Project L attempts to make legislation easier to read, analyse, share and discuss, by first building a UI and an API for reading and annotating bills, and then gathering a peer network around it.

That’s as good a summary I can write of my thesis for now. I’m going to call my thesis Project L, until a better name emerges. In the spirit of working in public, here’s all I know about my thesis so far.

First off, Why?

Why legislation? A functioning democracy requires citizens to participate in their society’s governance. The writing of laws is one important way to participate, but it has become increasingly burdensome to keep up with the legislative process. Hiding beneath that burdensome process, ill-considered laws sometimes get passed. The movement that fought the SOPA/PIPA bills points to both the danger that ill-considered laws pose, and the potential of the internet in enabling more citizen participation in legislation. This kind of emergent political action excites me, and I want my thesis to enable this kind of movement.

Why an UI and API? The growth of the movement around SOPA/PIPA is complex, and I cannot hope to build a process that encompasses all of it. I have a pick a place where I can make a difference. At the beginning of the movement, we know that a few citizens outside the legislative chambers read the bill, found it outrageous, and began to spread the word. I want to enable these people, the bloggers, activists, policy makers and journalists who are watching the government on our behalf. These people used software to do their work, and as an interaction designer and an application developer, I want to make their software better. In order to do that, I want to know:

• What are these people’s workflows like?
• How did they read and analyze the bill?
• What expertise are required?
• How did they share their findings?

The current systems used to put bills online are essentially a giant dump of data. My hypothesis is that if I build a more open, publicly accessible and web friendly interface on top of that data, I can make the lives of people monitoring congress easier.

Why a peer network? An UI/API by itself doesn’t enable political movements. Movements emerge online through conversations between peers in a network. That why my second goal is for my project to be where conversations about legislation begin. To do that, I aim to build a system that supports conversations about legislation both within and outside of the core UI and API.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals

In progressively more audacious order:

• I want Project L to be the place where people link when discussing new bills in congress.
• I want people to use Project L to crowd-source bill analysis.
• I want a page on Project L to make the front page of Reddit because the language of a proposed bill is so outrageous.
• I want Project L to be the place where engaged citizens talk to one another about congress.
• I want Project L to be where the next SOPA/PIPA style emergent political movement begins.

I may not get to even one of these, but these will be aspirational targets where I am shooting.

Ok, How?

To be honest, I don’t really know. The short and most realistic answer is: one prototype at a time, and one conversation at a time.

There are three main tasks I see. The first is building. How do I design a typographically beautiful, readable, manipulatable user interface for reading bills? How do I build a software system that parses bills into its components and exposes them as nodes with permalinks?

The second task is research. Who would care about this? I suspect it will be activists, bloggers, journalists, academics, and policy makers. Will they really care? How do they read and annotate bills now? How do they talk to one another now?

The final, and likely most difficult task, is community building. A tool like Project L is not very useful without a peer network. How do I convince people that this is relevant? How do I demonstrate its usefulness? How do I build an enthusiasm for it? How do I help users get their messages out?

Lots of questions, and few answers, but It is alright. One prototype at a time, and one conversation at a time.

p.s. The L stands for law, legislation, and labour of love.