As our portfolio of legislation grows and as we proceed to establishing a functioning New Judiciary that will among its sources need to have the stated legislative intent of a new act it becomes increasingly important that our lawmakers' deliberations upon issues concerning new legislation become easily available to citizens, new lawmakers, judges and the public at large in a form that does not require you to wade / search through endless transcripts of RA meetings to get to the finer points of the considerations in adopting new legislation.
Here are a few ideas for quick wins in that area:
1) Putting the final agenda of every meeting at the top of the transcript of the meeting making sure to specify the index number of every bill listed
2) More ambitiously, inserting into the transcript an HTML <A NAME=""> tag at every point where discussion of a new item on the agenda begins. The name of the tags would correspond to the number of the item of the agenda. Ideally, the introductory agenda would then be linked for each agenda item directly to the relevant <A NAME> tag. This could be done automatically if the transcript box we use had a few lines of LSL code added to automatically insert the <A NAME> tag whenever the LRA says "Moving on to item X on the agenda."
3) Moving detailed, technical discussion and negotiation of proposed bills into sub-committees and formalise the work of the RA to the extent where it is used for these purposes predominantly:
a) Refer proposed legislation to the proper committee
b) Ratify legislation sent back from a committee with a majority vote and give every spokesperson from the relevant party the chance to make a 'signing statement' only before the actual vote on the bill. These signing statements would be very good sources of legislative intent and being made in a structured, uninterrupted way would also be easy to read.
4) Create a del.icio.us or similar tag for every new bill submitted before the RA and index all relevant document / agenda item URLs in del.icio.us utilising this keyword. Whether this would only apply to approved legislation or to all proposed legislation is a good question to which I do not have an answer handy.
5) Incorporate a realistic proportion of the above tasks in the employment contract for the RA archivist along with reasonable goals of timeliness. Make renewal / renegotiation of the employment contract mandatory on a six month basis and have it be subject to an assessment of the extent to which the goals were met.
If I get time during the weekend I will probably do some experimentation to try and realise a prototype of what an archive infrastructure might look like if the above measures were implemented.