Called Glasshouse Policy, the program uses the Internet to devise policy prescriptions by gathering input from people who care to participate. After allowing them to debate, the most popular recommendations will be forwarded to a second level.
Those recommendations will be hashed out in roundtables consisting of directly interested parties, lawmakers' staffs and others. The result will be draft legislation along with a report explaining how it came to be.
The goal is to reconnect Texans with their government, said Thomas Visco, the program's director.
"People are at an all-time high in terms of being connected to each other," he said, referring to cell phones and social media. "But they're at an all-time low in terms of being connected to their government."
Single-digit turnout rates in Texas primaries show that people have despaired of playing a role in crafting legislation, said Francisco Enriquez, the project's co-founder.
"There is a huge swath of the population that has been left behind by the political process," he said.
Enriquez's family is from El Paso. His father was Detective Ruben Enriquez and his uncle, Bill Rodriguez, was police chief. The younger Enriquez grew up in Virginia and graduated cum laude last year from the College of William and Mary.
Francisco Enriquez and Visco are young — 24 and 23, respectively — but they've recruited some heavyweight support for their project.
Among their board members are former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff and former Ambassador to Sweden Lyndon Olson. Olson now is chairman of Hill and Knowlton, an influential public relations firm that is headquartered in New York City.
Visco and Enriquez say theirs is the first attempt to create public policy through "crowdsourcing" — proposing a topic and then allowing interested people propose policy.
Participation is free. Go to the Glasshouse website at glasshousepolicy.org to register and participate in the organization's first discussion — Texas Fire Prevention Policy.
The Glasshouse board chose the topic after a disastrous fertilizer blast in West, Texas last year. A new topic will be chosen every four months.
On the topic of fire, Glen Potter wrote on the Glasshouse website that "Texas is the only state without a universal, statewide minimum fire code."
The discussion is accompanied by a resource page that explains how state law currently deals with fire safety in various structures.
Just after Potter's comment, Ned Munoz pointed out that other parts of the law such as the electrical code and the statewide building code regulate for fire safety.
For each commenter, anonymous or not, a state House district is listed. Visco said one purpose for that is to let lawmakers know whether an issue has captured constituents' interest.
Participants can join the discussion three ways: They can propose a policy prescription, they can comment and they can vote on whether ideas should go on to a roundtable process and be turned into proposed legislation.
Enriquez and Visco stressed that it is essential that they stay out of politics.
"We're not political," Visco said. "We're policy oriented."
To keep from becoming captive to any one group, Glasshouse policy has capped donations at 10 percent of its annual budget, which stands at $216,000.
Enriquez and Visco said they've raised about a quarter of that amount. A list of their donors is available in the FAQ section of the organization's website.
The founders of Glasshouse now are trying to get the word out about their project in hope of spurring broad public participation. If they get 1,000 people to participate in the fire-safety discussion, they'll regard that as a good start, they said.
©2014 the El Paso Times (El Paso, Texas)
