Tuesday, April 1, 2008

DraftYourBill.gov

I have the ultimate Web 2.0 idea. It is a website named DraftYourBill.gov or something similar. Thus the name of this post.

DraftYourBill.gov would let you create a legal bill with everybody else on the web (even the Iranian President if he signed up!). There would be three main areas for the bill.

The first area is the properties area. In it, you set up the basic properties of the law, where you place things like jurisdiction of the law (If state or town, specify), area it effects, name [takes a vote to change], and other properties that are important, but not part of the bill itself.

The second area is the bill page. It would work similar to Wikipedia in that it will save a record of what everybody changes. It will have sections, comments [that wouldn't make it into the bill], and more. You could edit/add/delete sections and every change that you make would be recorded also like Wikipedia.

The third, and final section, for each law would be the talk page. Yes, that is Wikipedia's name for them also. Only they'll act more like threads similar to Reddits' talk pages.

The site will be coded properly and won't have anything flashy. It would be free to visit, and would be in PHP for server side and Javascript for client side. It would be built securely, and there would be daily backups. It would be ad free. You would have to sign up to make changes, but creating an account wouldn't take you off the page.

The site would have forums. It would be VBulletin forums that use the same username database as the sign in for the site so that if you are signed in on the site, you don't have to sign up for the forums. The forums would contain guides to help people out, a suggestions/bug forum, and a set of forums for discussing the issues themselves.

DraftYourBill.gov would be open source, and be adaptable for other countries if they wanted them (Maybe even adding a way for multiple countries to use DraftYourBill.gov itself) and even adaptable for it to be in games.

Areas that it HAS to be able to make law in would have to be Federal, State, and City. The rest would be expanded to the site.

I can't get the site off the ground for two reasons. One, I don't yet know how to code and need to figure that out. Two, I need to get support from the government and change the infrastructure to be online for bill making. I'm only a teenager, so I doubt I would persuade them right now. If it was created, I have the basic layout.

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