by JOSH JAMES –
Following specific bills as they wind their way through the Kentucky General Assembly and sifting through the legalese often takes more research than the average voter is up for, but a project launched at the University of Kentucky aims to cut through the clutter.
Kentucky Capitol building CREDIT LRC PUBLIC INFORMATION
An intern at the Capitol, second year sophomore political science student Patrick Mason says it wasn’t until Prof. Stephen Voss’ PS 476: Legislative Process class that he truly appreciated the scope of the work that goes on there.
“Even though I was in Frankfort, I don’t think I really got the chance to see how much legislation went through the General Assembly,” he recalls.
For outsiders and insiders alike, it’s a lot to digest.
And that fact inspired Prof. Voss to envision a student-driven project to track bills by subject and present a jargon-free picture of the legislation, the arguments for and against, and how it fared in committee and in the full chambers. To create the site, Voss sent groups of students to the statehouse to keep tabs on bills in their assigned subject areas and he says the result – a wiki dubbed Frankfort Focus – fills a void of sorts.
Frankfort Focus Wikia homepage CREDIT HTTP://FRANKFORT-FOCUS.WIKIA.COM/WIKI/FRANKFORT_FOCUS_WIKIA
“This is all the kind of thing regular people would like to know about what their legislature is doing and those services that exist right now aren’t very good,” he says. Rather than sorting through the minutia of numbers and amendments, Voss says users will see “a plain English description of what the bill was about.”
While the site is a work in progress and will lose its contributors at the end of the semester, Voss hopes to keep adding to the database in future classes – including an elections-focused course this fall.
Mason agrees, adding, “Hopefully it will be something useful, something that the university and political science students can contribute back to the commonwealth.”
