Update: a more thorough explanation of the label here:

Two strains of thought converged recently for thesis.

The first was the idea of a nutritional label for bills, which was suggested to me by Michael Tofias. How do I distill the complexity of a bill into a compact piece of graphic that can be quickly absorbed?

The second was the idea of a social object, which invites the public to look at something together and converse over it. The idea comes from museum design literature, but social objects exists on the web as well. The YouTube video embed and the 9gag watermarked memes are prime examples. Both of these float out in the web, and invite visitors back to the platform.

For Project L, the label and the social object is the same thing.

So this is my first crack at it. I tried to visually convey six primary pieces of information: summary, scope, urgency, probability of passage, process, and bill content. How will I get this information? Luckily, a lot of this information is available through the efforts of other civic hackers. e.g.:

• Summary, passage probability, and bill stage: opencongress.org
• Bill content information: The IBM folks behind manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com has an algorithm for auto detecting the topic of a section of a bill!
• Scope and Urgency: This seems to be the hardest part. Adler and Wilkerson outlined a method for coding in their paper, but there no way to currently automate it.

I’d love to hear suggestions for solving the scope/urgency coding problem, as well as feedback on the graphic design of the label!

p.s. Hurricane Sandy may be the best thing to happen to my thesis this week.

p.p.s. Some process sketches