Jim Caralis, OpenMass.org wizard and all-around good guy gets a nice profile in the ‘Dig:
Jim Caralis used to be frustrated with politics. As a kid, he grew up watching the Saint Patrick’s Day breakfast on television, but when the Everett native and Northeastern grad decided that he wanted to get “more involved” in local politics, he realized “there was no outlet for me to participate.” He had been reading and posting on Blue Mass Group, but when he’d try to follow policy debates raging on the site by scouring the state’s websites, he often found them to be fractured, illogical and difficult to navigate. More often than not, keeping himself informed was more trouble than it was worth.
Look, we here at BMG have to figure out new and powerful ways to use OpenMass.org. I love the site — it’s kind of like ESPN’s pages for individual baseball players, except for legislators. (Hey, did you know Jim Marzilli has a lifetime .391 on-base-percentage?) It’s a terrific tool that I frequently use, but I have this sense that we could integrate it more thoroughly and usefully into our discussions here — and put the info into action. Let’s put our heads together and learn to use it for world domination making a cleaner, kinder, gentler MA.
Can I get a witness? Can I get an open thread on that? What do you think we ought to do?
stomv says
I admit that I don’t use OpenMass much, and I ought to use it more.
<
p>
I do have a question/suggestion: tags for bills. If I want to browse all the bills related to public transportation, how do I do that? I can search for “public transportation” but that might miss bills which don’t happen to have the right words.
<
p>
OpenMass is like drinking from a firehouse. How can we make it more like a series of water fountains?
jimcaralis says
I do agree that tagging or categorization of some sort is needed. I worry about spam and other in inappropriate tagging. At BMG I believe you need to register to tag. I’d like to avoid registration.
<
p>
In any event you are right and something needs to be figured out.
<
p>
BTW – for the record it took 4 weeks to build not 4 months and I am not a software engineer by profession (I was one around 7 years ago).
charley-on-the-mta says
to have some registered guest users to help you with it — not open to the public, but a few folks whom you trust.
jimcaralis says
stomv says
tagging overcomes all of those problems. spam tags are each singletons; a number of “real users” tagging bubbles the most common tags to the top; those are usually pretty effective.
<
p>
Of course, you’ve got to drive traffic.
<
p>
Perhaps spreading the word to different constituent lobbyist groups — everything from Walk Boston to Mass Equality to People for the Ethical Treatment of Rich Taxpayers or whatever. More eyes, more activity, more tags, etc.
jimcaralis says
When non-registered users are allowed to tag it is still a very real problem.
dcsohl says
As stomv said, with enough users, it’s not a problem. It’d be like Wikipedia — anybody (registered or not) can edit WP, and sure, people try to “spam” WP, but it doesn’t work because there are enough people who care who will immediately undo any spamalicious changes.
<
p>
Question is, would OpenMass have the critical mass needed?
<
p>
One tool that could help is a list of the N most recent tagging operations (or perhaps all the tags in the last day / week). Then people could review for obvious spam tagging.
jimcaralis says
I’m not convinced yet (not that it is your responsibility to convince me…). Can you point me to a site with reasonable traffic that has no registration requirements and allows tagging? I’m struggling to find an example and if someone has this solved, I’d be happy to use their solution. I’m leaning toward Charlie’s suggestion which would allow a few trusted users to tag content.
<
p>
In regard to critical mass, well I’m not sure. OpenMass has been averaging between 30k and 40k hits per week. However a majority of those are RSS hits. This tells me people are using the site more like a data source for other sites.
<
p>
Thanks (both you and Stormv) for taking the time to respond.
peter-porcupine says
jimcaralis says
What info would be best to start with?
<
p>
Here is the list I am considering.
<
p>
1. Public Hearings
2. Newly sign laws.
3. Most popular reps and senators
4. Most viewed bills
5. Local Mass bills (a list of bill that affect a city/town)
6 Others?
<
p>
I’ll promise to get one a week done for the next couple of months.
stomv says
Yes, he’s an expert in tagging. He’s getting a Ph D in library sciences at UNC, and he’s a geek. His thesis involves tagging and identification on the Internets.
<
p>
So, I had him have a look. He points out that
(a) there isn’t a good example of userid-less tagging sites that work well. It’s not clear that it’s not possible; most of the great tagging sites have natural userids — del.icio.us, last.fm, librarything, etc.
(b) the idea that misbehaving tags will end up in the tails of the histogram distribution is probably true, but very hard to prove, and not protected from a few users getting together and tagging the item a particular way
(c) userids allow tags to be added together, so you know how many distinct entities have tagged an item a particular way. Without userids, how can you count how many distinct entities have assigned a particular tag, thereby allowing the good [or at least frequently used!] tags to bubble up?
(d) userids have a “feel” of accountability, and help people behave better. Sure, you’ll still have miscreants, but by and large folks who would normally behave “most” of the time tend to behave well even more frequently if they have a userid.
Correct me if I misunderstand, but currently everything on OpenMass is pure data. The legislative bills are verbatim with no editorializing. The information on each politician is pure data — name, address, that sort of thing. No data comes from the “dirty public”.
<
p>
Tagging would change this. Now, you’ve got two way interaction, whereas previously there was only one way interaction. This changes things very much, in all kinds of ways.
<
p>
So, here’s one way to do it: have a small team of librarians. They’re publicly known — not just userid known, but meatspace name known. They tag. Their tags are diggable — in other words, a user who sees a “public transit” tag on a bill can see which librarians set that tag. This allows transparency, so people can be reasonably sure that things are being tagged fairly and responsibly. If they’re not happy with it, they can complain. They could even choose to ignore the tags of particular librarians if they so choose.
<
p>
The general and widespread belief amongst library scientists is that tagging needs three prongs: user, tag, object. Without all three, you get unpredictable results. So, one way around this is to have a small set of “blessed” users be librarians — and make their ids easily known.
P.S. I ain’t the expert, my buddy is. Any errors are my misunderstanding of his genius. Consider this something to chew on, not a thesis or nuttin’.
jimcaralis says
Thanks, this is much more detail than I expected (which is a good thing) and I appreciate your (and your friend from UNC’s) time.
<
p>
To answer your first question, it is primarily primary sources based. The exceptions occur on pages that have news and blog coverage. This includes legislators and the Governor’s profile and the issue pages.
<
p>
I do like your/his proposal (it sounds similar to what Charley proposed) and it is very likely that will implement the solution suggested above.
<
p>
Thanks again!
stomv says
they’re partisan, but you might be able to modify some of their IT infrastructure ideas to OpenMass…. specifically, check out the “get involved” and play with their google precinct maps.
<
p>
Kings County Washington Democrats
scoopjackson says
Jim, this is a great site and I have so far only used it to waste time at work and learn about my elected officials.
<
p>
I was wondering if there is any hope for information at the town level in a similar format? Can we (as a community) request info on say town and school budgets and get them to you to be brought together in one place?
<
p>
It would be a powerful tool to fight override opponents if we can point to similar communities and have hard numbers.