User:ZeFredz/AmendmentsTool

Coals and motivation

Set up a tool to manage proposals and amendments for parliamentary/legislative/judiciary texts. This tool or set of tools will have to provide an intuitive user-friendly interface and handle history and translations. The goal here is to list the existing solutions, to analyse them and to create a list of requirements for such a platform.

Motivation : We are currently using several tools to manage our GA preparation process but none of theme is currently meeting the requirements to create a complete eDemocracy online platform that anybody can use. This platform will have to work in a multi-language environment which will be a real challenge to solve !

Move Commons Non-Profit, Reproducible, Reinforcing the Town/community/society Commons, Grassroots

State of the art

• MediaWiki (libre & open source GPL) - example : Events/EGA:2014-08/Amendments
• GetOpinionated : http://opinion.pirateparty.be (libre & open source GPL)
• AT4AM : http://www.at4am.org tool developped for EU (libre & open source EUPL)
• DemocracyOS : http://democracyos.org/
• Wirite : http://main.wirite.org/ (proprietary, source not available at this time)
• Co-ment : http://www.co-ment.org/ Descendant of the software used to write GPL V3.
• Git
  • German Laws on GitHub : https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze
• Pads (etherpad-lite)

Standards & data structures

• http://www.akomantoso.org/ : "Akoma Ntoso (“linked hearts” in Akan language of West Africa) defines a “machine readable” set of simple technology-neutral electronic representations (in XML format) of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents."
• Markdown + structure of documents (German laws on GitHub)

Other tools to look at

• iMio.be (ex-communesplone) : http://www.imio.be/
• Swarmops : https://github.com/Swarmops/Swarmops

Analysis of existing tools

Template :

MediaWiki

The Wiki has been used for the Amendments for the August 2014 GA

The main issue with the Wiki is that it's a generalistic tool. It can do nearly anything, but it's not specialized in anything. So using it to do something alse than creating a collaborative web site can be tricky or take a lot of time to enforce structural conventions. In addition, it requires a good communication on how the structuration has to be done by the end users.

MediaWiki - Good for

• Collaborative editing
• Versioning and history
• Easy to use if you now how to use the Wiki
• Flexible

MediaWiki - Lacks of

• Clarity when mixing proposals and amendments on a page
• Support for translations
• History on sections of a page (i.e. Amendments and Proposals)
• Easier way to debate/discuss on amendments and proposals
• Parliamentary/Legislative/Judiciary specific structures of documents
• User-friendliness if your are not a fan of the Wiki tool
• Seing amendments/questions/discussions in the page flow can be tricky
• Voting/decision system (OK? done at the GA, but should be possible to do it online for a more generalized usage)

GetOpinionated

Is a great tool for Liquid Democracy, for simpler than Liquid Feedback. But this is not a proposal/amendment managment tool.

GetOp - Good for

• Liquid democracy
• Discussion
• "liking" comments
• Voting on proposals
• Proxy voting

GetOp - Lacks of

As far as I know :

• A way to add argumentation to a proposal
• A way to handle amendments on proposals
• A way to create new proposals from amendments
• Versionning and history on proposals
• Translation system on proposals/amendments
• A way to add references (links, documents...) on proposals
• Collaborative proposals/amendments writing

Co-ment

Co-ment - Good for

• text annotation by multiple users.
• discussion
• navigation (TOC, versions, display of comments, discussion thread)

Co-ment - Lacks of

• translation support (as far as I know)

Requirements for an Proposals/Amendments management tool

working on it...