WELCOME TO THE NEW SITE!

This site is a little rough around the edges, but have no fear.  It will continue to be improved. 

Tutorial Videos

Introduction and tutorial video (YouTube)

More to come...

First Time on the new site:

If you don't have an account on this new system yet, you'll need to create an account (Your old Ning login won't automatically work!):

To get started, please click the link on the left navigation bar that says "Create Account".  Fill out the simple form. 

The form will create an account for you on both this wiki, and the forum.

If you have a problem that you cant seem to get solved email me, wayne.ostrander@hotmail.com, I will be monitorng today to help with getting up and running.

Once you submit the form, you will be redirected back to this page. 

Please log-in and continue reading down this page for further instructions:

Welcome

Welcome to Break It Apart, the intended value in this site is to allow the public the ability to keep up with the speed of congressional bills and changes to them. The goal of this site is to become a resource for the people of our country who either don’t have the time, or aren’t being given the time, to read and comprehend every word of the important legislation being proposed by our government. Our solution is to employ a divide-and-conquer strategy to the problem. The recent flurry of legislation is only the latest example of the need to have a "new" fourth branch of government. The press and media have failed to provide the needed balance for the public to make informed decisions. We hope this site will become one of the counterweights to provide the balance.

As documents come out of committee we will break those documents into pieces (usually pages) and individuals, like yourself, will read what pages they can (as few as one) and provide an English summary for that page. That summary should be as short as possible while still retaining the essence of the information being summarized (think of Cliff Notes).

Another group of people will then take the best summaries and produce a full summary document. That document will be a tiny fraction of the original document and should be digestible in a much more reasonable time frame. That final summary document will contain links back to the web site and the original page that generated the summary. This way you can read the conversations spurred by each of the provided summaries (and you can read any other summaries for that page that were provided).

This site is a non-profit venture and as such we do not have a paid staff of any kind. Donations of time is mainly what we are looking for, but we will accept donations of money.

How can you help?

This is where you come in. This site is only a facilitator. This site is built by you, run by you, and maintained by you. We need people to read and summarize pages, participate in discussions about those summaries to make the summaries better, clean up and produce the summary documents, and moderators to manage the web site itself.

We are also looking for talented and self-motivated developers willing to help build a more feature rich web site that will help manage this process and make it both easier to summarize the incoming documents and to produce the final result summaries. If you fit that bill and would like to help, please read the list of technical jobs we are looking to fill and contact us.

This site is the result of A LOT of volunteerism. No one wakes up in the morning thinking that reading legislation is a recreational hobby. So if you're reading this, then you're the reason this site exists. This is not a biased site. We hold true to the founding principles and use their wisdom as true North.

Please invite your right and left wing friends to check us out. IF we are to have balance we need both wings.

For more on where you can volunteer check out our Help Wanted section

What is the process?

If you're not new to Break It Apart, you'll see the operation is a bit different than the previous site. The changes will make your ability to edit faster, our ability to get a bill posted nearly instantaneous, finding of pages or sections which haven't been read will be much easier.

Pick a piece of legislation or two if you feel ambitious, download the PDF of the legislation and use any number that comes to mind to choose a page in that document (there is a field at the top of Acrobat Reader where you can type in the page number to jump directly to that page). After the bill has been up for a while, you can simply scroll through the summary looking for missing pages.  Read the page corresponding to your number and post a short analysis of the page as a section with the proper title. If for some reason there isn’t a section for your page, just find the page just before your page (note that it could be well before your page) and create a new section at the bottom as the word "Page" followed by the page number using the "Heading 2" format and enter your summary below that as "Normal" format text (see the sample post below).This will become obvious if you jump into some of the existing bills and see how they are formatted.  If not, the forum is a great place to post your questions.

New legislation will be added as soon as it is available. We may not be able to add every piece of legislation (more after we finish the next version of the site) so if you don’t see a piece of legislation that you feel is important, please add it (instructions below) or suggest it in the forums if you don't feel technical enough to add a new page to the site.

Currently we are only doing federal legislation but we hope to have state sections for state legislation at some point in the future.

Please obey a few solid ground rules:

1. When writing the interpretation of the section of the bill you've chosen, leave opinion out.
2. If you find a post with opinion, correct it.
3. Don't just copy text from the original page, we're looking for summaries here, in plain English.
4. Opinion and networking are encouraged in the forum areas.
5. Soliciting or advertising without prior approval by the admin of this site will get you blocked.

Sample post:

Page 29

This page addresses equality of all peoples, especially women, in their need to be protected and included in a progressive climate adaptation change program. Also lays out some "ideals" for the program to set up and structure implementing cleaner more eco friendly enviroment programs.

To Edit a Bill:

You need to create an account or login, by clicking the link at the top right.

Then you may browse to a bill's page and edit the information on that page.

To edit bill information:

Click Current Bills

Click the bill you would like to review. Read the page you would like to review. It may be easier if you do this in a seperate window or tab.

To write your interpritation click [Edit] to the right of the page section you want to summarize or the closest previous page to the one you want to summarize (not the [Edit] next to "CONTENT NEEDED"). Note that the CONTENT NEEDED will show up as a template icon which you should delete and replace with your summary.

Write your interpretation, review your post for opinion.

         We have disabled the ability to edit the bill's entire page, these will get very large for many bills and your browser might not be able to properly edit it, so you can only edit a page at a time.

Also, if you are editing a section (page) and someone else submits changes for that same section (page), you will receive a warning that changes were made while you were editing.  It will give you instructions on what to do to correct the problem.

Once you are satisfied with your post, click "Show Preview" Review your additions, if it is what you intended Click "Save Page"

Please at this point verify that your post still contains the page number that you edited and that CONTENT NEEDED no longer shows for your page.

To post a new bill:

Again start from the Current Bills page. If you don't find your bill here, then go to the search bar on the left side of the page and type the bill number you intend to post, click search.

Once you are sure that the bill does not exist then return to the Current Bills page and edit that page. Add the new bill on that page (please follow the format of that page and add your bill in the correct spot). Save that page.

The next step is to upload the PDF of the bill to the site. You do that at the File Upload Page. If you need help here is a tutorial on uploading files. If the PDF is located at a stable location you can link to the PDF there rather than uploading it.

Now you can click on your new bill on the Current Bills page, but the page will not be found. You will then find a link to "create this page". Click this.

Follow the Example Bill page to see how to format a new bill, see how to display the link to the PDF file, create the page headers, etc. Don't worry about creating a section for every page. Either those will be created as needed or someone will come along with a macro and create all of the page headers for you.

At the bottom of the page click "Show Preview" .

Does it look like the Example Bill? Yes? Click "Save Page"

No? Stop. Check to see what is wrong and if needed ask a question in the forum in order to get help in getting your posting right.

Thank You

Thank you in advance for all your help.

Where to go next

• If you need to create an account, watch the tutorial video.
• If you are ready to jump in, here is the list of bills.
• If you need a tutorial on editing a Wiki, then here is that tutorial.
• If you want to read about the state of the project, that would be the News Page.
• If you want to join in on the conversation about the project or bills, then the forum is your destination.
• ... add more here ...