Pat Powers and I agree: the Legislative Research Council’s reformatting of bills on the LRC website is clunky and hard to read. Pat’s critique reads just like mine:
For public users of the system, there have been basic changes to the system to the public end user, where choosing to select a view in HTML format…
Yeah… not even close to the former html format. That’s a .pdf being displayed on a page. If you click on the .pdf version, you get the same thing opened up in a new window. And no one is cutting and pasting from that, which was the nice thing from the old HTML display.
Whereas last session, small, nimble HTML (Hyper TEXT Markup Language) files could be displayed on a mobile device, now users are forced to use the pdf versions whether they want to or not [Pat Powers, “Anyone Else Hate the Updates to the Legislature’s Website?” Dakota War College, 2020.01.15].
Pat’s question shouldn’t be, “Anyone else hate….?” We might do better to ask, “Does anyone like the updates to the LRC website?”
It’s not just us public users getting heartburn from the unwieldy: Powers says legislators and lobbyists agree that the system is less usable than the previous system:
…there’s one thing veteran legislators seem to be united in their hatred of.
The new Legislative Research Council’s on-line bill system.
I’m hearing there’s lots of changes up front and behind the scenes that have met with a lot of complaints. And it’s not just legislators.
One Lobbyist had pointed out to me before session that they didn’t “think the new format for sponsoring and printing bills is working out very well,” and that “it will make meaningful participation in the process more difficult, not easier” [Powers, 2020.01.15].
This isn’t a partisan issue: this is a plain technological usability issue. When a legislator can’t easily view a bill, copy a passage from it, and send that text to a constituent to answer a question or to a friend or lawyer or to ask for an opinion on a law’s effect or constitutionality, the bill presentation needs to be fixed. To serve the Legislature’s daily functions and the public interest, the LRC should immediately scrap the current system and restore the simple plain-text formatting of new bills online.
Anything takes a bit of time to get used to. I agree, though, it ain’t as user friendly as the old version.
Back in the day, Mr. H, they use to have more work for the kids to stand around tables in the basement and stack colored papers into piles and hand them out across the legislatures. Everybody wanted a packet, and you didn’t have to print them yourself. Part of grudznick wishes they’d go back to that old system, where the papers were piled around the chambers and the shuffling and sorting through reams was ever ongoing.
OK BOOMER!
Yeah, I don’t understand what all those kids do anymore. They were called “Pages” for a reason. Collating all those bills kept those kids busy. Do legislators and lobbyists still get the blue-colored bills?
A good point about the LRC website is that anyone in the state can get those bills as soon as the lobbyists and legislators get them. Because of that website, I can follow the Legislature from Wisconsin almost as well as I could follow it in Pierre as a lobbyist.