Most of what I’ve been working on so far is how to provide functionality to people on the Hill so that they want to engage with the system that I’m developing. It seems that this is one of my parts in assembling the social media government communication system that we are all discussing.

I look forward to discussing this with you further and at length.

Its certainly a good idea to directly have access to and look at the stuff that is currently
being worked in the current system for reference.

Jim, i don’t know why you’d put it on a different website?
Why not just ummm… “insource” it?

The pc system does give a certain amount of credit to posters. It could be reworked, but its functional enough as is that it is not now at this moment a priority compared to several other things.

I think the real issue here is merit. My take on issue/priority/ bill x should weigh more
if I have expert knowledge on relevant subjects than somebody whos just running on populism steam. The ‘due weight” problem is a very difficult one, because you don’t want to give too much, and that is more dangerous than giving too little.

I’m not sure how to aproach that other than from the formal logic perspective, which says that the truth value of such things can be determined pretty clearly. For instance, today the issue is offshore and anwr drilling. An idea with zero merit and thousands of
endorsing votes, jim wants to combine two such things together. I can’t beleive we aren’t just throwing the whole thing in the waste basket. Well i can, but i hope the figure of speech makes sense.

The problem for jim is how does he justify that, how can we continue to call it democracy if we are pulling things down because they are wrong?

Well, formal logic has the answer to that as well, but the long and the short of it is,
most people aren’t interested in or swayed by logic and would accuse that its being done “because you don’t >like< the idea.

Eventually, jim is going to have to deal with the issue of merit, because otherwise the government will never take us that seriously, and perhaps more importantly, it would be dangerous… If we at this moment implemented wh2s assorted majority vote priorities,
the result would be unmitigated catastrophee. So we have to think about that in the long run, how to add merit to the system. NI4D has a sort of “committee” step built in where things go to a group for oversight and reality checks. Its one way of handling the issue,
tho it also has its flaws.

As much as i would like to claim extra credibility based on what i know, the other thing formal logic says is that merit has nothing to do with the person and everything to do with the ideas. So whatever ends up becoming employed should take that into account.

I am envisioning now tho two forms of pc. “pop” pc, which is like the current system,
and pc based on group evaluation of merit. Using formal logic as the measuring stick.

I think your staffer part makes sense - there has to be some way of engaging in a conversation over their current needs. This is important, but also important I think is to have pre-positioned content in almost “ready-to-access” fashion similar to the lobbyists. However this gets positioned so the staffer sees this as something they can engage in is probably culture/usability as much as it is functionality.

The other issue Kevin points out above is a way to give credibility to certain posters. Perhaps this becomes a combination of participation, and background.

To address the part about the name making it seem like it’s not for congressional staffers… What if there was a separate, very simple site that just had a search engine on the front page, and it searched all the documents and talking points people have put into white house 2. And of course anyone can edit and add to the results.

That site could also very explicitly ask staffers or anyone doing research for what they wanted help with, something you allude to in your post. That’s what a search engine is, after all.. tell me about X policy. Which could then encourage the community at white house 2 to research that more. That’s one of the things prometheuspan asked for (amongst many other things!) — the ability for people to tell him what they wanted help with.

There’s a “briefing room” tab on whitehouse2.org, which is basically what I’m talking about here, only put it on a different site and add a mechanism for people to ask for research.