BillHop.com – Arizona

Link: BillHop.com – Arizona.

Hate the Arizona Legislature’s billtracker? I do. It is cludgey, hard to edit, badly designed, and not easy to refer to. Maybe that’s all intentional… Moreover, it is hard for distributed, loosely coordinated groups to collaborate to markup and publicize bills they like and don’t like. Blogs have their place, but any blog can only bring so many eyes to bear on legislation to critique and take meaningful action.

Imagine a combination of wikipedia and a really flexible bill tracker and you have BillHop, the personal mission of an Austin activist Damien Brockmann. Brockmann started a wiki to track bills at the Texas state house. Check out the Texas site for a view what BillHop can do.

Brockmann expanded the idea to Congress, and now is in the process of expanding the site to all fifty states. One of the first state betas to launch is Arizona, and you are all invited to become sponsoring members and contributors. This is a great gift to Arizona, and we would be foolish not to take ownership of this tool and make it our own. The site needs just 7 local sponsors to launch. Why don’t you become one of them? All you need do is add a few bills that you are interested in when the site launches and let people know about this great new tool.