da5id

Huh, well if that is a goal of your app, you have a lot more work to do on reputation and UI. As you may have noticed a vote to the top with no reputation persistence (Reddit style) is extremely poor at actually diving into the info and getting correct info promoted. I was thinking more along the line of interactive annotation and summarizing if you want the crowd to do it. Even so, I think a better method would be a public institution, crowd funded, to pay lawyers to do the unpacking. We could even have competing partisan institutions providing their own perspectives to their constituents.

Cool idea. I have thinking about how to turn this country from a representative democracy to an actual democracy (the three day horse and buggy ride to the capital isn't exactly a problem anymore; now we can get rid of the representatives), and this seems like it could be the start.

However, using the app I see the largest problem is deciphering the sometimes intentionally obtuse wording and many layers of references to other laws, bills, subsections, etc. The bill title is often misleading, as are the summaries, you have to dig into the actual bill and follow all the references to get the gist.

So do you know of any effort to provide an unbiased plain English unpacking of the dense and obtuse wording in bills? Seems like a great need. . .