Some TechyTools for Congress

A drawing of the hypothetical Memex.

By Bijan Parsia

Congress paperwork can be daunting. As of the second CBC report we have 53 motions for the first day alone. That's a lot! The CBC report is a very static PDF with no navigation features. I'm not a big fan of motions split across page breaks. In general, I prefer to read online and take notes online and the PDF ain't great for that. It's also bad for collaborative note taking, pre-discussions, branch deliberation, etc.

Using my personal Claude AI coding account, I have extracted all the motions and their groupings and recast them into three formats:

1. A TiddlyWiki, which is my personal favorite. It takes a bit of practice, but it can show/hide things in wonderful combinations and has an explicit comment box for each motion which is also good for later extraction. (The above link will only accept comments from me. You need to download your own copy and either host it on TiddlyHost yourself or download the appropriate desktop app.
2. A GoogleDoc, which is best for collaborative discussion and note taking. You'll want to make a copy into your own space.
3. A Markdown file, in case you want to reprint it in a nicer way. You could convert that to Word, or otherwise manipulate it. (I used the Markdown file to generate the Google Doc.)

The key feature for me is having a hyperlinked table of contents that lets me jump to a particular motion with a click. I really like it in a side bar so I don't have to needlessly scroll to the navigation all the time.

Being able to take notes or (in Google Docs) have threaded discussions seems like it could be really useful especially in the lead up to Congress.

Obviously, none of these are perfect, nor is the extraction perfect (it would be easier if we had the source motions as a collection of files). They all require some degree of tech savvy. Some will interact better with various assistive technologies but I've not tried to optimize them for, say, screen readers. If you have some particular request for a tweak let me know and I'll see what I can do.

(I might try for a "nice" printable version wherein no motion is broken by a page break and there's some clear boxes for notes, vote tallies, etc.)

As is usually the case when I work on this, I reflect how poor a format motions are for decision making and, in particular, for setting policy. This is particularly the case where there's little consensus on what counts as policy. We end up with a lot of highly operational directives and clashing semi-policy stuff. Much of it seems to be more about political expression than trying to craft policy to guide the union.

As painful as it is for me to say, what I've read about the SWP conference suggests that its a more rational approach to group policy development with sessions organized at developing a policy rather than dealing with a bunch of uncoordinated motions.