Seven months. That’s what I’ve been holding on as the hard constraint for thesis. What if it isn’t? What if I had all the time in the world. Or what if I had three weeks?

If I had all the time in the world, I would recreate a number of congressional function in a networked fashion. What would that look like? I would:

• Crowd-source the deciphering of bills, using a mechanism like the TED Open Translation project, and display it for all to see like RapGenius with better typography.
• Enable the collaborative the writing of bills, ala GitHub, and build a petition system around it to push to Congress.
• Lower the barrier of entry of being and hiring a lobbyist, by 1) crowd-funding lobbyist salaries and 2) networking them with an army of policy hobbyist. (e.g. Kind of like YouLobby.com, but with a web native, transparent toolset.)
• Reveal the inner workings of congress, through the use of data analysis, data visualization, and communication design. (Doing what Nate Silver did for primaries and poll data.)

Each one of these would be more than a seven months project. But wouldn’t they be awesome? One can dream.

What if I had only three more weeks? I think I would go back to the idea of illuminating a bill. Take an existing, heavily modified piece of legislation, and demonstrating how it has changed over the years, and showing the discussions around each modification. Perhaps it would be a glorified infographic, but hopefully it will be illuminating, and maybe even sobering.

At least it would be a fun three weeks.