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Post by aronprice on Jul 19, 2012 18:25:36 GMT -5
Sorry if this is too self serving but I thought many of you would find it interesting. I just released for beta testing my latest application: Pure Democracy: a new way to grade CongressA democratic experiment, Pure Democracy enables you have a say in what effective government means.
You are presented with titles of speeches given on the floor of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
For each title you are able to view the text of the speech anonymized to remove the names of Congressmen and women.
You are also empowered to "bill it" or "bin it", "bill it" meaning this is a good use of Congressional floor time and "bin it" meaning it is a waste.
The votes will then be tallied to generate report cards of both Congress as a whole and individual representatives and senators. I invite all of you to try it out and help me make it better.
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Post by kjlowry on Jul 20, 2012 2:25:15 GMT -5
Sounds really cool! KJ
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Post by craigwood on Jul 20, 2012 4:02:46 GMT -5
I am not sure how many speeches you can have in your system or the selection of the speech system, but its going to be amusing. Many speeches are to give when next to no one is there, or even just entered into the record as given.
Project Vote Smart made those who are running for office disclose their positions. It was all too soon gamed. The least positions disclosed became a game winner. I rated several speeches after reading them -- since one can guess the party one can stuff the voting box, see if you can spot that pattern. So lots of luck.
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Post by aronprice on Jul 20, 2012 9:12:47 GMT -5
Thanks for the feedback.
To give a bit more detail Craig, the system currently has the 112th Congress up to date. I run the collection script occasionally to pick up new stuff.
Though its not quite set in stone, the current plan is to only use the active Congress as those are the people we really need to be evaluating...
I do understand bias can creep in. While in beta voting is anonymous but once we move to the official release we will be requiring either a Facebook or Google account to verify you are an individual and not a spam bot. Not a perfect solution but good enough to reduce vote fraud. Also we plan to restrict the API so multiple votes on the same speech from the same IP will be restricted.
Granted this is not a valid election, but it could very well provide new insight into public opinion on many topics. I am also quite excited to start building report cards for representatives and senators!
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Post by frankleespeaking on Jul 20, 2012 11:40:53 GMT -5
hey aron this looks great. send me a om with your email so i can include you on some other conversations about what we're trying to build. a couple other people have offered other tech solutions as well, and we could use to get all those people together and test out various things to see what makes the most sense.
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