Human and robot

Massachusetts legislature is notoriously opaque. It’s a subject that’s sparked a lot of buzz lately, which I don’t need to retread. Connecting with policy directors and activists in Massachusetts, I noticed a gap in the civic pipeline: automation. Is there an opportunity to energize the push for transparency via “tech activism”?

Automation

One area which is lagging is automating data collection. Right now, there’s a lot of manual parsing of nested legislature outcomes, PDFs, scans, and images. This could be an angle for scrapers, OCR, and LLMs to do in seconds (or less) what currently occupies hours of advocates’ time. By automating votes and keeping a record automatically, activists could have an easier time holding legislators’ feet to the fire if they don’t follow through.

Visualization

Another gap I see in activism efforts right now is translating Excel and Google sheets into dashboards, graphs, and conclusions. There’s a lot of good work being done behind the scenes, but the public seldom sees the results, and even more seldom understands them. Finding ways to crunch numbers and make them pretty and presentable would be a huge boom. Beacon Hill transparency isn’t an easy topic to just jump into, but this would bridge the gap.

Communication

Massachusetts residents are massively affected by an opaque legislature which they overwhelmingly voted for, yet it’s not an easy issue to get people riled up about compared to national culture war outrage. Writing and reaching Beacon Hill insiders versus everyday citizens is a unique skill, and the latter is vastly underrepresented. If 72% of voters can align on something, there ought to be some way to keep them clearly updated on its progress, too.

How to plug in

I went to a potluck as a total stranger, had an “elevator pitch” prepared for how I wanted to help, and just started talking to people. From there, those people introduced me to other people, and I quickly found myself locking into projects about things I care about in ways I know how to help.

Some other ways I’ve been trying to bridge the gap are:

  • Creating a site to facilitate writing and thinking critically about Massachusetts politics as a non-insider myself
  • Reaching out to hyper-local ward campaigns to offer tech help and outreach
  • Connecting with leaders of city and state grassroots organizations to offer support

In addition, here’s what’s worked the fastest:

  • Identifying gaps and launching myself at them–maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but trying matters
  • Creating tools proactively and sharing them when appropriate
  • Approaching with a “how can I help?” mindset rather than “look at what I made!”

In summary, grassroots organizations are built on volunteers and run on dedication to the cause. Tech is underutilized, as many folks have backgrounds in politics, law, business, and architecture; there are a lot of quiet process gaps begging for automation and presentation. Observe, be proactive, and keep trying.