A hearty congratulations to the forward-minded people at the Sunlight Foundation for their most recent effort, a highly-comment-able version of the Transparency in Government Act of 2008.
While one certainly can’t expect all legislation to become this accessible in a heartbeat (especially those with even more arcane references to older bills), the very act of crying out for direct public investigation without intermediation is quite wonderful.
At this point, I wouldn’t suggest taking the notion a step further and fully wiki-fying the bill, but I would like to see at least two outputs from PublicMarkup in the future to prove the authenticity and success of the effort:
- A revised edition of the bill that incorporates the public’s comments and general consensus.
- An “editor’s edition” of the bill that specifically highlights changes from the previous version to the current version. It should give credit to the citizens that suggested the assorted major changes, and perhaps profile or interview them.
The former is common sense, the latter is a great chance at adding a “human element” of interest to the whole Open Source Legislation concept, which could stand to separate itself from the “teeming masses” imagery of other “flat-democracy” efforts.
