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Government Changelog - Keeping track of everything they do #285

Open sweethuman opened 3 years ago

sweethuman commented 3 years ago

Project description

Changelogs in the dev space are extremely useful, it helps you see the health of a project and relevant information immediately. In case of governments and the actions they do aren't so easy to digest, understand the impact and form a clear map of what's happening. I understand that everything that is happening is complex, despite that, I still need a way to understand at least what's going on without having to constantly keep up just so I can make the right decision.

Journalists play a key role in this ordeal and help unearth lies and deceit, and report on what actions have been made. Still a normal person that is already busy doesn't necessarily have the resources to do a background search when I need to decide and cast my vote or know when to call my representatives to make a reclamation.

I thought there must a solution where you can take a political party, or a political person and easily look at their past, former affiliations, actions they have made, and how those connect with other actions and movements just so I can make a good decision and not be manipulated. Facts are more important that whatever promises they are going to make, because it's hard to fulfill all of them and we don't have the same transparency and feedback loop like in a development environment where you empirically know progress is being made and you know who to trust and who not to trust.

My best idea is an online platform, with crowdsourced information using articles as reference and basis. Where one piece of information can be referenced in multiple places and have a graph like data structure of everything so you can than filter and look at the relevant information you need without having to search on google about that person and having to waste all that time doing research.

I know it's extraordinarily complex and there are many factors at play here; I'm posting this more as an open discussion to figure out what would consist in a good solution and what challenges, philosophically and physically are there.

TLDR; Platform to cut through the amount of political data, and effort one must make, to get empirical data and results about the political environment and its components.

Relevant Technology

Probably something like Spring on the backend. I don't really know, it's pretty complex.

Complexity and required time

An MVP could probably be made in a few months and from then on just constant improvement to make it easier to understand and navigate and data filtration.

Complexity

Required time (ETA)

Categories

KOLANICH commented 3 years ago

IMHO "goverment changelog" means a formal language for encoding legislation and actions and maybe an AI doing it for people. May be useful for multiple use cases:

sbutler-gh commented 3 years ago

This organization may be relevant:

https://publiccode.net/

They've discussed the concept of "gitflow" for legislation. Where you could try a policy, make iterations, and bring a more software development kind of workflow to the implementation and experimentation around new policies.

mikkel1156 commented 2 years ago

Seems like a really interesting idea.

To me looks like information would need to be heavily vetted. Also concerned about bad actors, espcially if information is crowdsourced.

While I dont know how complex an AI would need to be to be useful, but maybe POS-tagging could be useful here?

KOLANICH commented 2 years ago

maybe POS-tagging could be useful here?

POS-tagging is an absolute prereq for NER.

sweethuman commented 2 years ago

In the meantime I have discovered Jetbrains MPS, a system to create your own domain specific language. It looks like, from their homepage, that the Dutch Tax legislation is written in code through MPS. Their case study is here: https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/MPS_DTO_Case_Study.pdf