Post in community law-making, a system based on recombinant text

2007 Aug 13 12:54 UTC

From my experience, MoveOn tends to focus much more on issues at the Federal
Level than at the State Level and be fairly top down oriented.  If anything, I
would be tempted to start with organizations that are more oriented towards
state government, such as
Democracy for America (DFA)
http://www.democracyforamerica.com
or the
Progressive Legislative Action Network
http://www.progressivestates.org/

I was at the National Conference of State Legislature (NCSL) last week, and
have written a challenge to members of DFA about responding to their State
Reps.

Based on this discussion, I hope to take some of my experiences from NCSL and
expand upon them, in part based on this discussion.

So, I have a question for everyone on this list:

Do you know your State Rep?  (If you live outside of the United States, please
help me out and give me a little details about how state government works in
your country.)
- I'm having coffee with mine on Friday.

Does your state have a site where you can track legislation as it moves through
the assembly?  Can you tell me the state, the URL, if you use the site, how
easy you think it is to use, what means there are of subscribing?  Also of
importance, is how easy is it to access the state budget.
- I live in Connecticut.  Our State Legislature is called the General Assembly.
Their website is http://www.cga.ct.gov/  You can search bills, read their text
and amendments, track their progress, see the votes, and subscribe to them via
email.  There is NOT an RSS feed of the bills or the bills progress.  It is a
decent tool for doing research, but not great for interactive involvement in
the legislative process.  I do not know if there is any easy way of tracking
the budget.

Any feed back that people on this list have would be greatly appreciated.