govt20.txt

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda is the creator and director of the popular News for Nerds Web site Slashdot.org. He spends his time fiddling with electronic gizmos, wandering the ’Net, watching anime, and trying to think of clever lies to put in his bio so that he seems cooler than he actually is.

Like most of you, I’ve been watching our government fail for years. It really doesn’t matter who controls the House or Senate, and it doesn’t matter who sits in the big boy chair in the Oval Office. Bad laws are passed. Good laws are squandered. And bill after bill is bloated with pork in secretive committees, manipulated by invisible special interests.

But never fear, Ma’am, I’m here from the Internet and I have two simple fixes guaranteed to make government responsible to the people. No, I’m not talking about ridiculous things like letting the unwashed masses vote on individual clauses inside bills. It seems like Internet users immediately leap to direct democracy as a solution to all our troubles. But such systems have serious scalability issues.

I’m simply talking about taking technologies we are all familiar with and enforcing them upon our elected officials. Two simple ideas; one that could possibly happen and one that never will.

First of all, software developers have been using version control for years. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible for more than two or three developers to share source code without it.

Now, I’m not suggesting that our representatives learn CVS or GIT, but I think they could handle a wiki. So, my first rule is that all laws are written in a publicly readable wiki, complete with every line of revision history. If a congressman adds a bit of pork, that information is the in wiki. If another one removes a clause, then the whole nation is able to access that simple bit of information.

It’s about responsibility, and for far too long Congress hasn’t had to have very much of it. Any time a vote is taken, the wiki can simply note who voted for and against every measure. The Data.gov project can write simple APIs so we can export this information. We wouldn’t need a complicated system; if a wiki can maintain thousands of documents pertaining to individual bits of loot in World of Warcraft, surely our highly paid and intelligent public servants can handle it, as well.

So wiki for Congress is a no-brainer. It should simply happen, and you should all lobby your congressional representatives to make it happen. They’ll hate it because it will require them to be responsible for their actions, but it’s a good idea.

The second half of my simple fix for government will never happen because it will reveal too much truth: Your congressional representative doesn’t read or write his bill. If we deployed my proposed Gov2.0 Wiki, you would see that representatives and senators don’t actually write anything. Instead, lobbyists and aids write the actual words that go into the bills. I mean, your representative is busy shaking babies and kissing hands to get the green for his next campaign.

My second proposal is simple: Only the elected official is allowed to type into the new wiki. If he wants a clause, he must type it himself, on an actual keyboard, with his own hands. OK, maybe he can use voice-to-text. Hell, he can read the bill into his tape recorder, and his secretary can transcribe it. But the point is that if your elected official wants a clause in a bill, he must at some point be forced to say it. Type it. Something.

If we did this, we would have shorter laws, with less pork: Nobody wants to spend all their time typing vast bills hundreds of pages in length. And if we mandate that the actual data entry must be done by the elected official, the influence of the lobbyists could be at least slightly removed. And every change would be in the wiki, with complete revision history for the citizens to enjoy.

The Data.gov project will eventually export APIs that will allow us to see which official has taken money from which organization; this will eventually make it supremely easy for us to see the cause and effect relationship between campaign donations and elected officials’ legislative drafts and votes.

Of course, all of this would undoubtedly require a constitutional amendment to get into law, and I have a hunch that not many existing elected officials are going to sponsor a bill that will ultimately require more responsibility on their own part. So I guess that will have to be the first plank in my platform.