Unleash Your Inner Lobbyist: Annotate Bills Like a Pro

Posted by: Theo Francis on September 28

Ever have a yearning to mark up pending health-care legislation like one of those high-powered lobbyists or a duly elected representative of the people? Now’s your chance — and there may even be a real, live congressman at the other end, absorbing your advice.

The lawmaker is Rep. John Culberson, a Republican whose district lies just west of Houston, and the bill is the very-much-in-flux health-care bill passed by the House earlier this year. The Web site — run by Sharedbook, which normally sells group-editing services to publishers — lets visitors register and (if they enter a ZIP code from Culberson’s district) annotate the bill, comment on it, and respond to one another’s annotations and comments. It’s a little like Wikipedia for legislation, only instead of editing the text, visitors annotate it.

“What I’m doing is crowd-sourcing the health-care bill so people can see for themselves what the bill actually says, and then debate it by sentence, by paragraph, by section,” Culberson says. “My instincts tell me this will be the standard in the future for elected officials, if they want to be truly transparent.”

The annotation function is similar to one at OpenCongress.org -- which so far has clocked in more than 1,600 comments on the same House health-care bill -- but Culberson set the site up at a cost of a few thousand dollars to get feedback specifically from his own constituents. (Both versions lack recent amendments, since it's hard to get updated copies of the full text.)

It's just the latest in a long-running fascination the self-described "Jeffersonian 10th Amendment Republican and free-market fiscal conservative" has had with online tools. In 1987, he says, he ran a dial-in bulletin-board from a Macintosh and a 1200-baud modem. After getting on Twitter and Facebook earlier this year, he says he's using a new iPhone to put video interviews online, and he's charging ahead with plans to add a wiki to his Web site so constituents can make public suggestions and weigh in with arguments supporting or opposing his own.

Culberson acknowledges that earlier crowd-sourcing efforts in Washington have had curious results, and that his experiments are likely to invite "trolls" -- the Internet troublemakers who "hang out under the bridge to throw rocks at people and just criticize and not do anything productive." But, he says, that's nothing new for lawmakers, who get flooded by faxes, emails and lobbyists already. "As representatives, we have to deal with balancing the loudest voices against the majority opinion against all the other factors we take into account -- that’s just a part of our job," he says.

It's not the first public-interest document Sharedbook has put online, though it is the first for a paying lawmaker. The company has posted the Google Books settlement online as well, as a demonstration, and OurEnergyPolicy.org is using the platform to generate discussion about energy policy. CEO Caroline Vanderlip says the software can handle up to 900 online pages (which vary in length from the printed page).

Vanderlip says the underlying software was developed for publishers who need to pass documents-in-progress among many people, exhausting the usefulness of the change-tracking features in most word-processers. "After the second or third user, it just becomes too cumbersome to follow," Vanderlip says. At the same time, the software is simpler and less expensive than massive systems like SAP.

"We think there's an enormous market in between, where there's an interest in discussion," she says.