Help us track the action in the statehouse: Nominate a bill for the Olympia Newsriver

Reg­u­lar read­ers may recall that around this time last year, we launched a younger sib­ling to Pacif­ic NW Por­tal called the Olympia News­riv­er, which has the abil­i­ty to track what bills are mov­ing in the state­house on any giv­en day. The News­riv­er gets its name from Dave Win­er’s con­cept of a riv­er of news. It dis­plays bill updates in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order, sim­pli­fy­ing the task of fol­low­ing legislation.

The News­riv­er had a good first leg­isla­tive ses­sion in 2011, but now we need to get it ready for 2012… and we could use your help!

The 2012 leg­isla­tive ses­sion kicks off tomor­row, and pri­or­i­ty bills are going to start drop­ping quick­ly. The more assis­tance we get iden­ti­fy­ing pri­or­i­ty bills, the faster we can pro­gram them into the Newsriver.

(A pri­or­i­ty bill is a bill that one or more com­mu­ni­ties with­in the pro­gres­sive move­ment feels strong­ly about. It could be a good bill worth sup­port­ing, or a bad bill worth stop­ping. Eli­gi­bil­i­ty is based on inter­est. When you nom­i­nate a bill, you’re let­ting us know there is inter­est in it).

Nom­i­nat­ing a bill for track­ing is sim­ple: just leave a com­ment on this post. Min­i­mal­ly, please pro­vide a bill num­ber. You may also describe your inter­est in the bill and let us know of any pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions that have tak­en posi­tions on the bill. You don’t need to pro­vide a list of spon­sors or bill text — we’ll see that infor­ma­tion when we look up the bill.

Bills pro­grammed into the News­riv­er are cat­e­go­rized under one of five topics:

• Eco­nom­ic Secu­ri­ty & Healthcare
• Our Envi­ron­ment & Civic Planning
• Edu­ca­tion
• Open Gov­ern­ment & Elections
• Civ­il Lib­er­ties & Technology

We will estab­lish a sixth cat­e­go­ry for bud­get-relat­ed bills a lit­tle lat­er into the ses­sion. It is like­ly that the Leg­is­la­ture will be debat­ing putting a rev­enue pack­age before vot­ers in May. Any updates per­tain­ing to bills that have some­thing to do with a rev­enue ref­er­en­dum would go into the bud­get category.

We also wel­come your ideas for how to improve the News­riv­er. Leave a com­ment here, or con­tact us and let us know your thoughts.

We look for­ward to hear­ing from you!