Commentary on Legislation

2. Who Are Those Guys, Script by Bob Blakley

Act Two, Notes from WAAA2007

Use Case

We want to manage, understand, validate, and respond to public commentary on legislation, so that the voice of the public can be better heard and understood by the politicians and the rest of the public.

Managing commentary means providing an easy way for people to generate comments, plus a method to consolidate duplicate commentary and to organize comments so it is easy to see the range and weight of viewpoints expressed.

Well-organized comments mean that it is easier to respond to commentary, so that each unique viewpoint is addressed only once, and that all significant viewpoints can be addressed.

Well-structured comments can be easier to understand than an unstructured list. Allowing commentators to meta-comment (comment on comments), as well as comment on relationships, and rate or self-moderate other comments, can help the reader understand the issue at hand.

Validating comments means being able to know that a real person lies behind the comment (validating, actually, the identity of the commentators) and also validating the facts stated within the comment. These activities work together, helping to identify serious commentators and cranks both (and everyone in between).

Capabilities

(what actions the user of the system will perform)

• Create comments associated with entries in the database (entries include content from documents; commentary on these documents; entries for legislators, lobbyists, and other interested parties; and associations between any entries in the database).
• Provide (require?) validated, persistent, and accountable login identities for all commentary
• Allow users to easily rank entries in the database for usefulness, factfulness, and so on
  • Allow the creation and organization of rating categories?
• Search, filter, aggregate, and view comments and associations

Applications

(the programmatic elements needed to fulfill the capabilities)

• Database (see Budget Online)
• Commentary UI
  • Ranking and/or comment moderation facility
• Search & Filter UI

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