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Mike Liveright

User Profile Image Mike Liveright
Member since : May-27-2009 (Verified)
3 Ideas, 13 Comments, 75 Votes

User Activity Stream

Ideas Posted

This was a great idea and I'd like to see it a continuing process and to have it improved as time proceeds. The specifics are:

1) That it continue and that the President respond to the top items each week. That way there would be a continuing conversation.

2) That the procedures for finding ideas be improved, perhaps by open sourcing it, so that a user could show the Idea titles ordered by say: Recent, Top, Controversial, Tag, Title-Contents, Tag, and others that I don't think about.

3) Start moving toward threaded, rated... comments so that it might be easer to benefit form the comment stream.

4) Attach a Pro and a Con WIKI to each idea to see if the people who voted Pro, and Con could develop detailed proposals for their ideas. (Note: this might not work, but I'd like to see if it did)

5) Try to involve our representatives and allow them to comment on the ideas and identify their comment

6) Add a "Preview" (I forget if this is implemented, though I'd replace "Post" by "Preview and then Post") and "Speller" so that the submitter could see who the posting and comment looks before it is submitted.

Others... I'd be interested to read other suggestions and cements on the specifics by people who, hopefully, could make constructive additions and modifications to this idea
Let tax payers to allocate, say 1% of their taxes as they want. This would not be enough to prevent our representatives from doing the business of the government, but would show, on a yearly basis how the people think their money should be spent.

In addition, I would like the results, with proper statistical categorization to be available so that we could see which groups, areas, etc. wanted to send the money in different ways.

If it worked out, then perhaps the percentage could be increased and the option, to reduce the amount money to the government could be added by permitting people to allocate some money to a charity.
Ensure that no bill, ammendment, etc. be approved or signed, except in emergencies until it is posted in final form for a sufficient time. The "Read the Bill" project http://www.readthebill.org , proposes 3 days, I would prefer 7 days.

Also contact your representative and have them make a commitment that they will vote against any bills that have posted for 3-7 days.
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Comments Posted

Mike Liveright 9 months ago
Re: felkakarp

1) I agree that many of the comments, and perhaps ideas, are AstroTurf, and that if this site is to grow there need to be ways to reduce this clutter. Have you seen other sites that do a better job and how do they do it while not requiring costly and dictatorial human monitors?

My thought is to allow threading so that readers can view the main comment topic and then drill down to the comments on the comments where they seem interesting, and to allow votes on the value of comments and allow readers to decide if they want to restrict their reading to comments that others have determined are valuable.

Thoughts?


2) Certainly any real 72 (or 7 day) restriction will have an escape clause for Emergency, Special, cases, though given the pace that the Governments implements things, I doubt if most bills will be effected by a 3 to 7 day wait before they are enacted. I don't see this proposal as preventing th Government from acting, but as allowing us, and the Wisdom of the Blogisphere to uncover the Time Bombs in the legislation, though intelligent people can, of course disagree
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
Re: mkelly , I agree that a -5 to +5, or however one expresses Strong NO to Strong Yes would probably be more indicative and that it seems to be a good idea.

I'd add that I'd like to see more "sorting" options, The -5...+5 allows a sorting option to show the average score rather than the total score, as we have now, and would allow people to see those items that do not yet have a large number of votes, but do have the people who voted being strongly Positive (or Negative) GOOD. I'd add that it would be nice to have all 4 sorting possibilities:
1) Highest number of Positive-Negative
2) Lowest number of Positive-Negatives
3) Highest Average Score (-5...+5)
4) Lowest Average Score (-5...+5)
as well as a being able to select the items that have words of interest to the viewer, are in the category of interest...
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
1) re: lihu, Having the administration interact would be a do-able step, where as allowing the public to directly vote would, I think require a constutional amendment and is lots more difficult, and is a major change in our government, I'd vote against that for now until we have much better experience as to the way these polls worked. Note: I did also propose that individuals be able to "Allow people to allocate a percent of their taxes." that would allow some direct control of the government.

2) Some more suggestions: Allow people to see the Yes% in the header and allow them to view the ideas in order of Yes% or No%, that way ideas that are popular (or unpopular) by the people who voted on them could be seen.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
When I posted http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/3863-4049 , I did not see this, We agree, in general. thanks... I would add:
1) This site is a good first step, but I think it can be improved. (My post had some suggestions, please consider adding your own.

2) Re: kdtroxel, I'd prefer to centralize the information, and then let congressmen be notified of your interest and let them comment here.

3) I would hope that IdeaScale.com could comment as to their ideas as to how to continue this, improve it, and possibly pay for it.

4) Finally, I'd like to get the Administration involved. My suggestion is that they comment on the top few ideas each week so that the people who do participate in it see that their thoughts are being listened to.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
I'm surprised that this is not one of the major ideas. It seems to me that it is essential to have more competition for our representatives so that their is a possibility that they will listen to us rather than to their party.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
Re: felkakarp's comment.

I'd vote to let even politicians, CEO's, lobbyists, etc. comment, approve or disapprove, and submit ideas, though I would prefer, as a courtesy that they posted their affiliation.

Certainly John Boehner has his own "Soap Box", but if he had a good idea, and I think that assuring that all bills are posted before they are voted on is, I makes sense to me to have them discussed here.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
OptIn sounds good, though I guess I assumed that if a person did not allocate their portion, that would be effectively a not to an OptIn.

I doubt that setting the ammount to be $100 rather than 1% would be an Idea Killer, though on first thought I think I'd prefer 1% as it seems to me that it is more reasonable for the allocatable money to be in proportion to the money that the allocator pays to the government, and I do think that the ammount allocated should be more signifficant than $100 would make it. But this would be worked out, I assume, if the Idea did proceed further.

But either possibility would allow those who want to tell the goverment how the budget priorities should be set, so I'm still interested in knowing why the idea was considered bad by 1/3-d of the people who voted.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
I like the idea of having Citizens interact with the government and have voted for Post/Read the Bill type ideas as well as trying to Continue and expand this site, but am voting against this as it does not define sufficient details as to how it would work.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
Yes, My Bad, I think I tried to spell check the body, but did not catch the titles "Contue", thanks...
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
This is similar to the general idea of expanding this site, http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/3863-4049

I agree that a Wiki would be desirable, though I think that there should be a PRO and CON WiKi page to allow people who were basically in favor of the idea to develop it and the people who were opposed to express their opposition. One hopes that they would be civilized :-) so that the idea could be developed while still honoring constructive criticism
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
I don't want a single person to determine which earmarks are valid. At least, bad as it is now, the current system ensures that two branches of government wiht multiple geographies approve.

My personal prefrance is to have any Geographic spending by the government lead to an automatic increase in that states income tax. That way there would be less reason to sponsor an earmark since the money would be paid for by the state that was benefited by it.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
Yes, My Bad, I did mean that the representative should only vote for a bill that was posted for a few days in final form on the internet.

Note there is a similar "Support a 72-Hour Mandatory Public Review Period on Major Spending Bills" proposal, http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/2459-4049 , that has 642 votes.
Mike Liveright 9 months ago
YES!!! This is the "ReadTheBill.org" proposal.

The other thing is to request that your representatives commit to voting against any bill, budget, etc. that has not been posted for the required 3 days, so that we and the Blogisphere can uncover the "Time bombs" in the bills before they are passed.