Yesterday, I wrote about various town halls that are happening around the State of Connecticut as the 2013 session of the Connecticut General Assembly take shape. I also mentioned, in passing, a little bit about virtual town halls. Today, I want to explore this idea in a little more detail. Please, consider joining my effort to get a good virtual town hall going.

On the Connecticut General Assembly website there are various lists of bills that have been introduced for this session. Some bills are listed by the chamber they were introduced in. Others are listed by the committees they've been referred to. Some bills will get to the point of having a public hearing, where people can come in, talk for about three minutes about why they support or oppose the bill, or, in some cases, even talk about amendments they think would make the bills better. However, with the public hearings, there is no real dialog and discourse between people testifying about the bills, except maybe informally standing around the committee conference room.

I was recently on a phone call with a person interested in promoting deliberative discourse and we talked about how there aren't great sites for doing this. I mentioned a few different sites that might have potential to do some of this, so I explored what it might be like to try this for legislation.

In my mind, such a site would have a list of bills, with different ways of finding the bills, based on who supports or opposes the bills, what committees they've been referred to, tags about specific topics in the bills, and so on. Each bill would have the ability to have comments. The comments would be threaded so people could comment on comments. Ideally, a thread about comments could fork off of a discussion and perhaps join other discussions. We often see this in computer software and various systems for tracking changes in software have the ability to support different sets of changes to a program that are related to one another, but not other changes. Something like this could be good for discussions about bills as well.

One of the first systems I thought about to use something like this was branch, and I set up House List of Bills 1/23/2013. I sent out a message via Twitter about it, but haven't gotten any responses yet. Without a bunch of people participating, I can't test to see how well Branch handles these sort of discussions, but I haven't seen a good way to do some of the discussions I've been talking about. It may be that there is some way to do this, and I'm just not finding it.

Another system that I like is Pearltrees. I did a bit of work with Pearltrees a year or two ago, but set it aside. I've revisited it. I've set up the 2013 CT General Assembly Bills Pearltree. Again, I spread the word on social media, and one person followed this. As you might guess from the name of the system, it is focused on trees; there is a strict hierarchy. You can change the hierarchy quickly and easily, but any link always has just one direct parent. This makes the idea of looking at bills different ways more difficult, but not insurmountable. You can duplicate a pearl to be in multiple trees and when you add a comment to one pearl, it is shared in other pearls. You can also add notes, but the notes don't seem to get duplicated between different pearls. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. Pearltrees also shares nicely to Facebook and Google+. Right now, I'm thinking I'll explore this most.

All of this made me think of another system I had tried a few years ago called Mixed Ink. I went back to revisit it, but they have a fremium model and I don't think I can do the testing I want, without paying for an upgrade, and I don't know if it is worth it.

So, anyone want to join a virtual town hall to talk about different bills?