Architecting Information For An Open Source Citizenry

Editor's Notes

• #3: We thought we’d start off with a little civic refresher - just in case you might need one! Wow - I love how that video seems to just get faster and faster to the end. How many of you all remember watching that when you were younger? How many of you think you still have a good grasp of how this stuff actually happens in reality?
• #4: Let’s break it down a bit more and take a look at what our friends at School House are telling us. Here’s the process laid out, journey map style. Except you may note, the “user” in this user journey isn’t really a person - it’s a Bill. It comes from a mysterious place, someone (who?) takes it to the floor of congress (federal, state, city - mostly the same). Then it may or may not move to a committee, where they debate it, rewrite it, revise it, and if the bill is lucky it goes to the floor of congress for wider debate and more revisions. Eventually, it may get the president, or it may just be forgotten. That’s the fate of the bill. But what’s missing here? You probably already guessed it - it’s the people that are involved.
• #6: The users around legislation and government are a lot more nuanced that we see in that School House Rock video. There are a lot of varied players, some obvious, others maybe not so much. We wanted to get a better feel for this particular missing piece, so we started where you might expect - with empathy.
• #7: We used our networks to start relatively small, interviewing friends of friends and contacts of contacts, we rounded up a small - but mighty initial list of folks to talk to across the united states. The areas represented ranged from the heart of our federal government here in DC, to concerned citizens in South Dakota and all the way to reform activists in Washington State. While it wasn’t a large list, it felt like a good representation and place to start to understand who was behind the scenes of the engine of government in this country - at all levels. Part of what we learned through this was the beginnings of what we call our legislative personas. 6 key users that make up the messy side parts of this whole process.
• #8: First, and perhaps most obviously - we have the elected official. This is everyone from our senator down to your friendly town council members. Anyone citizens voted into office. Our elected official may have come into politics with a certain amount of idealism, but the nature of a career of this kind is that outside influences are inevitable. While the official still wants what’s best for their constituents and helping them is their primary goal, it can be waylaid by secondary goals of campaigning, part alliances, and lobbying. Primary Goal: Represent the needs of their constituents to pass legislation that is in their best interests. Secondary Goals: Position themselves for re-election, represent the needs of their affiliated party, fundraise for campaigns Tech Savviness: Basic understanding of Social Media platforms. May have some ability to do live streams.
• #9: A key persona, that our conversation with Seamus Craft at Open Gov helped shine a lot of light on, is the congressional staffer. If you’ve called your reps, this is who you probably talked to. Our staffer is young and eager to help, that’s why they decided to intern with one of their representatives. They fundamentally want to connect with people and learn how government gets done. In practice, they spend a lot of time manning phones, answering emails and are the front line that constituents are most likely to reach when trying to contact an official. Primary Goal: Learn about government and help constituents & their boss Secondary Goals: Prepare themselves for a future career in politics or law. Tech Savviness: Staffers tend to skew a little younger, and therefore are more familiar with social media in particular. You can learn a LOT more about the struggles of these particular folks at Open Gov’s really fantastic study “Voicemails to Votes” which we’ve linked to in our references slides. There isn’t a single person in this process with a harder job that these people.
• #10: Lawyers have a unique position, depending on the type of law they practice, but all of them share a role in that they will be required to understand, integrate and interpret any laws that pass through this process. There’s a reason lawyers get into politics! The lawyer comes more from the perspective of having to properly interpret laws in order to provide appropriate guidance to their clients. From this angle, they are the ones who will be put in the position of fighting for legal and constitutional rights within our court system. Primary Goal: To properly interpret and provide appropriate guidance to clients on the state of the law Secondary Goals: Understand the guidelines of what may make laws unconstitutional, to advocate for legal changes that they believe inl Tech Savviness: The level of savviness of a give lawyer could vary quite a bit depending on their area of expertise and age. But they are generally adept at research and outreach.
• #11: Some folks have a strong gut reaction to lobbyists, but they are a part of this whole engine, and can’t be ignored. These folks may be paid to exert influence, but exert influence they most definitely do, and these folks exist on both sides of almost any issue that passes through our political process. The lobbyist is a bit of a gun for hire, paid to go into the halls of government and fight for their clients to get legislation passed that is good for them.
• #12: Activists come in a lot of different flavors, but the commonality is their passion and drive for change. They are usually driven by a singular focus, whether it be prison reform, LGBTQ+ rights, or movements like BLM and the Women’s March . Primary Goal: Through communication and activism, drive legislative change for the common good. Secondary Goals: Spread awareness of their causes to wider audiences, connect with peers with common interests. Tech Savviness: Today, activists are huge users of social media in many forms to organize their efforts. From Facebook, Twitter to less well traveled technologies like Snapchat and Periscope.
• #13: Citizens come in such a wide demographic, that it’s hard to distill down to a specific set of needs and desires. But one commonality is that they want to be heard and they want their elected officials to follow up on promises and vote according to the values of their constituents. Primary Goal: To elect officials that accurately represent the values they share Secondary Goals: To understand how proposed laws will affect their lives and families. Tech Savviness: As time goes on, the average citizen is becoming more tech savvy, but the variance is still great. Still, we see that a lot of the citizenry is getting news from Social Media.
• #14: Let’s dig a little deeper into how the journey we first looked at becomes more complicated when viewed through the lens of one of these personas. In this case, we’ll work through a story I heard from an activist in up in Washington state. At the beginning, everything was very rosy. The idea for this new law came from our friend and they worked with contacts in the current state legislature to draft a bill that they were really happy with. They were very confident and had the buy in from influential members of that legislature that things would go through smoothly. But - once that bill reached the committee - the control our friend had over the proposal dropped as did their ability to see what was happening in that closed room. While in committee, the bill was revised quite a bit, and while it was still recognizable, it wasn’t as strong as it was initially. Still, it passed committee hearings and moved along to the floor for wider debate. However, at this stage - the Speaker of House refused to actually take it to a floor vote. There was no view into why that decision was made, and the bill ended up ignored. A really disappointing end to what had seemed a relatively smooth sailing process at the outset.
• #15: What that really boils down to for us, is that transparency and control drop significantly as the bill makes its way through it’s journey, ultimately leading to frustration and a feeling of disenfranchisement.
• #16: Let’s break it down a bit more and take a look at what our friends at School House are telling us. Here’s the process laid out, journey map style. Except you may note, the “user” in this user journey isn’t really a person - it’s a Bill. It comes from a mysterious place, someone (who?) takes it to the floor of congress (federal, state, city - mostly the same). Then it may or may not move to a committee, where they debate it, rewrite it, revise it, and if the bill is lucky it goes to the floor of congress for wider debate and more revisions. Eventually, it may get the president, or it may just be forgotten. That’s the fate of the bill. But what’s missing here? You probably already guessed it - it’s the people that are involved.
• #17: Github? What the heck does any of what we just said have to do with GitHub? An excellent question, but we suspect you may have come to this talk because we hinted at some solutions, not just problems. And it is our belief, that Open Source Software is a lens into how we could start thinking about addressing those user concerns.
• #18: OSS has been wildly successful, and a lot of that success can be traced back to the history of GitHub. Back in 2008, at a meet up in SF, Tom, Chris and PJ had an idea to create a system that would allow software engineers to collaborate in a radically new way. In just 1 year, that idea had blossomed, and GitHub included 90,000 public repos and 100K users. Ten years later, that’s gone up to 57 million repositories, 20 million users, and 100 million pull requests. But why was it so successful? Like most great products - we assert that it’s because of the user experience, and because GitHub has a deep, empathetic feel for how developers in particular work and collaborate. ---- OSI also developed the Open Source Definition—a list of ten principles which a software’s license must adhere to for it to be considered open-source: Free Redistribution - The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of a larger software distribution containing programs from multiple sources. Source Code - The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Derived Works - The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. Integrity of The Author's Source Code - The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups - The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor - The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. Distribution of License - The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product - The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. License Must Not Restrict Other Software - The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. License Must Be Technology-Neutral - No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.
• #19: DX: GitHub knows their users very well: they are its users. They use Git. Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. GitHubbers use GitHub to build GitHub. Focused: GitHub is designed to “reduce friction,” allowing contributors to focus on developing, delivering, and supporting software. Collaboration: GitHub lowers barriers to distributed communication and problem solving. Scrutiny: Eric Raymond's proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (which he terms Linus's Law): the more widely available the source code is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered. Flexible: GitHub supports the “open source working model”--Issues, Pull Requests, Merges, Releases, and Support--critical features of all software projects. According to this workflow model, Project Management styles like waterfall or agile are “parliamentary procedures,” if you will.
• #21: Issues: (or Problem Discovery) Discussions around whether software should be created or changed.Discourse: Lobbyists, Activists, and occasionally citizens rally around outcomes and whether legislation should be created or changed. Code: strings of text that become executable software or are amended to an executable software.Bills: strings of text that become executable law. Pull Requests: software intended to solve a problem (or problems) is publically available for review, testing, and changing, and voting.Revision Proposals: A bill intended to solve a problem (or problems) is publically available for review and modification and possibly a final vote. Insights (OSS): consumption, defect, and community metrics are tracked and assess, which might lead to more code (the process repeats).Insights (Law): Metrics regarding a law’s effectiveness and side-effects are rarely collected and presented publically. Metrics might be analyzed by independent “think tanks,” activists and lobbyists (special interest groups)
• #22: This is a super smart crowd, so I suspect a lot you have already been thinking “hey, isn’t Open Government already a thing?” It absolutely is! We are far and away not the first people to make the connection between OSS and Government. So let’s take a quick history break to look at what has been happening in this area since 2009.
• #23: At Obama’s inauguration ceremony in 2009, the newly minted president dropped this radical quote into the ether. Openness will stregthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government. It wasn’t an empty promise either, in 2013 President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. And open data is really only the beginning of the work that is being done in this area.
• #24: Some important touchstones - that you should all take a look at. Data.Gov: This is the home of all that open data Obama talked about. Data.gov makes it possible for developers and researchers to access hug volumes of government data for the purpose of research, data visualizations, application development - and a lot more. Open Gov Foundation: led by Seamus Kraft, it’s focus today is on helping civil servants (those staffers we talked about) meaningfully engage (at scale) with the constituents that they represent. All of their product development work is open source, and they have been using human centered design to bridge the gap between citizens and representatives since 2013. Open Gov Partnership: A multi-national organization, launched in 2011, aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. Open the Government: funded in 2007, this organization is a non-partisan group that focuses on pushing for increased transparency in order to ensure integrity and accountability in the operation of our governing institutions This is not a complete list, of course, as their are many other groups in the US and internationationally engaged in efforts around this central belief that an open government is a better government. A really interesting and important note about all these groups is that they are generally speaking, fiercely non-partisan in their alignment.
• #25: But let’s talk details. There are a few actual working products released by people within this Open Gov coalition that are of particular note to what we’ve been discussing. The first of these is Madison. Originally created in 2012, when SOPA and PIPA - the first wave of legislative attempts to curtail net neutrality - were in the news. The Open Gov Foundation, in partnership with Representative Darrell Issa of California. The initial version was a light weight, Wiki like engine that allowed users to comment on in progress legislation - in this case the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act. This was the first time a Member of Congress had crowd sourced a bill and actually introduced user-generated improvements to the legislative process. While a huge touchstone for introducing this concept, Madison today sees relatively limited usage. It’s primary use case, collecting public commentary, does not necessarily answer all the concerns we’ve seen with the process of crafting legislation. That said, we believe that Madison represents a huge step forward in the direction that we want to go with a truly open-source legislative process.
• #26: An interesting project that sits somewhat outside the world we’ve been discussing so far is a site called TLDR Legal. Created by Kevin Wang in 2015. The purpose of this site was to disambiguated the convoluted world of OSS terms of service agreements. Who here reads Terms of Service? Who here understands Terms of Service? Well - TLDR seeks to help both developers and users by translating legalese into common language so the average person (you and me) can actually understand what these ToSes are telling us. If such a thing can work for terms of service, why not for other types of convoluted legalese?
• #27: So we’ve set the stage for you a bit. Learned about the legislative process, talked about the key personas, and dug into what the open source software world is all about. But - you may be asking - how can we actually do anything with this? Well - we do have some ideas.
• #28: The three key existing platforms that we feel have the most to contribute to this idea of opening up the legislative process and truly making it collaborative are TLDR Legal, Madison, and (of course) GitHub. Together, these three products offer up transparency, translation of difficult concepts, and radical collaboration and they are the backbone of the collaborative law information architecture that we seek to build.
• #29: And that Information Architecture can be distilled into a relatively simple seeming 4 parts. The Bill itself: We see this, the text of the bill, being paired with a TL;DR Legal style translation of the text. Thus making it easier for the average citizen to understand the core concepts contained within that bill. The Discourse: This is the engine of public feedback. A free-form, open area for citizens, activists, and lobbyists to comment on the text of the bill and make their opinions known in a transparent place designed to fuel conversation and debate. Revision Proposals: discourse is relatively unorganized and of the moment, but a formal proposal is an actual request to elevate a discourse item into an effective change to the bill text itself. Like a pull-request in GitHub, this is a structured, formalized process that requires review and agreement before changes are integrated. Insights: beyond the text of a bill, we mentioned that a lot of what the citizen in particular wants and needs is more insight into how a bill will actually affect them. This is where insights come in, visualization how a bill will actually impact things such as congressional budgets, tax rates, employment or citizen sentiment.
• #30: Within this structure, we can really drive into 4 primary areas of focus - transparency, understanding, collaboration, and insight. Starting with Transparency - we are envisioning a system that ties changes back directly to the official that drove them. As you can see in this quick sample, our Rep, Jane Doe added section 5.3 a few days ago. This provides not just the transparency of knowing what person has contributed what to a bill, but accountability as well. With changes linked to their names, you can actually envision the beginnings of a system that would tie a given representatives contributions back to them so you can truly understand what they are really doing for you, the constiuent that elected them into office. Now, in reality, we know that this may be an area where staffers would be doing a lot of this actual ground work - but what we are truly pushing for is transparency of ideas.
• #31: Fostering understanding is a step towards (we hope) better collaboration. The discourse area of our IA is centered on the concept of open public feedback. Conversations are all tracked, and individual pieces can be elevated up to revision proposals, so collaboration isn’t a black hole, but a pathway to actual legislative change. All tied back to the people who are engaged in the process.
• #32: Now we move to the other half of this puzzle - understanding & insight. First, let’s bring in that TLDR Legal framework in order to push for better understanding. We know that bills can be long, complex, and difficult to digest. But within this system, we want to show the raw text of the bill next to a translation - provided by a legal expert - that distills the real meaning of that text into something more broadly understandable. This could help citizens really connect with the large - unwieldy - bits of legislation that have so much impact on their lives.
• #33: Lastly, insights. There are numerous ways today that the impact bills have on us can be visualized. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, produces reports on proposed bills about how they can impact the deficit over time and how they may impact employment, economic touchpoints and budget distribution. As data becomes more easily available, we can potentially, within this architecture, display those insights so that citizens can get an understanding for how a bill that may sound great on paper, actually impacts the wider world around them and their families. A critical component for buy in, not just at a federal level, but all the way down to the local level. Imagine this - citizens want more snow plows for the winter, but a bill provisioning this, will impact the budget. Perhaps it means fewer parks, or less regular trash pick up. That could be visualized and presented in a clean and non-partisan view, so everyone can better understand the impacts of a bill on the world around them.
• #34: And, we’re reaching the end of our time with you. So, what’s next? We’d like to make it very clear that all of the things we’ve presented to you today, they represent an ideal or ours, a beginning. We don’t think we can do this on our own at all. Which is why we wanted to speak here today, and why we want to reach out to you to get involved. We’ve set up some ways for you to connect with us. Here on slack at democracy-ia, and at our GitHub project under the same name. If you found any of this interesting, please feel free to come up to us after the talk today. We’ll be hanging around for a bit and we have some information sheets and contact cards we are super looking forward to handing out.
• #35: Also - we want to make sure we give a special shout out to Seamus Kraft at Open Gov, who was very kind to us early in our research and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to talk to us about all the amazing work they are doing there. And, to our friends at GitHub, particularly in their government outreach group, who gave us a lot of great insights as well.
• #36: Also - we want to make sure we give a special shout out to Seamus Kraft at Open Gov, who was very kind to us early in our research and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to talk to us about all the amazing work they are doing there. And, to our friends at GitHub, particularly in their government outreach group, who gave us a lot of great insights as well.
• #37: And, thanks to all of you for attending! We’ve got a little time left, and we are happy to take your questions.