RSSNo more ‘Killing Granny’: A new way to track what’s actually in government documents
Apr 08
Uncategorized Citability.org, Healthcare Reform No Comments
Last week, I wrote about ProPublica’s Health Care Bill Comparison app, which elegantly took on the task of showing people just what was changing, and how, in the health care bill’s final days and hours. It’s an incredibly important task, since the bill weighed in at over 1,000 pages and it’s often in the final revisions that pork-barrel projects find there way in or out.
But with bills generally seeing multiple revisions, it’s easy to lose track of what exactly was or is included in a bill and when it was added, taken out, or even re-added. The results can be disastrous when it comes to reasoned discourse, as the League of Technical Voters’ founder Silona Bonewald notes in a recent piece for O’Reilly Radar:
Commenting on these types of documents as they are currently implemented is extremely challenging. Pointing a finger at that big pond and telling someone that you swear you saw a fish isn’t very effective. It’s even worse when someone swears they saw a fish that isn’t really there and it is effective because no one is willing to refute them. No one has time to wade around themselves and so they take it on faith. The recent “killing grandma” scare is an excellent example.
So the league has created an advanced citability solution, Citability.org, that tracks changes and makes sure that it’s easy to see how your political sausage is made, and who is putting in what ingredients.