Citizens using the Internet to monitor their representatives and the legislation that they draft is nothing novel. But a new Sunlight Foundation project aimed at allowing citizen legislatures to collaboratively script their own legislation, challenging what representative democracy means, certainly is.

Past elections have proven that a candidate’s willingness and ability to engage online communities can mean the difference between winning and losing an election. But with this project, The Sunlight Foundation, a funder of NewAssignment.Net, suggests that governance, not just election outcomes, can be changed as well.

Using the model of moreperfect.org, organizers have set up a wiki and divided the research project into four categories—identifying relevant, already-proposed legislation, gathering information and vetting news article about the legislation, suggesting legislative language or rules and suggesting amendments to existing bills.

“If this is a success, and we draft proposable legislation in this area, we can use this experiment to show lawmakers how they might do the same in the future—share principels with their constituents, and work with them, instead of in secret, to turn those principals into laws,” writes Zephyr Teachout, the Sunlight Foundation’s national director.

Still in its infancy, the project has had less than half a dozen legislatures actively researching and amending pieces. Some agenda items have drawn more interest than others.

The Reporting Legislation page of the wiki begins from the principal that all lobbying reports that are filed publicly should be required to be filed electronically in a searchable format within 24 hours of their filing. It includes links to five different, relevant pieces of legislation, including a 2005 bill, sponsored by Sen. Feingold, requiring that Senate candidates file election-related designations, statements and reports in electronic form.

The page lists potential sponsors of such an initiative as well as a link to a Sept. 2006 Washington Post article titled “Support for Electronic Filing of Senate Candidates’ Campaign-Finance Record Gains Momentum.”

Given the arduous, research-heavy task before the authors of these documents, the Sunlight forum seems ideal, bringing many willing sets of hands on deck while allowing as many people as possible to inform finished products. Work on each wiki pages presupposes that legislatures are on board with the basic premise of the legislation (i.e. that corporations should be subject to FOIA laws, that an Independent Office of Public Integrity is both important and necessary, etc.) and thus seems to eliminate much of the large-scale ideological back-and-forth that muddles the process in Washington, allowing completed pieces of legislation to get evaluated.

If the process works, it could launch governance into the realm of user-generated content. For now, the project is a “small experiment” to test the waters and see how this type of governance could work. As Zephyr Teachout says “I would love it if draft legislation came out of this, but I’m not counting on it.”

Legislation might not be a result from this test run, but while NewAssignment.Net tries to figure out how journalism can benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, this is a future project to keep our eyes on.

Joe Wendelken is a writer for the Queens Chronicle