Transparency and blue sky sunshine would cure many ills for our country. I would like a law that forced all Presidents to post on the White House website a report card that shows all their campaign promises and what the status is for each of them. e.g. accomplishments, future accomplishments planned with target dates, and issues if they are getting stalled, why they are stalled, what they are doing to resolve the issue, who’s assigned to solve it and target date.
Publish this and keep it update. Make it easy for people to navigate around and look up the status–allow us to be updated when a status changes on something that we’re interested in. This allows people to examine the facts and agree or disagree. If they agree, they could call up their representatives and urge them to support the President, and if they disagree, they could write the President and let them know.
I would like to see bills published online and I would like for tools to be developed that allow people to actually read and understand them. This is possible if the government were to focus on this. I than think of two tools that would greatly help:
- Make a law that creates a single official Glossary that must be maintained and used by both the Congress and Senate. New bills that include new technical words not included in the Glossary are required by law to declare the official definition into that bill with a request to have it added to the Glossary if passed into law. Updates to the Glossary definitions must be a separate bill all to their own, they can include changes to multiple words if the change is all interrelated–and the proposed change must reference all the other bills that use the word and recommend if the change is pending approved adoption of the change to all or some of laws already on the books using the old definition.
- Provide an online tool that allows people to easily keep their electronic finger (via a bookmark) on a certain place where they are reading and quickly research other places within the bill, other bills, and other laws that are similar. It would be possible to create tool that do this.
- Expand upon this tool so that our government leaders use it as they work to create bills and resolve issues. This is essentially a specialized document management system on steroids–this could be done, the private sector has created harder computer systems than what I’m describing here. This system would allow staff and elected officials to draft up language and for committees to play with the words and agree upon the final language–it would also track who wrote what and when, who approve or disapproved of certain words. And all this would be visible to the public online in real-time and archived so people can see the sausage made in real-time, or wade through the history of how a bill was made.
- This system would allow people to compare bills so that it would show what’s different between two of three versions or based upon a certain time. This single invention would prevent people from sneaking things into large bills because you could simply see what has changed since you last looked at it.
I believe if we had a system like this and required, by and open online record of all committee meetings (for non-security matters of course) we would really straighten Washington out quickly. I’ve personally managed hundreds of millions of dollars in large scale computer system projects and so I’m not speaking without experience that such a system as this could be designed.
