I'm thinking that the development of the bailout legislation poses a unique
opportunity for technology to elucidate the legislative process.

We've been posting some key legislation on publicmarkup.org, but that's just
one piece.  Another way of looking at the development is on display by the
New York Times, through their interactive
timeline<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/27/business/economy/200809...>,
featuring video of press conferences at each step of the process.

The really interesting thing here, to me, from a transparency perspective,
is the *specific provisions* that have evolved under pressure from the
public, party leadership, political necessity, expert feedback, and who
knows what else.

I recently saw a version control system that programmers apparently use
routinely to track changes in code, where differences and appended sections
are highlighted, allowing for the evolution of a text to be easily tracked
and visualized.

It seems that there are individual provisions evolving through multiple
iterations, which could be aligned in such a version control system, though
I don't know how easy such version control analysis is to apply to bills.

The proposals, however, are as follows:

Treasury Proposal
(link<http://publicmarkup.org/bill/legislative-proposal-treasury-department...>
)
Dodd Proposal (link<http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Articles.Detail...>
)
Frank Proposal (link<http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/financialsvcs_dem/press092308.shtml>
)
Last Thursday's draft (via U.S.
PIRG<http://static.uspirg.org/consumer/archives/2008/09/late_thursday_d.html>
)
This morning's draft (via
CNN<http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/28/news/pdf/firstdraft.pdf>)
...and then today's finalized proposal (still pending)

This has been influenced by numerous non-legislative proposals, including
from the Republican Study Group, House Republicans, and Democratic Party
leaders.

Through that evolution, we should be able to trace what have been deemed
"billettes", or specific proposals about oversight, spending amounts,
judicial review, authority, reporting, etc.

Any ideas on how these pieces could be intelligently fitted together, to
create a narrative about how the legislation evolved?

Because the text ballooned from ~3 pages to ~103 pages, it would be
difficult to compare them. There won't be much in common between then
(relative to the long version). Comparisons between the short versions
or the long versions would be interesting.

But from a technical perspective, it's hard to extract the text out of
the PDFs in a way that makes it easy to do comparisons. (The line
numbers are a pain.)

You can tell that at least one was drafted in XML since it has a
filename at the top of every page, and if they published the XML the
public might be able to figure out what the differences are better.
(Maybe they do. I have a hard enough time understanding the economic
crisis that thinking about reading the bills makes me nauseous.)

If someone can get XML versions of these bills...

--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation!  Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)