Beyond SOPA: Rep. Darrell Issa's Big Plans For Digitizing Democracy

Over the past six months, Issa's launched an interactive subcommittee livestream, produced a new form of online polling, and sponsored a bill to make government spending trackable. 

Engineer and congressional Republican firebrand Darrell Issa is leveraging his supporters' collective outrage against a contentious anti-piracy bill, SOPA, to showcase his new experimental crowdsourcing legislative platform. "Project Madison" invites the legions of angry technology firms and policy wonks to construct their own version of an alternative anti-piracy bill on a new online platform.

Project Madison is just one of a handful of ideas bubbling in Issa's laboratory of open government: Over the last six months, he's launched an interactive subcommittee livestream, published a new form of online polling, and sponsored a bill to make government spending trackable. To be clear, his experiments often serve to advance a brazen political agenda. And Issa could be seen as an unlikely champion of transparency. And digital democracy has had a difficult time gaining traction. And yet Issa publicly pledges to open the halls of Congress, at least some of them, to America's netizens...