Categorize bills

[cehsu]

Two ideas for this are to use the provided categories, another is to classify.

• Adding bill subjects can make filtering out legislation much easier, and filtering Scorecards by subject area much more powerful.
• Proxying-by-subject area can come later.
• Quora-style notifications to comment/vote on all bills within specific categories that are of great interest/areas of expertise.

[dsernst]

One issue with using the Library of Congress provided categories: it sets a precedent that we can't meet for new legislatures.

[dsernst]

Right now we have the categorization provided by the Library of Congress: https://www.congress.gov/help/faq/find-bills-by-subject

Other strategies for assigning the categories that have been suggested:

• Based on the committee the item came out of
• Have people vote on the categories ahead of time?
• Let the voter pick a proxy just to assign categories for them. In other words, let different people have different categories
• Some sort of simple plain-text filter (does the bill include the word "park" in the title), or more sophisticated natural language processing

[dsernst]

berepresented describing how he added subject categories:

You can see the list of subjects here: http://www.berepresented.org/senate-representation/

Subjects were automatically extracted using govtrack api. Not all bills were classified. But many were, by the time they were getting voted in Congress.

— from this reddit thread

Here are the categories:

Agriculture and Food
Animals Armed Forces and National Security
Arts, Culture, Religion Civil Rights and Liberties, Minority Issues Commerce
Crime and Law Enforcement
Economics and Public Finance
Education
Emergency Management
Energy
Environmental Protection
Families
Finance and Financial Sector
Foreign Trade and International Finance Geographic Areas, Entities, and Committees
Government Operations and Politics
Health
Housing and Community Development
Immigration International Affairs
Labor and Employment
Law Native Americans
Private Legislation Public Lands and Natural Resources
Science, Technology, Communications Social Sciences and History Social Welfare
Sports and Recreation
Taxation
Transportation and Public Works Water Resources Development

[dsernst]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 1:41 AM, H K wrote:

I would like to offer you my idea regarding making political representation obsolete and enabling every voter to be fully heard. If this interests you contact me on my email id. There is, indeed a much better workable option to political representation!

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On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 10:37 PM, David Ernst wrote:

Hi H—

Thanks for reaching out. What's your idea?

David

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On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 3:39 AM, H K wrote:

Thank you for extending your courtesy to me. Let me try to give a simple overview which will serve as a seed of an idea for you

As a Liquid Democracy candidate you have offered everyone in your constituency to be a part of the legislative process. But the route to participation is offered for the vast busy majority through personal proxies. This is nothing but status quo through the back door. Please consider this alternative

Not everyone wants to vote on every issue. The simple reason is many of the issues under legislation may not affect everybody significantly. Hence they may chose not to participate. Liquid democracy must provide for this through a simple arrangement. Representatives like you should create large number of issue based constituencies (within the main geographical constituency) and allow everyone to become members of as many constituencies as they wish. They should be able to get into and out of any constituency at any time. Now when a legislation is discussed the constituencies significantly affected by the legislation are required to vote compulsorily. This ensures that voters become responsible and actively take interest in the discussion. With social networking tools today the constituencies can conduct detailed internal discussions on the issues before deciding the votes. This way true democracy is established. This system also prevents vested interests and unconcerned persons from skewing the vote.

Going forward the idea is to make these changes

1. Establish a large number of issue based constituencies in every geographic constituency, merging them together eventually to obliterate geographical constituencies altogether.

2. Ensure that every concerned voter becomes a member of all the issue based constituencies most critical for her

3. The discussions in the representative fora such as the Senate, Parliament etc is completely transferred to the voters who are directly involved with the matter on hand.

Ultimately the constituents would take over from their representatives and vote directly and the representatives will only have to identify and formulate issues that need legislation.

I have tried to explain this to the best of my ability. I am sure you will be able to take this forward most effectively and create a true democracy in your constituency

Please feel free to ask for more inputs if you find it relevant

Thank you once again for lending an ear and hope this is of help to you.

H

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On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 10:04 AM, David Ernst wrote:

Thanks for your thoughtful message.

Issue-based delegation is really interesting, and definitely something we want to keep working towards.

But our major holdup right now is figuring out how we decide what are the categories, and who decides which category any single item falls into.

How would you approach this?

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On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 10:45 PM, H K wrote:

Hi David

I am thrilled that you see value in issue based delegation. Here is my one line answer to your question

Take the first tiny steps and all will fall into place.

Let me explain further -

First let me suggest that decision on categories need not be restrictive. Categories have to be exhaustive. As time goes on these will naturally merge within themselves or get abandoned if irrelevant.

Next is the decision regarding inclusion in categories. I do not see any harm in a single item falling into multiple categories. So it is more of including the item in as many categories as possible that helps to gather more and more voter support and hence eliminate personal agendas and bias.

How can you go about doing this-

You need to first create a simple framework of how issue based delegation is going to be attempted. For example you can take the current debates and tag them with the major issues they affect. Then you can invite the voters most affected by these issues to form voting constituencies under the banner of these issues. You can move ahead confidently as it is always possible to add or alter issues at a later date as required. The proactive voters most affected by an issue will serve to rally others behind them and thus serve your purpose also. You need only to ensure that every viewpoint is fully represented. Otherwise bias will creep into the decision making process.

Hope this makes sense to you as we are communicating through huge cultural barriers Thank you once again and always happy to help

H

[dsernst]

More feedback coming in about this:

I would be nice to have proxies for different topics. There are experts I trust on education, but I don't care what they think about agricultural subsidies. I would love to have a way to designate that.

Also you should start reaching out to experts on specific topics to get them to start using your platform. That way they can 1) bring their followers and 2) your site will have people to designate as proxies that aren't just random strangers. You could have a page featuring profiles of suggested proxies

[dsernst]

Brainstorm around categorization. Questions from AM, answers from DC.

How do we categorize statewide legislation?

Whoever votes on it first gets to act as the bill author and choose a topic

Do proxies know how they've been categorized?

If you mean when they get a notification that they have a new proxy, why not?

Can proxies choose their own category? What does that look like?

I think proxies should be able to self-limit the areas they will work on if they want to. that way people can choose general or specific experts and know what they're getting

Can proxies have multiple categories?

I think they should self-select, so people can choose people that are more or less specialized

[dallasjc]

I've looked through the policy areas and think we should add a few subjects and break out some of the policy areas into specific subjects https://www.congress.gov/browse/policyarea/115th-congress

Add:

• Abortion
• Firearms and explosives

Break out:

• Military

  1. Military assistance, sales, and agreements [139]
  2. Military civil functions [12]
  3. Military command and structure [37]
  4. Military education and training [88]
  5. Military facilities and property [158]
  6. Military history [128]
  7. Military law [18]
  8. Military medicine [123]
  9. Military operations and strategy [176]
  10. Military personnel and dependents [481]
  11. Military procurement, research, weapons development [112]
  12. Military readiness [27]

• Veterans

1. Veterans' education, employment, rehabilitation [292]
2. Veterans' loans, housing, homeless programs [108]
3. Veterans' medical care [442]
4. Veterans' organizations and recognition [129]
5. Veterans' pensions and compensation [167]

• National Security Include everything from national security and military policy area that doesn't fall into the new military and veterans policy areas

[dallasjc]

For state governments:

Reach out to state gov to see if they have internal method for categorizing bills If they do, use the same topics that they use. For those that don't, we should develop a default list of topics based on CA or WI

let the first person who votes on a bill choose the topic. Send an email to the elected official who introduced the bill asking if it is categorized correctly