What is newcopia? It is a website that puts a blog-style interface over the Bills and Research output of the Australian Parliament House (APH). It connects comments from users to the RSS feeds and PDFs from the APH. We are attempting to use the newcopia website as a way to connect a politically interested community to the goings on of the APH.

Please go and check it out.

Why?

This came from the discussion surrounding Avocadia's post on building a bottom-up user community. Avocadia was commenting on his own software writing efforts with greasemonkey to create a community around public information. Somewhat similar to Tim Lambert's creating an alternate commenting system over Tim Blair's site. While Tim Lambert did it as a joking like stunt to draw attention to the issue of moderation on Blair's log - the idea behind it, does have wider positive applications.

We are fond of talking of abundance here, and its effect that it will have on social, political and technological structures. The process of adding value over public information has the possibility of adding abundance where there is currently scarcity - connecting where there currently is disconnect. The APH is making wonderful efforts to publish and make public what it is doing. There are now live broadcasts, rss feeds and weekly information on parliament. But even with their efforts, there is no chance for a user community to grow around that. The vehicle for a user community will need to be supplied by a third party.

It is probably better that a community with commenting and articles is provided by a third party. Every online user community relies on moderation of some kind. Having the APH do the moderation would raise all sorts of accusations of censorship, coercion, tribalism and group-think. Every thread would end with Godwin being invoked. It is better that the APH supply the primary material, and leave the value-adding to third parties.

Aggregation

Newcopia also carries rss aggregation. There are three sections; the front page contains parliamentary bills and research. The political news sections contains the rss feed from the ABC. Since the newcopia server is in the US, it is not contravening copyright laws, nor fair use. Since the mass media does not allow comments on their output, newcopia adds value here by providing a mechanism to comment on the political stories.

The third section is political commentary. These are feeds from highly popular and/or high quality Australian political sites. Links on these feeds go directly to the political blog. Currently there is Catallaxy, Imagining Australia, John Quiggin, Palmers OzPolitics, Poll Bludger, Tim Blair and Troppo Armadillo. Since it is on the South Sea Republic server, we get a look in too.

A notable absence from that list is Currency Lad. CL if you are reading this, please get an RSS feed.

If any of those sites have an issue with that, email me at cam.riley (at) gmail.com. Even though under US copyright law I do not believe I am infringing, if you wish for it to be taken down, I will respect that and remove the feed.

Hopes

What are our hopes for newcopia? We aren't quite sure. It will probably be experimental and look to new technological ways to connect the government, mass media, community and bloggers to each other. Attempting to provide a seed for the cloud, or flash-mob intellectualism. Who knows. At the moment though, it is the only game in town for commenting directly on each and every bill and research item published by APH.

cam