RE: Political Rhetoric Vocabulary

Political rhetoric is … well … rhetorical ... as well as “political”.  Bloviation may be fun, particularly if it can be used by an emotionally inflamed mob to bludgeon (“bully”) perceived antagonists into submission (e.g., on college campuses).  And words sometimes do matter – in terms of making a difference (preferably without bloodshed).

 

However, well-conceived plans and effective actions certainly do matter and politics often get in the way of progress that might otherwise occur if NOT for the rhetoric (which may lead to physical aggression and almost certainly aggravates “polarization”).

 

Virtually all candidates for elective office now have websites and virtually all of them include statements about “issues” the candidates believe to be important.

 

While the value of digitally paving the politically motivated rhetorical cow path may be questionable, if not counter-productive, perhaps it might be possible to achieve broad, omni-partisan agreement on the benefit of publishing the plans of public officials on the Web in an open, standard, machine-readable format.

 

Indeed, if that is not done, usage of the term “public” in association with governmental goals may be more a matter of rhetoric than reality… fun perhaps but falling far short of optimizing practical utility (for anyone other than the most dedicated and partisan political groupies, who are free to interpret the “facts” in any way they choose).

 

In any event, for whatever it may be worth, the management section of the Trump administration's budget "blueprint" for FY 2018 is now available in StratML format at http://stratml.us/drybridge/index.htm#PMAT2017  

 

Whether section 10 of the GPRA Modernization Act (GPRAMA) is implemented will be a key bit of evidence (performance indicator) as to whether the goals of the administration's management plan are themselves being effectively implemented.  http://stratml.us/references/PL111-532StratML.htm#SEC10  

 

With reference to that provision of law, perhaps those who were willing to give the Obama administration a pass on performance accountability may be less inclined to afford the Trump administration the same consideration… unless, of course, all they really care about is rhetoric rather than results.

 

For those who do care about results in support of public objectives, it would be great if members of this group could help extend to agencies at all levels of government, worldwide, the good practice set forth in section 10 of GPRAMA.  

 

The OGP national action plans might be a good place to start.  https://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries   The fact those plans are being published in PDF is a bit of a hypocritical (do as I say not as I do) embarrassment.  https://www.opengovpartnership.org/how-it-works/develop-a-national-action-plan 

 

BTW, while I wouldn’t want to get too hung up on semantics, it seems to me that non-standard usage of words like “blueprint” and “framework” may serve to confuse (and distract) more than to inform.  At least such documents are poor substitutes for actual performance plans, with clearly specified goals, objectives, stakeholders, and performance indicators.  It also seems to me that we already have far too many “policies” (and so-called campaign “promises”) and far too few performance plans for which anyone can be held accountable … but I guess it does make for great rhetoric (and scapegoating), if that’s one’s cup of tea.

 

Owen Ambur

Chair, AIIM  <http://stratml.us/> StratML Committee

Co-Chair Emeritus,  <http://xml.govwebs.net/> xml.gov CoP

Webmaster,  <http://firmcouncil.org/> FIRM

 <https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenambur> Profile on LinkedIn | Personal  <http://ambur.net/> Home Page

 

 

 

From: rvguha@gmail.com [mailto:rvguha@gmail.com] On Behalf Of R.V.Guha
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2017 10:33 AM
To: Thomas Francart <thomas.francart@sparna.fr>
Cc: Paul Watson <lazarus@lazaruscorporation.co.uk>; Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com>; Eric Franzon <eric.franzon@gmail.com>; Joe Duarte <songofapollo@gmail.com>; schema.org Mailing List <public-schemaorg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Political Rhetoric Vocabulary

 

Yes, there are a lot of countries where there is nothing like a StateOfUnion and so it is a bit US centric.

 

But since we have a concrete use (i.e., a bunch of sites and an application) that is of general interest, I think that should be fine.

 

guha

 

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:52 PM, Thomas Francart <thomas.francart@sparna.fr <mailto:thomas.francart@sparna.fr> > wrote:

StateOfUnionReport sounds US-centric (?)

 

Le 17 mars 2017 21:09, "R.V.Guha" <guha@guha.com <mailto:guha@guha.com> > a écrit :

Revised, highly simplified first step for the core.

 

Political Discourse Vocabulary

 

New subClass of CreativeWork: Speech, PressRelease, HeadOfStateStatement, Proclamation, ExecutiveAction 

 

New subClass of Speech: InauguralAddress, CommencementAddress, CampaignSpeech, StateOfUnionReport

 

New subClass of Event: PressEvent

 

 

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 4:27 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com <mailto:danbri@google.com> > wrote:

On 16 March 2017 at 21:55, R.V.Guha <guha@guha.com <mailto:guha@guha.com> > wrote:
> You are right. Political Discourse might be a better name for it.

There are various overlapping ways in which these things might be
organized wr.t. "named hosted extension" subdomains ("lega" has been
mentioned for related work around legislation, courts etc; "civic" is
also in the air). My suggestion would be to asap get the basic term
definitions drafted into the "pending" section so that they can be
used and tested, and worry about how to name packages of terms as a
separable problem. Any attempt to partition vocab is always tricky
(e.g. ClaimReview for fact-checking is also discourse/argumentation)
but it shouldn't stop us from getting the basics in place. I'd also
like to see the earlier Legislation proposal progress, and wouldn't
want to slow either of these down by forcing a big debate for whether
they are part of a big "legal" vs "civic" vs "discourse" section....

Dan

ps. we also have http://pending.schema.org/Quotation which has some
discussion in https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/271 around
citations and date/time details



> guha
>
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 11:44 AM, Joe Duarte <songofapollo@gmail.com <mailto:songofapollo@gmail.com> > wrote:
>>
>> Okay, so now that I see the subClasses, I'm not sure this is about
>> rhetoric. I thought this vocab was going to be about the sorts of arguments
>> and appeals that people make in politics, maybe something along the lines of
>> AML: http://www.ai.sri.com/~seas/aml/
>>
>> or what this W3C group is working on:
>> https://www.w3.org/community/argumentation/
>>
>> Rhetoric is about language, persuasion, and reasoning:
>> https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhetoric
>>
>> Another way to put it: rhetoric is about content and style.
>>
>> The vocab we have so far seems more like a list of events, of venues where
>> a politician might give a speech, as well as a couple of documents a US
>> President might issue (and others have noted the US-centricity of it).
>> That's not really about rhetoric – that's just a list of things Presidents
>> do in the general domain of speeches and press releases.
>>
>> It also strikes me as odd that Political Rhetoric would be narrowed down
>> to what chief executives of a nation do. Even if we thought that rhetoric
>> meant giving a speech to this audience, then to another audience, etc.,
>> there's no reason to suppose that the only speakers we care about are chief
>> executives of countries. That's not even half of the goings-on in the domain
>> of politicians going around giving speeches and releasing statements or
>> orders. There are legislators, governors, state legislators, lobbyists,
>> activists, etc. – a lot of political action of the speeches-and-releases
>> variety doesn't even come from people in government, but people outside of
>> it. So if this is meant specifically to encode some important things about
>> what national chief executives do, I suggest calling it something more like
>> Political Events or Political Addresses.
>>
>> By the way, I'll probably try to dovetail with this at some point in the
>> next or so – I own argumentbase.com <http://argumentbase.com>  (there's nothing there yet), but I plan
>> to build a schema for arguments and positions (mostly political in nature),
>> including evidence quality, which will be very interesting and perilous as
>> far as pulling it off without ruining it with unconscious political biases
>> (I'm the lead author of this paper, so I'm always worried about political
>> bias.) I'll need a lot of help to keep it clean and maximally useful.
>>
>> Ciao,
>>
>> Joe
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 9:44 AM, R.V.Guha <guha@guha.com <mailto:guha@guha.com> > wrote:
>>>
>>> Absolutely. My hope is to have both.
>>>
>>> guha
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Eric Franzon <eric.franzon@gmail.com <mailto:eric.franzon@gmail.com> >
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My preference is for InauguralAddress, as HOS is specific to the country
>>>> level, but I would like to be able to describe entities such as those in
>>>> this page:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.westgov.org/news/357-news-2017/1341-western-governors-deliver-inaugural-speeches
>>>>
>>>> --Eric
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 3:54 PM, R.V.Guha <guha@guha.com <mailto:guha@guha.com> > wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What is the reasoning behind having both "InauguralAddress" and
>>>>>> "USPInauguralAddress"? My concern is that (unless we adopt a less US-centric
>>>>>> prefix such as "HOS" - see below) then we will end up with requests for
>>>>>> near-identical classes for many other major countries.
>>>>>
>>>>> InauguralAddress could potentially cover a much larger set of
>>>>> inaugurals. but I completely agree with your suggestion of replacing USP
>>>>> with HOS.
>>>>>
>>>>> guha
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Eric Axel Franzon
>>>>
>>>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericfranzon
>>>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/EricAxel
>>>> G+: http://http://gplus.to/ericfranzon
>>>> Online Business Card: http://ericaxel.magntize.com
>>>
>>>
>>
>