AI Supports Legislation By the People, For the People
A new Massachusetts online hub connects legislators with communities.
You know who the president is. You probably know who your senators and congressional representatives are. But how about your state senator or legislative rep, or your city councilperson or county commissioner? Where do they stand on the issues you care about? Where would you go to find out? Where would you go to talk to your neighbors about those policies?
What channels of communication – if any – can you use to talk to your legislators about the policies they support, your community’s needs, and how to align those two things?
In Massachusetts, there’s a team working on a new answer to these questions. Matt Victor and Nathan Sanders founded MAPLE — short for the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement — as volunteers a few years ago, using their experience in law (Matt) and tech (Nathan) to build a hub to open up lines of communication between legislators and their constituents. It’s a nonprofit initiative, helped out by colleagues who have joined along the way, and they’re keeping it open source so that people in other places can use the system, too.
For MAPLE, success would look like an informative, generative, democratic conversation taking place out in the open about effective, responsive legislation – and more platforms like MAPLE taking shape across the country.
There are two sides to the hub: legislators and constituents. Legislators make policy, but those policies can be hard for non-specialists to digest. And constituents have needs and opinions about those policies, but there are too many of them to all have individual conversations with their lawmakers. MAPLE smooths both divides, with AI playing an important role.
On the legislative side, an LLM generates readable, accessible summaries of bills and ballot initiatives with useful contextual details. An automated transcription tool will enable constituents to read what’s going on in hearings, or to search and filter transcripts for specific topics.
An LLM summarizes the conversations on the constituent side too, to give legislators a snapshot of what their community is thinking. Matt taught me a new term for this: “Broad listening,” which is the reverse of broadcasting. It means absorbing and digesting masses of testimony in order to act on it. Jigsaw (a part of Google) piloted a similar tool in Bowling Green, Kent., this year with impressive results.
Does my local rep really want to hear from me? Matt’s answer is an emphatic yes. It’s easy (and all too common) to think of our elected officials as out of touch, even antagonistic or corrupt. But in reality, they are just people, with families and staffers and priorities and aspirations and fears. They don’t want to be attacked or yelled at. If media attention means their words will be twisted and misinterpreted, they’d rather not get attention at all. But give them a way to communicate better and more constructively with their constituents, and many officials will jump at it. If they had clear communication coming back to them, they wouldn’t be left guessing what their constituents want (or telling their constituents what to want), and they’d be more likely to try to make it happen.
There was a time in the United States when people really did have more access to their legislators, and not just because elected officials represented fewer people. In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the density of civic organizations in America. Well into the 20th century, people debated public issues and got to know what lawmakers were up to through groups like rotary clubs, unions, faith-based groups and Elks Lodges. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam famously documented the disappearance of these groups, and the loss of the civic connectedness they facilitated, after World War II. And the loss of local newspapers all over the country in the past few decades means that there’s often no one watching, investigating, or reporting on local politics.
Today, social media provides connections and civic information of a different sort, but it’s no substitute for what’s been lost; you often don’t know where commenters are located geographically, and the good information is jumbled up with mis- or disinformation and rage bait. “The town square is an amusement park now,” Matt explained – and it’s owned by billionaires to boot. “Trying to accomplish a civic purpose with social media,” he added, “is like trying to cut down a tree with a sock. It’s not the tool you need.”
The internet, Matt emphasized, has the capacity to facilitate coordination and civic connection to a degree the United States has never experienced before, if we choose to use it to transform society for the better rather than merely extracting profit from it. MAPLE allows you to follow individuals and organizations for updates, but no one has a follower count or “likes” to brag about: that’s not the criterion of success for legislation, and so that’s not a metric MAPLE is incentivizing people to worry about. No algorithm feeds you the most popular stuff, or lures you into spending hours scrolling (although the team is exploring algorithms that might actually have a positive impact).
There’s a fundamentally optimistic vision at the heart of MAPLE. Yes, the internet has been used to manipulate elections and to turn people against each other, but it has also been used to mobilize mass anti-authoritarian movements like the Arab Spring and to democratize information through tools like Wikipedia. MAPLE is taking what’s good and useful to society from AI and automation in order to facilitate communication and forge new bonds in communities — and ultimately to lead to policy reforms that people genuinely want and need.