Talk:110th United States Congress
From dKosopedia
What are we doing to track Legislation in Congress during this session? Chadlupkes 11:17, 10 January 2007 (PST)
Well, I just posted to this page about HR 2237, and it was erased saying that I was too "sarcastic." Daily Kos is a bunch of wimps, just like the Democrats in congress. Go ahead and erase the the votes that make you uncomfortable. I'll just quit using your shitty website.
- Well that is part of the thinking about how I am trying to get some of the structure on how we have the Congress pages set up (ooooh bad pun there) so to effectively do just that. I am hoping to ray and integrate the Congressional Committee Project structure into the larger Congress structure. This is why I have been spending an inordinate amount of time the past week trying to restructure the way the members of Congress articles and Congress as a whole articles are structures and linked. My think in, to get the various portions into a nice clean readable chart format that can be the cut and past code to be repurposed for things like Roll Call votes and Committee action and votes so that we can then make daily digests and integrate articles on the legislation that comes to the floor or votes in the various committees and have it all cross linked and contextual. I am hoping that we can then go and cull and summarize h e daily congressional record and then just bracket the legislation and cut and past the relevant legislation text... then the votes and summery there of. Build out a really integrated and structured version of a summarized CR. Since WE can add the links for instance, when we can make references in the summary link to supporting articles elsewhere to give context etc. (i.e. use hypertext the way it was originally envisioned). Not sure if that makes any sense as I am running on about 4 hours sleep in the last 50 or so... Lestatdelc 22:48, 10 January 2007 (PST)
- That sounded good, but I'll have to see it to understand it. Anyway, I think we should move the Major Legislation section to Legislation currently in Congress. By the end of 2008, it will be pretty big. --Corncam 11:04, 11 January 2007 (PST)
- I agree for the most part (i.e. that that is where legislation that is not yet public law should reside there, though I would propose that public laws (i.e. approved by Congress and signed by the President be here. This is what they do for the individual congress pages (i.e. the 109th, 110th) over on Wikipedia and that isn't too huge of a list. What I was thinking is this can catch the first session and then that moves to a separate page for "legislation passed in the first session" page (better nomenclature title though) with a single link to it, then accumulate the second session here until this Congress is over. Then we end up with two separate articles for each session that can be linked through form this one. As you might notice I am looking to try and structure this as a more human accessible complete framework of what Congress does, with the Congressional Committees Project (CCP) content being fully leverages from the Congress pages, all the way down to the daily summary and Congressional Record articles. All stitched together via a framework that makes sense from a usability stand point. I think I can get it to structure out pretty well and then it will not be actually as onerous to do the record in a way that captures every day Congress is in session but building into the framework organically with a intuitive logic way to drill down to that granularity from which to do the daily summary... weekly summary, etc. The beauty of this vs. what the THOMAS site delivers is, we can fully stitch stuff together because WE control what hyperlinks and where. So in the CR, the name of who is speaking links to that member or senator's article, same with legislation, or articles about specific subject, Iraq, proposed bills, previous bills, previous arguments, etc. Because we cant then add category tags, we can aggregate content on individual members, or states, or by issues, etc. somewhat like the tag cloud is doing on Daily Kos. In fact because we control the content for each days record and summary, etc. we can better cross-integrate via the tag cloud there, with diaries which explore and discusses about relevant diaries there as well as other media reporting and so forth. To give context and we can write it in plain language that we the public can better grasp and digest (particularly in the daily then weekly summaries, etc. But because we can do category tags, it will make it easy for instance for me and others to find any and track issues that matter to us, or "adopt" legislation or members of Congress, or Senators, or states, etc. to then find and summarize into their respective articles. For instance, if my Rep David Wu (which is my Rep. IRL) rises to speak about something today on the floor todays CR will aggregate in that categories page. Then I can summarize that f there is something significant said about a topic and/or go into the CR and establish links on the section in David Wu's article about whatever issue he spoke about that was important today. This way we can establish the schema and framework that if all I do is focus on my Rep. and Senators, (and the Sub-Committee I sign-up to help with on the CCP) I can take on a manageable amount of work, that will slowly accumulate a full, robust article on what David Wu did this Congress. Others might be able to track more (I myself am committing to several of my States Reps and doing the daily CR capturing (and maybe some f he summarizing therein). Which is already a lot, but if we get it squared away enough to establish said workable framework, we only need 50-100 people willing to do around that much to have the killer resource for keeping up with Congress, keeping our side honest, and doing serious OPPO_research about what the other side does where the rubber meets the road (not to use to cliched a term there). Then all the Daily Kos people need to do is look up a specific article on a member to find out the bottom line in an easy to understand way and it will be backed up by sources in a meaningful and contextual way. Lestatdelc 01:55, 12 January 2007 (PST)