One strand of the ideas in Project L is pointability, which I encountered when was I introduced to Craig Mod’s blog at while interning at Findings.

Our notes and highlights get special powers as data in the public corpus. Search, of course. And increased accessibility. But also, they're votes. You’re voting on interestingness within a particular text. There’s a feeling that this is valuable data.

- Craig Mod, “a pointable we [2/3]”

In that series of blog posts, Craig highlighted how important it is to make data pointable and granular. Pointability is the basis of conversation on the web.

This lack of platforminess is what makes many iPad magazine apps impotent. They end up in no better a position than a printed magazine. There are no routes by which you can directly get to their content. You can’t point in. You’re forced to go through the “front door” to get anywhere. And it’s a door usually weighing several hundred megabytes and infuriatingly difficult to unlock.

[…]

Which is to say: the loops are left open. The reading-enjoying-sharing-engaging-reading loop can’t be closed when your platform doesn’t have universally, publicly accessible points.

- Craig Mod, “a pointable we [3/3]”

This, I thought, was the crux of the problem with how legislation is published and discussed online. You cannot have a proper conversation about specifics of a bill unless you can point at it. I will make my thesis about this! Then I discovered OpenCongress.org, and their clause level permalinks. They have pointable permalinks galore, but I don’t see anyone pointing at them.

So if data pointability isn’t the problem, what is? This semester I am in Ian Curry’s Design for Public Spaces class, and he brought up this idea of a social object, i.e. something that draws attention and provokes discussion. This led me to Nina Simon’s blog.

Make the object of interest simple enough to require little explanation. The goal is to make the barrier to pointing as low as possible. It’s much easier on the pointer if all she has to do is say, “look!” and the other person/people will understand. If the pointer is then obliged to explain why she pointed, that increases the demand on her.

Nina Simon, Museum 2.0, “Design for Social Engagement: Pointing at Exhibits”

It is not enough to make pointing possible. I need to make pointing easy, and sensical. I had imagined that people might quote a clause from legislation like they quote a tweet. Unlike a tweet, however, a clause from legislation makes no sense out of context.

I have not given up on the idea of making legislation pointable, however. For my next experiment, I am thinking about what could we point to about a piece of legislation that might actually be immediately understandable, and without requiring a lot of context. I want to create the smallest piece of social object that will entice people to find out more.

What might that entail? What are the quickest pieces of information I can provide people about a piece of legislation? What do people care about? This is my hypothesis: importance, urgency, likelihood of passing, and topic areas.

Common sense tells us that content influences the prospects of legislation.  In this paper we propose a general methodology for distinguishing among types of bills. Our methodology is far from novel. It reflects two frequently discussed but rarely quantified elements of legislative politics. The first is that bills vary in importance. Some bills propose to name post office buildings while others create multi-billion dollar packages of transportation spending. The second is that bills vary in terms of their urgency. Whether Congress passes a bill to rename a federal building today or two years from now is not of great urgency to most legislators. Whether Congress passes an appropriations bill or reauthorizes an expiring Clean Air Act is of significantly greater urgency.

E. Scott Adler and John Wilkerson, “The Scope and Urgency of Legislation: Reconsidering Bill Success in the House of Representatives”

This weekend I will dive deeper into Adler and Wilkerson’s paper, and see if I can design a small, pointable, graphical, Tufte-esque “food label” that captures these qualities about a bill. The vision is to make these embed widgets, which bloggers might use as a social object to make their points about legislation.

Wish me luck.