / 3)
That we should be doing, because it achually accomplishes something.

I also think 1 and 2 could be expanded to the netroots in general, for all the meta talk about Obama's cabinet why didn't I see any major pushes for or against a specific nominee in the netroots?

This action focused stuff is great though, I hope to see more of it and am willing to help any way I can.

John McCain: Beacuse lobbyists should have more power

This Strikes Me as Extremely Useful (4.00 / 4)
Is there any way we can get linked to proposed language and any markups and amendments?

How are you planning to fund this?

Is there any way to cooperate with the new dKos site, Congress Matters?  Not necessarily joint postings, but, perhaps, some cross-promotion or coordination between bills you are reporting on and some of what Kargo X writes?

I may also be helpful at some point to provide links to track the interest groups involved (i.e., American Trucking Institute, Financial Services Industry, etc.) and the contributions these groups have made to various key members of the relevant committees.

Thank you for taking this on.

Hey, I hope so. (4.00 / 8)
Part of what I'd like to do at Congress Matters is develop a common space where the public blog audience can become committee watchers, so they can track legislation at these early stages, when changes can still be made. As Chris notes, once it's on its way to the floor, it's generally too late to do anything about it. But if we're in regular contact with an interested community, and that community is in regular contact with committee members, there's a serious chance at changing the direction of legislation.

I'd also like to bring in some of the DC institutional advocacy community to watch the committees along with us. And by that I mean actually watch them. Most House committees now stream video of their hearings online, so even if they don't make the C-SPAN schedule, they're still viewable remotely. If communities interested in legislation before the committees were organized enough to watch hearings and comment on them together, we'd naturally be an audience of interest to the progressive institutional advocacy community as well. What if we were able to watch and discuss the hearings in real time along with the advocates who are already experts in the issues, and who have already established professional relationships with Members and staff on that committee? Watching, for instance, a Judiciary Committee hearing alongside a liveblog or real-time chat with staffers from, say, the ACLU would be, I think, a real benefit for the community, and could only add strength and numbers to appeals to committee Members and staff made by the ACLU, who would be able to roughly gauge public interest in bills by the level of interest and participation in viewing the hearings with them.

[ Parent ]
Sounds excellent (4.00 / 3)
Seems like there'd be a lot of opportunity for working together, Chris and I dig the idea :)
[ Parent ]
That does sound great (4.00 / 1)
Your knowledge in this area, along with the mission of your great new site, would be fantastic to work with. Let's find a way to make it happen. I'll be in touch when we get back to Philly (later tomorrow).
[ Parent ]
ACLU membership drive (0.00 / 0)
ACLU made an online effort to boost membership not too long ago, with a special request for monthly donations, similar to what ActBlue espouses. Don't know how many new members may have joined, but since I've participated in many of their petition efforts in the past but never had contributed until now, they may be experiencing growth and will be more influential than ever, and have a larger audience to call on for cooperation in projects.
[ Parent ]
Wheat from Chaff (4.00 / 5)
You are talking about 10,000 pieces of legislation -- remember, legislation is drafted legal language, often of great length and with the devil in the details -- each of which has to go through committees with up to 25 Democrats on them, and each of which will pertain to a subject to which ten other pieces of legislation also pertain.  That is a truly massive amount of material, with a massive and changing tally of supporter information as well.  While the goal is good -- get as much progressive legislation passed in 2009 as possible -- attacking it by sifting through all legislation ever filed is grabbing at the wrong end of the funnel I think.

Maybe instead you could go directly to members of Congress, specifically the progressive caucus, and ask them what bills they are introducing that they don't want to see perish in the dark.  Ask people that already are somewhat favorable to us (there are a few -- Brad Miller, Rush Holt, Tom Perriello, Jeff Merkley, I'm sure there are others if I knew the House better) to show us legislation that they believe in and think we would believe in, and that they think could pass but needs help getting attention and getting through.

If this angle of finding legislation we like works, we could try to make some noise for those.  We'd be making phone calls on considerably fewer bills, and typically when the sponsor was aware that we were trying to whip support from the ground.  It's possible that that would be considered bad manners in the House -- going to my constituents to try to get my support, instead of talking directly to me? -- but almost any use of the netroots is considered bad manners.  Hopefully it will be more productive than counterproductive.

The point of going to particular Congresspeople who respect us and asking them what legislation looks interesting to them (they could point us toward legislation by others, actually) is to help sift through the massive amount of bills that you're speaking of and get us directly to a much smaller number that we can focus on.  The project as I understand you to have described it sounds mathematically overwhelming to me.  And, devoting an equal amount of time to understanding every bill, by every member, treats as equals things that really aren't equal.  Some of these bills are much more important than others, so you either draw up a list of subjects you particularly care about, and narrow your focus that way (at which point you just became Defenders of Wildlife or ACLU or whatever), or you find some other way to determine early on what really matters and what doesn't.  Simply asking our allies might be a way to do that.

And if we can actually prove useful in helping push a bill through the House, we will suddenly have a lot more people wanting to be our friends.  Our positive, non-monetary usefulness in the legislative process will have been established.


I share many of your concerns... (4.00 / 1)
...although I completely support where Chris is trying to go.
[ Parent ]
I've thought about that too (4.00 / 4)
The size of the project is a little worrying, especially on the first day when hundreds of new pieces of legislation are introduced. Also, in terms of the legislation we want to help pass, it makes sense to contact certain members of Congress who we like and who like us. There are legal issues with that approach though, and I have run into them before. Once, I received an email of the leadership about it. A little embarrassing.

What you say makes sense. I think we will have to see how it plays out in the first couple of weeks. This might not be the sort of project where we can predict best methods before hand, or even where one method will work all of the time. We have considered the options you list though, and will try them out as the project progresses.

[ Parent ]
this is (4.00 / 1)
awesome. Great plan.  
In fact, come to think of it, isn't this what 100 single issue groups already do? (4.00 / 1)
That is, track every bill filed in their own subject area, fight the ones they don't like, promote the ones they do?

And then any given subject has groups ranging from conciliatory to confrontational, incremental to revolutionary?  So you can find out what is going on with environmental legislation, for instance, just by listening for the difference between Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife?  Ditto gay rights by listening for the difference between HRC and (hm, I'm not sure which is the most left-wing LGBT group).

And these groups actually have funding streams and paid staff already set up to do this, and existing relationships with congressional committee staff.

Given the enormity of the task you have described here, I think it would be wise to accept the shortcut of finding the single-issue groups whose political outlook you share, letting them sift through the 10,000 pieces of legislation, and then asking them to show us some of their work in exchange for our active support when it's useful.  These people are already built to know when good and bad legislation are in the legislative pipeline.  I think building up that capacity ourselves is a pretty significant task, whereas working out an alliance relationship, while tricky, is much more practical.  Obviously there would be ways to do this wrong, but there are also clear paths toward doing this right, and the various structures of the single-issue groups and the netroots can be complementary.

Learning to work with both congressional allies and single-issue allies is a big job, but I think it's the correct choice given the lay of the land.  Recreating their entire existing capacities in-house within the loosely organized netroots is, um, not actually the right choice I think.  That's a really big job and we're not actually structured right to get it done, IMHO.

(In fact, the only blog-driven revenue stream that approaches that capacity has been TPM's reporter-bloggers (who still mostly ask other people what's going on, given that they're reporters), and Daily Kos, though markos hasn't spent his money on investigators yet.)

Very spotty reporting (4.00 / 6)
Not all single issue groups make public the results of their monitoring of committees. They do legislative scorecards on a hit or miss basis, not always published online, and again reporting on things that have come to the floor for a vote.

For those groups that we can establish a good working relationship with, I'd welcome an opportunity to share some of this out, but that isn't going to be possible for all topic areas and I'd rather not rely on that. Part of the point of this project is the generation of organic, public lobbying capacity from within the netroots itself. It's us, and our readers, learning and practicing what it means to keep an eye on Congress with the aim of exerting effective leverage, as well as developing what you might consider to be an institutional memory of the congressional processes.

There's no substitute, in the end, for doing a lot of this work ourselves. Unless we want to be resigned to nibbling around the edges of the discussion and having what's proven to be virtually no effect on the major legislative questions of the day.

Knowledge is power. We've got to get ourselves some of that.  

[ Parent ]
If you want to do all of this yourselves, you can expect to become really effective (0.00 / 0)
sometime around 2011, or more likely 2013.

If you have a really long time horizon, that's ok.  If you're talking about building up the netroots, whatever that is, into a permanent, powerful, independent political presence, then doing it all yourselves is probably the correct model.

If you believe in the "progressive moment" theory of 2009, that may not be a good idea, because by 2013 you may have a very close Congress on your hands and you may even have a Republican president.  If the idea is to get as much done in 2009 as possible, then trying to do it all yourself is a pretty bad idea, because you won't really have learned how to be effective until 2009 is over.

.

If you want to incorporate both mindsets, I think you'd have to set the long-term project on the backburner for six months, and in 2009 make whatever alliances and take whatever shortcuts allow you to be most effective in the immediate progressive moment.  If that means forging alliances with single-issue groups or congresscritters that we'd rather not be forced to rely on indefinitely, that's ok.  If 2009 really is unique in a way that 2011 and 2013 probably will not be, then I think that kind of strategy is called for.  And I think the first half of 2009 really is unique.  We've been waiting 16 years for this trifecta, and we totally blew the one we had then.  If we'd gotten health care right at that time then hundreds of thousands of Americans would not have died prematurely.  Getting this moment right is a very high priority I think, and if our optimal short-term and long-term strategies diverge right now, this would be the rare moment when it's right to go short-term for a while.

[ Parent ]
where does that end? (4.00 / 4)
Again, I'm not saying that we'd refuse all help, far from it. Yet if long term goals are ever going to be met, the work to accomplish them has to get underway and someone has to do it.

It's like the decision I made when going back to school. Sure, I wasn't thrilled that I'd be over 30 when I finally had my undergraduate degree, but I would eventually be that age anyway, with a degree or without one. Time passes relentlessly.

The important question to me is whether the goal itself is worth bothering about. I have my doubts in retrospect about the financial merits of having gone back to school, but re developing an open source capacity for public pressure on congressional processes, not so much with the skepticism. Further, with news organizations continually destroying their institutional memory, pulling people away from large, slower investigative journalism projects, there's likely to be even less of the sort of public information available that's needed to make good resource allocation decisions on policy activism.

I think the various people involved in the netroots, those who started as self-appointed volunteers and amateur political enthusiasts, have reached the outer limits of what can be done with our existing model of activism. Were we able to positively affect the FISA vote? The efforts to introduce real accountability to the TARP funds disbursement? The vote for telecom immunity? No. Meanwhile the various omnibus legislation packages passed this last year had very little progressive input, and even less netroots community input or participation.

The Democratic Party has treated netroots activists as an embarassing source of occasional fundraising juice, whom they must repeatedly kick in order to make sure that our taint doesn't rub off on them when we hand over our filthy lucre. Many of the NGOs aren't much better. I'm tired of it.

[ Parent ]
This will require management (4.00 / 1)
This is great:
I think the various people involved in the netroots, those who started as self-appointed volunteers and amateur political enthusiasts, have reached the outer limits of what can be done with our existing model of activism.

Right. Putting up an Actblue link or urging readers to call a particular member of Congress's office only gets you so far. So let's get organized. A few points:

You and Chris mentioned expertise, using as an example Sarbanes-Oxley. One way to go is to forge links with individuals or groups who do have the expertise. Another is to allow your volunteers to develop or bring expertise to the process. You could do both. In all cases, your model has to promote the development or acquisition of knowledgeable people to do the bill-reviewing.

Your model has to take into account the inevitable fights among your volunteers/staff. Everybody has an ideology. Whose will be the one to prevail? If you put it to a vote, who gets to vote?

Another concern would be monkeywrenching by conservatives. Call this the Wikipedia Editing Problem. If you built something worthwhile, then people who have vested interests might come in and try to influence the process here. How do you have a process that's open enough to let everyone who honestly wants to participate, while keeping out trolls and the opposition?

Finally, if you progress (as I hope) from simply reporting on and summarizing bills to actually taking a position on them, then clearly there has to be a certain amount of consistency among positions taken by OpenLeft on similar issues.

My point is that all of these really revolve around the question of control, which I am sure you and Chris are already wrestling with. If you build something that really does transcend the current model of online activism, it probably can't be completely democratic and self-regulating. It requires at least some hierarchical structure with ultimate approval power resting in the hands of a few trustworthy people who can keep everything going in the right direction. Their decision-making has to be transparent and consistent.  

[ Parent ]
Great points - (0.00 / 0)
Mithras, you're absolutely right about these issues of control.  

In my post farther down the thread I suggest that an early-stage solution to conservative monkeywrenching and such is just to use moderators for changes.  That only covers the observe-and-track stage, though, not the take-positions stage.  

Would welcome your feedback on the discussion about wikis down the thread.  

[ Parent ]
Open Source Capacity for Public Pressure on Congressional Processes (4.00 / 1)
To that idea I say yes and no.

On one hand, Open Source Capacity for Public Pressure on Congress absolutely needs to happen.  Pointing it at the mechanical details of legislation though -- everybody make phone calls about paragraph 75!! -- is pointing it at the part of the process that is inherently the least penetrable to outsiders.  The line-by-line sausage-making and the Rules Committee stealth power is about the most insidery stuff there is.  It's fighting them on the terrain that they most thoroughly control, where they hold every advantage and we hold very few.

I actually think that the easiest, most powerful route to influencing Congress is by influencing public opinion much more proactively.  Instead of reacting to the MSM the way lefty blogs have for five years, create a new public opinion, loosely the way talk radio does.  An interesting thing to notice about talk radio is how non-reactive to the mainstream narrative they are.  They choose their own subjects and build up their own narratives very well.  (Although obviously based on insane premises.)

I think our clearest path to changing what happens in Congress is to step further and more aggressively into the massive void left by the decline in reputation of TV media, and decline in actual existence of print media.  Create netroot structures that allow us to collaborate in identifying messages that monkeywrench the elite media narrative, introduce facts that help change public opinion, and develop viral videos that disseminate those messages widely.  Change public opinion, and congress has to follow.

Putting our arguments into internet-based video is the way to move the country, I think.  Current_TV and the rise of YouTube et al will help.  After print blogs and podcasts, real vlogs should be making waves soon.  That is where we can build a real message machine that does what talk radio does so well -- proactively create public opinion, instead of react to what Wolf Blitzer just said.

If I get my shit together, I'll have a lot more on this coming here soon.

[ Parent ]
There's A Trade-Off Here (4.00 / 1)
If you're totally dependent on other groups to do your analysis, then obviously you don't have the capacity to critically evaluate whether you agree or disagree.  So, while Texas Dem makes a good point in terms of up-front efficiency, I think you have a very valid point.

Single issue groups do have a strong tendency to live inside the DC bubble, and part of our purpose should definitely be to pierce that bubble.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

[ Parent ]
Issue groups (0.00 / 0)
A large part of separating the wheat from the chaff is knowing which issue groups are supporting which bills.  Many good bills that get introduced don't have a chance in hell of passage because they are not supported by an interest group.  At the same time, bad bills that inexplicably get passed invariably have powerful interest groups behind them--in many cases, actually writing them.

Perhaps if this project, in addition to identifying legislation that should be supported or opposed, also should seek to identify which groups are pushing it, or, going one step further, which groups ought to be pushing it.

If we're seeking ways to allow people to influence legislation, then focusing solely on calling members of congress essentially makes us just another (very) small interest group.  One way to extend this project and carve out a broader role would be to shine the spotlight on the interest groups themselves so that we could put pressure on them too.

Several possibilities come to mind.  First, as others have suggested, if we could identify which good bills had interest group support, we'd know which bills to rally around.  Second, what if we identified some bill that we thought the ACLU or some other group should be behind?  Could we push them to take a look at it?  Third, what if we uncovered that some issue group was pushing a particular piece of bad legislation?   Then we'd know which bad legislation--and which interest groups--to target.

All of these are things that issue groups with a lot more money and experience already do.  But if you're seeking to "pierce the DC bubble," I submit that examining the interaction between issue groups and legislation is a crucial piece of it.

[ Parent ]
A Great Idea (4.00 / 1)
I like it.  Yes, it will be a lot of hard work, but putting it together will definitely lead to some victories to savor.  And it will drive traffic to OpenLeft. :) I say go for it.
I think it is a wonderful idea (4.00 / 3)
I have been reading Openleft now for about 6 months and decided to sign up with the site.  Overall I agree with what you guys say and want to do.

I think that this idea will bear fruit and will help the progressives be even more proactive and effective in getting legislation that they favour passed.

Who knows maybe people will start doing this in some state houses if they are not already.

I have de-lurked specifically to help with this idea (4.00 / 9)
I mean, I literally registered here 10 minutes ago.  I'd never bothered because (a) I have little free time, and (b) usually by the time I got a chance to read most of the diaries someone had already said whatever I would have said, so any comments by me would have been redundant.  But I'll make time to make some calls or do whatever is needed, to the extent I can.  I've wanted to see something like this for a while now and feel thrilled at the prospect of helping get it off the ground.

I see lots of good discussion here, and for the moment don't have anything to add to what's already been said.  Just somebody point me in the right direction so I can shoulder up to the wheel.

[ Parent ]
DKos has a subsite, congressmatters.com (4.00 / 2)
that might be either a site to assist or host(co?)said effort.  
Not sure everyone will agree on issues, that will be interesting.

How often does Thomas.gov update bills in committee?

Perhaps we should push for better/more transparent process.  I think a lot of the dirtier deals get done in dark smoky rooms.  It would be nice to get a law in that all amendments (up for voting) have to be registered with thomas.gov or something like.  

Love this idea (0.00 / 0)
Questions:
How will you "work with" us on identifying good/bad legislation? Especially when the community is divided. And especially in such a short timeframe. Is there a criteria that should be created to guide this process? Also, how will prioritizing take place?
I'm eager to help any way I can.
I guess (4.00 / 1)
I hadn't thought that out deeply, but my guess was just to ask for suggestions, and then put the suggestions up for polls, and then use that information to make an informed judgment. That was the plan, anyway.

Getting popular participation is always difficult, though. Maybe we need partner sites to help out. Natasha does write for MyDD, and Kagro X has also expressed interest. Throw in BlogPac's email list, and maybe we have something.

[ Parent ]
A "down the road" idea (0.00 / 0)
Think about advocacy organizations that have memberships. Kagro X upthread brought up the possibility of working jointly with the ACLU, for example. The ACLU has 500,000 members who they reach through email and their blog, and who they occasionally try to get involved on legilative matters. By partnering with them, you could offer organizations like that basically an way for them to get their memberships involved and active, which makes them feel more loyal and involved with their home organization. (Which causes them to donate more money - call it the Obama Volunteer Effect.)
[ Parent ]
An example (4.00 / 1)
While we were poking around on thomas.loc.gov to get an idea of what this project was going to look like, we ran across an amendment to the Sarbanes-Oxley rules. I know by reputation that it's a law passed in the wake of the Enron/Anderson scandal and regulates corporate accounting practices, Chris didn't recall hearing anything about it.

Needless to say, neither of us is a CPA and we have no particular contacts with groups who'd know if the legislation at hand were good or bad. Though chances are, there are readers of this blog whose jobs depend on knowing quite a bit about Sarbanes-Oxley and might well have strong opinions on the subject. If such a situation came up, and there was enthusiasm on taking action following someone with better info making a good case, and we'd checked around for verification and further opinion, we might well decide to take action.

Prioritizing is going to depend on a combination of what people who interact with our community seem to be up for and our best estimate as to whether we can make a difference. With the caveat that if other people can use this information to start activist projects of their own, we'll be very pleased.

So to sum up, the help we're looking for is informed enthusiasm, knowledge sharing, a passion for good government, and practical ideas for influencing the legislative process. Anything you see that needs doing and isn't being done, time permitting, jump on in.  

[ Parent ]
Open ended (0.00 / 0)
Okay. I'm game.
[ Parent ]
THis is an awesome idea (4.00 / 1)
and an awesome amount of work.

Chris, have you given any thought to just how you're going to store and manage all the data you're going to need to collect and track?  Because if you can't to that, there's not much point.

It really sounds like you're going to need a build a custom database / web interface if you want any hope of staying on top of this.  

Microsoft Access (0.00 / 0)
I was thinking of just creating a Microsoft Access database, one for each committee.

Obviously, it will be a huge endeavor. That's why I want to separate the wheat from the chaff before we start seriously tracking any legislation. If we are monitoring only a couple dozen bills at any given time, it should be manageable. (I hope.)

[ Parent ]
I think you're going to (0.00 / 0)
need to track all of the bills, in the sense you (or I guess "we") need to review all of them to determine which ones are wheat and which ones are chaff and assign a wheat or chaff rating to them.  If you don't keep a master list of bills and their "wheatiness" you're going to quickly find yourself rereviewing bills all the time.  And building that master list shouldn't be hard as it looks like it would be pretty easy to scrape the info out of Thomas.gov.

And I think that building a "database" for each committee isn't the right way to approach the problem as the bills move around and you'll have trying to keep track of which bills is where.


[ Parent ]
Web based is the way to go (4.00 / 3)
I'd strongly suggest against using Access. It doesn't scale well and is hard to share results and, ironically, access.

Web based with a SQL backend is the way to go for publishability, distribution of updating, and future expansion. While custom coded would be great, there's obviously a time issue.

I'd suggest setting up a wiki, which has multiple users and change tracking built in, and then have someone write a script that will trawl Thomas and create a stub entry for each bill introduced. The stub would have the bill number, name, introducer, cosigners, etc., and a list of all the current Members of Congress, each of whom could then be updated by allowed users (starting with you and Natasha, presumably) with stated position and any extra notes.

[ Parent ]
which platform? (0.00 / 0)
I don't care much for ad hoc wikis, not the ones I've seen, anyway. And Access may have its flaws, but we have a copy and we know how to use it.

Specific suggestions to the contrary would be welcome, but that's the state of opinion at present. And let me also say how annoying it is that the Thomas site's categorization and search features are virtually useless unless you already know what bill you're looking for. If they performed even a single usability study on that piece of junk, or had taken a moment to care about alternate ways people might want to aggregate their data, I'd be shocked. And I'd further bet that the programmers who put it together weep routinely over the stunted thing they were mandated to build.

[ Parent ]
Depends on the desired tool (4.00 / 1)
I agree that wikis are less than ideal, but they're the best option I know of for a collaborative editing tool that can be set up in the time frame until the next Congress convenes. I guess I'm assuming that you want this system to be published immediately as it's updated, and want the load of calling and updating the database to be easily distributed.

If you want to keep it just you and Chris and don't mind a delay in publishing then an Access database that you're already familiar with and some sort of manual export function is probably better.

Thomas is indeed miserable. You're probably aware of the push to make its data available through XML but that's clearly not going to be ready in a week. If you wanted to automatically populate bills as they're introduced, but didn't want to deal with crawling the awful Thomas site, you could check with GovTrack to see how often they're planning to use their crawler in that first week or two.

[ Parent ]
More on Govtrack (4.00 / 1)
It looks like GovTrack has gotten some really nice features since I last looked at it. If you're interested in creating a community tool, even if it's only used by you and Chris to start, I think GT's API would be enormously helpful. Essentially, all you'd have to create would be a module for tracking member's positions, and everything else can be pulled from GT's API.
[ Parent ]
Yes (0.00 / 0)
What a good effort.
I imagine strategies to pass some of the evaluation of bills to single issue groups or volunteers like me will develop as the work progresses.

Is this the work that congresspeople are supposed to do, instead of fundraising for the next election and ladder-climbing and obeying the party line? Its too much. Its another argument for publicly funded, limited elections so congress people don't have to fundraise. Its an argument for distributing more power back to the states or perhaps coalitions of states instead of laying their big abstract eastern seaboard hand on real local people.

You guys rock. (4.00 / 4)


Montani semper liberi
And what is the saying? (4.00 / 4)
"People don't do what you expect, they do what you inspect."

Montani semper liberi
[ Parent ]
monitoring bills. (0.00 / 0)
You should get volunteers to start and then divide the congressional committees and if possible sub-committees amongst the volunteers to help monitor bills. Maybe create a google or yahoo group?
yahoo groups is a start, but what this thing needs is an organizer or two (0.00 / 0)
There is a lot of talk above about fundraising and hiring a couple people part time, or even full time, to do this work.  This makes a lot of sense, as it is going to be a shit-ton of work.  At the same time I think that Doughnutman is on the right track in identifying the fact that volunteers can do a lot of this work if given proper tools, direction and oversight.  The organizer in me really wants to see a structure developed in which volunteers are able take on a lot of this program.  This should go way beyond simply setting up yahoo groups and involve actively recruiting and training committed, long-term volunteers.
[ Parent ]
Exciting ideas (0.00 / 0)
Here's a few more, the first 2 are near term:

1) create a 5 minute video blog post, and a corresponding 5 minute audio blog post, every few days. The former can be distributed via linking on web sites, the latter via distribution to lefty radio programs. Give it a flashy name, like 'Activist Citizen Reports!'. My thinking here is that the main purpose is to maintain visibility and buzz, rather than communicate lots of information. People can go to a web site for details.

2) Use a Sharepoint site for collaboration. That's what it shines at, most. I'd be happy to help set one up, if somebody works with me to communicate requirements.  You might also want to look at non-Microsoft collaboration technologies that nevertheless work with the Microsoft Office Suite (e.g., o3spaces.com).

3) (for later) We need an Early Warning System not just for pending legislation, looking to make it out of a committee birth canal. We also need an Early Warning System for economic health, civil liberty health, etc. The current financial meltdown was 30 years in the making, since the deregulation that made it possible started back then. Where were the economic doomsday clocks?

The most important Early Warning System that we're missing is, IMO, international in scope. The US needs to cooperate (and hopefully lead) the world to a sustainable future. Resource wars are coming (though we can consider the Iraq invasion a resource war which came early). A real globally-oriented Early Warning System would create a doomsday clock, make a stab at calibrating it with regards to various events (population density reaching X, energy efficiency reaching Y, etc.), and then help write, track, and push legislation that would help generate events that lead to the doomsday clock hands moving  counter-clockwise.

Thus, your current exciting ideas may be subsumed, some day, in a global system where activists collaborate with their colleagues around to world to get their respective governments to pass legislation favorable to long-term human survival on planet Earth.

Which seems like a noble goal. :-)


DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

I'm in! Let's get to work! A few ideas... (4.00 / 2)
Chris, Natasha, I'm thrilled about this.  It's exactly what's needed in the short-term, and more importantly, I think this can in and of itself engage passive progressive blog readers and turn them into Rootin' Tootin' Netroots Activists.  

My first thought is that it will be helpful to develop a distributed networking/delegating system for tracking legislation, engaging your readership and divvying up the load.  The simplest approach might be a wiki, with an organizational scheme based on House and Senate Committees and Subcommittees.

We actually tried something like this on DKos in 06-07 when the Dems took Congress.  Have a look:
The Congressional Committees Project

The wiki has been inactive (defunct?) for a year or so, but it was a framework for the same kind of monitoring-discussion-influence system you're hoping to develop.

Besides this structural suggestion (and using a platform - wikipedia, or a Backpackit, or whatever - to do it), I'd like to offer to help.  

I'm a sustainability officer at a large US university, and have expertise in environmental policy issues... I've done advocacy on several federal environmental bills, including the Higher Ed. Sustainability Act and the No Child Left Insider Act.  I'm also informally advising my member of congress on environmental policy, so it'd be a good fit, if that's how you opt to organize us (topically, or by committee - in this case probably House Natural Resources / Senate Environment and Public Works).  

Let's get to work - this is going to be a productive adventure for all of us at OL!

Great! and ... wikis again (0.00 / 0)
First, we'll definitely be in touch and will certainly need plenty of help. Sometimes it takes a lot of tries to get a situation where everything clicks for a certain type of project, so I'm very interested in your experiences good, bad and ugly in working on the previous effort. Maybe it will work out this time.

Second, these are my beefs re wikis, both in general and for a project like this:

- I don't like wiki markup formatting.

- "Build it and they will come" is a recipe for heartbreak, imo. It works only rarely and needs a sustained core of effort to keep going.

- Search functionality is limited. W/o a database-type capacity to reaggregate on the fly, I think we're going to miss a lot and have a much harder time compiling lists and comparing behavioral trends. The format data is stored in with a static web page is very limiting, and it maximizes the amount of drudgery involved in putting together things like spreadsheets or contact lists. Some type of object-oriented backend needs to be in place, iow.

[ Parent ]
Just a thought: LexisNexis Congressional (4.00 / 1)
I'm a lawyer, not a computer person, so when I need to look up bills I use LexisNexis Congressional. They've got complete bill history, full text of all testimony, "research carried out by congressional committee staffers or Congressional Research Service expert", and "authoritative statistics on a wide range of topics" (whatever that is, I haven't needed that much data in my work.) So the database you need already exists, it's just a question of whether a service like LexisNexis would agree to a reasonable price to provide it to you in a way you found usuable.
[ Parent ]
What other databases are out there? (0.00 / 0)
Is a single-issue interest group already sitting on a good framework or system for this that we can use as a starting point (or cannibalize, or buy, or ask for nicely...)?

[ Parent ]
None that I know of (0.00 / 0)
What Chris and Natasha are proposing here hasn't been tried before, I don't think. I am sure many of the thinktanks and policy groups have developed research systems that track developments in their areas of interest, but not for every bill.  
[ Parent ]
Good points, and follow-up (0.00 / 0)
Hi Natasha,

Glad you'll keep me in the loop and I look forward to getting started!

Your points about the limitations of wikis are good ones - I especially don't see a good fix to the search problem.  So a database may be necessary (if you guys have the coding knowhow and/or cash to do it).  

But there might still be a place for distributed, modular contribution to that database system - I'm imagining a web form-based update posting system, or a database combined with limited wiki spaces for contributors to acknowledge changes to bills or their progress through committee.  

The system wouldn't allow contributors to remove info from the database, but would allow them to add it (i.e. shifting a committeemember to yea or nea, sharing a source or link, or assigning a bill to a subcommittee).  This could be moderated, and it would still be less work for you and Chris overall.


I do hear you about the inadequacy of waiting for contributors to pick up the load and run with it - "build it and they will come" just won't do.  But that's true about all community organizing - it's an active process getting folks involved, engaged, and competent enough contribute meaningfully, and it benefits from initial top-down leadership before growing into a grassroots project.  I believe that we can, and should, do that.  It's a key part of the movement OL is building, and in any case, even the inexaustible forces of nature known as Natasha and Chris will burnout eventually otherwise!  :)

My position requires change management and a whole mess of strategies for stakeholder engagement, so I've seen this work...

[ Parent ]
Wiki's just won't work (0.00 / 0)
I and understand why you want to use Access.  However, if you go that route, I think you're limiting the scope of the project and what you'll be able to accomplish because Access will necessarily force you to limit who has access.

If you want to do this big, you really need to look at something like a MySQL database hooked to a web server with some php (or perl or whatever) scripting language to manage the sql to html. Something like that would all you to open it up to a large population.  Because there's no reason that you can't get 50 or 100 or say 538 people signed up to call their Representative/Senate to track the issues you want tracked.  And you really don't want to do that sort of database entry because it's laborious, error proned and in this day and age, silly.  You just want them to do it.  In fact, you could have a weekly list of questions they need to ask on a web page. They call up, ask the questions and note the answer and done.

[ Parent ]
Sharepoint subsumes wikis, discussion boards, databases, WORKFLOW (4.00 / 1)
also tasks, calendars, and document workspaces, which are sort of sub-websites for collaborating on a single document. I think of wikis as merely an intelligent way to document something, in a hierachical fashion. Access 2007 has a tight integration with Sharepoint Server 2007 - e.g., you can move a local Access 2007 table to a Sharepoint list, after which it can still be accessed in Access, via a linked table. Each row in the Access 2007 table corresponds to a list item, but has enhanced functionality like metadata that can be searched on, versioning, and the ability to be easily restored from the Sharepoint recycle bin. The Sharepoint server's list's data actually lives in a high powered SQL Server database - serving it up to the masses via the internet, as web pages, is no problem.

I capitalized "WORKFLOW" because a post above says
"it will be helpful to develop a distributed networking/delegating system for tracking legislation, engaging your readership and divvying up the load. " If you're going to track something, and if different groups of people need to act on related documents as the thing being tracked progresses, you're talking workflow.

There are non-Microsoft technologies that facilitate collaboration and document management, though I don't know a lot about them. I think o3spaces is the leading one, but unfortunately they are not scheduled to support workflows until '09. '09 is only a few days away, but unless they mean very early '09, that won't do us much good in the near future.

You can google "sharepoint hosting" for companies that will get you up and running with Sharepoint in no time.

There are webcasts on Sharepoint as a collaboration tool at the bottom of this page. See this page, also.

Finally, since Sharepoint comes with so much functionality out of the box, and since these ideas need to be implemented quickly, I would suggest only considering alternative collaboration technologies if they also come with lots of usable functionality out of the box.


DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

[ Parent ]
Perfect! (0.00 / 0)
Metamars, this is great - now we're talking.  

Who's got the time and cash to put something together, though?

[ Parent ]
I've got the time (4.00 / 1)
As in 1 month, probably 2, full time. I can also pay for a low-end shared development and staging sharepoint web site out of my own pocket for 4 months. Dedicated hosting would cost more, and is not something I can pay for, myself. Though there's less advanced features with shared hosting, it doesn't look like anything critical is missing, especially given the time frame (which dictates a less sophisticated Day 1 implementation.)

One thing I can't do is develop requirements by myself. Somebody has to tell me what they want, and preferably try and think of as much of it as they can from the get go.

Can anybody give a rough estimate of the size of the database that might be required? As a start, if there are X bills of Y many pages, and we keep Z versions, that will allow us to compute a minimal size. The storage capacity at sharepoint360.com starts at 500 MB for the shared internet - only hosting, and is $30/GB/month for extra.

DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

[ Parent ]
Whoa. (0.00 / 0)
Metamars is walking the walk :)

I have full-time work commitments for at least the first half of the coming year, but I can offer some real time too: ~5 hours a week, both to take the lead in reviewing a group of committees, and to offer ideas and feedback on the framework and strategies for implementing this whole system.

Once again, Natasha/Chris - thanks for your leadership.  Looking forward to hearing from you re next steps.  Maybe a discussion group would be in order?

[ Parent ]
Wow. (4.00 / 1)
Chris and Natasha, you certainly have a lot of ambition.  This idea is awesome, as well as awful.  Awful in the sense that the sheer scale of it fills me with awe. It sounds great.  It also sounds complicated, difficult, and overwhelming.

As the commenters above have said, you must modularize.  If you make it possible for people who are participating to move in and out of the project as their time permits, you won't have to do it all yourselves.  And you won't have to make it your lives' work.

I'm really impressed that you would try to take on a project like this. Make it as easy as you can for us to help you. Not so much by making the work easy to do, but by making it possible for us to understand how to help you and how to go about it. Many of us will. What an exciting prospect.

Chair (4.00 / 1)
Seems like you'd want to ask the chair of the relevant committee if they'll hold a vote within X weeks or months...otherwise a whip count is for a non-existent vote.
An Activist Plan For The Democratic Trifecta | 84 comments
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