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hamstar / legislat0r

An open source system for crowdsourcing creation and analysis of legislature
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Internal references #36

Open fierce-bad-squirrel opened 12 years ago

fierce-bad-squirrel commented 12 years ago

I think it would be helpful to include a tool tip style definition of terms defined within the bills. These definitions would appear when a user hovered over a term defined elsewhere in the bill. Since definitions tend to be very specific to the given legislation, this would help keep bills "human readable" and the user wouldn't have to remember the usage peculiar to the bill.

It would also be good to have similar tool tips or linked references to sentences, sections, etc. that define, clarify, impact and/or are impacted by a given sentence, paragraph, subsection or section. If we opt for links, these should probably be limited to the "comment" interface to keep usability as clear as possible.

hamstar commented 12 years ago

Great idea! I have tagged this as an "epic" to indicate it needs to be broken down into features.

It would also be good to have similar tool tips or linked references to sentences, sections, etc. that define, clarify, impact and/or are impacted by a given sentence, paragraph, subsection or section. If we opt for links, these should probably be limited to the "comment" interface to keep usability as clear as possible.

By this do you mean the ways by which we can post links on reddit/facebook whatever and it goes straight to the thing you linked to?

Something like http://example.com/bills/digital-bill-of-rights#T3A2P2S4 goes to Title 3 Article 2 Paragraph 2 Sentence 4?

I'm not sure of the legal notation for referring to sections etc...

hamstar commented 12 years ago

Created feature #37 from this epic

fierce-bad-squirrel commented 12 years ago

By this do you mean the ways by which we can post links on reddit/facebook whatever and it goes straight to the thing you linked to?

Something like http://example.com/bills/digital-bill-of-rights#T3A2P2S4 goes to Title 3 Article 2 Paragraph 2 Sentence 4?

For links, yes.

I'm not sure of the legal notation for referring to sections etc

I'm not entirely sure, either. I'll see what I can find and get back to you.

Tool tips are a little different. There are a few different ways to go about tool tips, using CSS or javascript. Think of it like using RES on reddit and hover over a user's name, a box appears with info about the user: comment/link karma, account age, options to tag, friend, etc. For our purposes, the box would show the relevant referenced text. If multiple sections, sentences, etc, are referenced, we could use footnote style superscript numbers with attached tool tips and/or links.

The term references should be relatively simple, I think. It's been a while since I've worked with Rails so forgive me if I misreference the terms, but I think we could create a "lexicon" model (?) with associated controller and helper. Each bill would have an associated lexicon particular to that bill.

I'm not quite sure how we'd call the lexicon into the view, but there must be a way to either automatically call a defined term's definition when it's used in the bill or to make it easy for sponsor's to add a call for a definition through the user interface.

fierce-bad-squirrel commented 12 years ago

Created feature #38 from this epic

hamstar commented 12 years ago

Awesome!