[Cdn-DMCA] Proposal: collaborative comments on the Commons debates

Tue Apr 30 20:08:56 EDT 2002

The proposed system seems rather similar to a slash site - it might
just be easier to make the appropriate modification to slash than to
code this from the ground up.

On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 07:13:19PM -0400, mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:
> 
> OK, I still don't know how to make a game out of this, but here's what I
> imagine in the way of a database-driven comment system:
> 
> * Have a script that parses each day's Hansard, capturing all the names
>   and headings and capturing them into a database.  The Government
>   postings already contain link targets that could be stored in the
>   database.
> 
> * Store comments in the database too.  Each comment would be associated
>   with a specific point in some issue of Hansard.
> 
> * A "main" screen showing the N most recently added comments in the
>   database, with columns for who wrote the comment, which member was
>   speaking, and that member's party.  Also shown for each comment would be
>   the comment itself, and a link that would take the user to that point in
>   the annotated Hansard (see below).
> 
> * By clicking on any of the column values on the main screen, users could
>   limit the display to comments having that value.  For instance, if
>   there's a comment from me, they could click on my name and see a
>   similar display of only my comments.  Or they could click on the party
>   affiliation of the member speaking, and see commonts only on that
>   party's members.  These would be cumulative, if you wanted to see only
>   my comments on a particular party or whatever.
> 
> * Every comment would have a positive or negative point value and these
>   pages would show the total for comments matching the filter.
> 
> * Each page would also be available in RSS format (trivial to do, just use
>   the same code to spit out the results in XML instead of HTML) so people
>   could keep an eye on it with an appropriate client.
> 
> * A script to provide an "annotated" Hansard, which I imagine as being a
>   cached copy of the one from the Government's site, with extra icons
>   added.  Anywhere users could add a comment, there would be an icon to
>   click to add a comment at that point; for any points where there were
>   already comments, there would be a little icon and note inserted (N
>   comments, click to read them).  This would preferably be available, just
>   like the files on www.parl.gc.ca, as both a complete transcript of the
>   day's events, and in 5-minute segments.
> 
> * Other scripts could be added to do things like the top N Members by
>   score, the form-letter thing I mentioned, and so on.  Also necessary
>   would be the add-a-comment script, and administrative stuff for adding
>   users, deleting users and comments, etc.
> 
> What do you think?  Is this something we'd like to have on our Web site?
> (For some value of that; I know this list reaches the people in charge of
> several different sites.)  Am I missing anything critical?  Would we be
> able to get people to use it?
> 
> Some technical issues:
> 
> * My preferred platform for developing stuff like this is PHP4, with
>   either mySQL or PostgreSQL.  I have both database packages on my system
>   at home, but it isn't network-accessible.  I can post things for
>   debugging purposes on a friend's machine, www.edifyingfellowship.org - 
>   a "production" site wouldn't be welcome there for traffic reasons, but
>   testing/debugging would be fine.  That system supports only PostgreSQL,
>   not mySQL, so if we wanted to port from there to a mySQL-based system
>   elsewhere, then some rewriting and conversion would be necessary.
> 
> * If this were going to be hosted on a system that already has a user
>   account database (for phpSlash or similar) then it might be desirable to
>   write code to connect with those user accounts instead of having a
>   separate account base for the parliamentary-comment system; then we'd be
>   spared of having to deal with account management ourselves.
> 
> * Disk space requirements: an issue of Hansard, in English, is about
>   600K.  Double that if we include French as well.  Double again if we 
>   store both the "complete" file and the "in 5-minute segments" files; divide
>   by two, maybe, to account for compression.  We could probably fake one 
>   of {complete,segmented} by splitting or joining the other, although 
>   if space is cheap it would be nicer not to have to, because storing 
>   both would allow better synch with the Government site.  My guess is
>   that if we didn't cache the actual text, but only stored the "heading"
>   information, that would take about half as much space, counting database
>   overhead.  If we *did* cache the text we'd probably still want to store
>   the headings in a database; my bottom line rough estimate is that we'd
>   have about 2M of data to store per day of Hansard, plus whatever
>   comments people add.  That's not a huge amount of disk space but is
>   enough to be worth thinking about; I wouldn't want to have to store it
>   on ansuz.sooke.bc.ca with my 100M space limit.
> 
> * We could have lots of "fun" figuring out how to represent what happens
>   in the database when Members change parties, change portfolios, resign
>   mid-term and get replaced, etc.  Other people speak in Parliament
>   besides regular Members - for instance, the Speaker and his deputies.
>   Also, I anticipate parsing problems with situations like the Committee of
>   the Whole, and the editorial notes that occasionally get inserted when, 
>   for instance, Members speak in languages other than English and French.
> 
> Some non-technical issues:
> 
> * Such a system would need people to be "operators", to keep an eye on it
>   and make sure everything was going smoothly.  I could forsee
>   vandalism/trolling problems; a "lack of critical mass" problem if we
>   ever got into a situation where there were no recent comments in the
>   system; and all kinds of fun when (as always happens eventually, with
>   systems designed to automatically parse other people's
>   for-human-consumption postings) the Government Web people changed the
>   format of the Parliamentary site.
> 
> * What's the copyright on Hansard, and would this violate it in any way?
> 
> * To what extent should or could such a project be bilingual?
> 
> * Area of coverage: I am most interested in the House of Commons debates,
>   but interesting things happen in the Senate and the Provincial
>   legislatures too, and many if not all Parliamentary debates in Canada
>   are online and could be fodder for such a system.
> 
> * Programming: I think I can write a parser and basic query script, but I
>   don't have time and energy to do all of the development for a nice
>   idiotproof system with all the features I've talked about.  Do we have,
>   or can we recruit, other people who would participate in building it?
>   I'm actually more concerned about recruiting "operators", because
>   that's an activity I hate doing, whereas building new stuff is an
>   activity I enjoy and will do as much as I have time for.
> 
> If a system like that described above seems too large or complicated,
> there may be lighter-weight things we could do instead that would still be
> valuable and serve many of the same purposes.  What I've described sounds
> a lot like what a "Wiki" does; perhaps we could simply build a parser that
> imports Hansard into the database of an existing Wiki package.  Then we'd
> get all the collaboration features for free.  Less work to build, but my
> guess is that it would also be less nice to use.  A good thing about that,
> though, is that if we wanted a Wiki for other reasons (for instance, the
> "open dictionary" that has been discussed), they could seamlessly merge.
> -- 
> Matthew Skala
> mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
> 
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Kristofer Coward				http://unripe.melon.org/
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