”NOBODY READS LAWS! Even the senators and representatives who enact bills don’t read them. They’re full of dubious clauses that we learn about only after they manifest themselves. The entire point of a democracy is to shape laws that represent the people, and when the people don’t know what those laws say, that’s dangerous.”

It’s a sad truth. But it doesn’t have to be the case. That’s what motivated Matthew Burton to build Readable Laws, a NewAssignment.Net lab project that has been slowly gaining ground, using wiki technology to take the convoluted legalese of legislation and turn it into plain English.

Matthew, a graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program where he studied with the author and Net thinker Clay Shirky was in part inspired by an idea that was floated a few times on PressThink. Can we build…

“a cross-partisan, 50-state coalition of citizen volunteers who would read and decipher—for purposes of public understanding—every word of every bill the United States Congress votes on and passes in a given year. No one reads our laws now. The someone who can is likely to be a network. Right now we don’t know how to do projects like that. But maybe some day we will.”

A technology consultant to the US Intelligence Community with a specialty in collaborative, interagency analysis and use of the Web for intelligence gains, Matthew is exactly the type of person who could make the Readable Laws project a reality. Not only because he is a hardcore geek (From 2003-5 he worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency with interests in knowledge management and information technology), but because he has experience working with the government and knows just how screwed up and Net-backwards it can be. “Ever since (working in intelligence), I’ve been on a kick to make our government more accountable, more transparent and more efficient with the Web’s help,” said Burton.

In the long term, this project is a step towards building a primary reference for all Congressional legislation, because right now the alternatives are incredibly weak. Thomas, the official archive run by the Library of Congress (and the source of the original bill text for this project), has poor search capabilities and zero browsing features. Citizens looking for issue- or district-specific legislation have no hope of finding it, and if they do, they probably won’t be able to decipher it.

Readable Laws in the future could give citizens automatic notification of new legislation affecting their district or a particular issue. It could present each bill in the context of how their senators and representatives voted with role call tallies. Features like these will make it much more practical for citizens to follow Congress’s activities.

The web has changed our ability to aggregate information and wisdom. Wikipedia is, without a doubt, the poster-boy of Web 2.0 collective intelligence. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales once told Jay Rosen that part of Wikipedia’s success was that people instinctively knew what an encyclopedia entry should look and feel like. That was what enabled so many people to seamlessly use wikis as a tool to write, re-write and create what is the greatest compendium of human knowledge.

Wikis have also been used as tools to work collaboratively on projects, to define niche subjects in great detail (journawiki), to work together on art and start the unconference revolution.

At Newassignment.Net we’ve written about wikis in relation to journalism with specific emphasis on how they can improve politics. I personally am skeptical about how much of a role wikis can help to write stories, but without a doubt, they provide a quick way to collect information, keep politicians accountable and even help write legislation.

If you combine Readable Laws with other web tools like DocStoc, a startup that is set to be the “YouTube of professional documents,” then what you have is an empowered public. The Internet has the potential to become the ultimate fourth estate.

Right now Readable Laws is still a small community battling a gargantuan task that requires special knowledge. If you, or somebody you know, can contribute to making legislation readable again - now’s your chance to turn help our democracy.

What follows below is a lesson in participation: Since this is a NewAssignment.net project, which is about engaging readers in the news process - this is a chance to examine how to build a community around wiki technology. Even when trying to spur user-generated content for a noble cause, like improving our democracy, it is never easy. So I asked Burton to describe in his own words what he has learned so far.

What I’ve learned? That’s easy. In the early days, I was full of gimmicky ideas about how to attract readers and contributions: Seed the pages (it’s a wiki) with bad content that will inspire passers by to make edits. Turn the editing into a game-like process that inspires contributors to compete with one another. Get some high-profile blogger-friends to promote it and watch the hits pour in.

The hits poured in, and they exited the site just as quickly. I spent a lot of time thinking about and implementing these things, and it was time wasted. The time should have been spent instead on the only thing that matters: content. I’ve learned that a site like mine—a people’s resource that is written by the people, much like Wikipedia—cannot build a community out of nothing. A dynamite marketing strategy will get you nowhere if you have no content. People will not come to a bare site and just start editing blank pages. You have to nurture that community slowly by building a base of readers, and then gradually turning those readers into contributors. The ONLY way to build that reader base is with good content, and because the readers come before contributors, you have to do the contributions yourself, or hire people to help you. When this occurred to me back in April, I wrote it down:

“People want to be a part of something that is already good; they don’t want to be part of a foundering effort that MIGHT make it. You can’t rely on people to build your online presence. You have to build it yourself and make it a home for them. The content IS the marketing effort.”