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The State of the Art in Legislative Editors and the DATA Act
(My plan was for my next blog to contain a mini-tutorial on my editor, that is still coming this weekend) A report on legislative editors has just been released in Europe. You can find the report at...
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Imagine All 50 States Legislation in a Common Format
Last week I expressed dissapointment over NCSL’s opposition to the DATA Act (H.R. 2146). Their reasoning is that the burden this might create on the state’s systems will not be affordable. Contrast...
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An Interesting Idea for how to Rethink How we are Governed
This past weekend I came across this interesting block by Abe Voelker. GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents – a Tourniquet for American Liberty. The reaction he got was amazing and totally...
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Unhackathon Wrapup
Well, we had our “unhackathon” and it was, overall, a great success. We learned a lot, introduced a lot of people to the notion of XML markup and Akoma Ntoso, and made a number of important contacts...
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XBRL in Legislation
Over the past few weeks, my posts about the HTML5 editor I have been working on have received a lot of attention. One aspect that I have noticed throughout has been people equating legislative markup...
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Legal Reference Resolvers
After my last blog post I received a lot of feedback. Thanks to everyone who contacted me with questions and comments. After all the interest in the subject, I think I will devote a few more blog posts...
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XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text
I find I’m often talking about an information model and XML as if they’re the same thing. However, there is no reason to tie these two things together as one. Instead, we should look at the information...
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2013 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
Last week I participated in the 2013 Legislative and Transparency Conference put on by the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington D.C. It was a one day event that featured numerous speakers both...
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Legislative Data: The Book
Last week, as I was boarding the train at Admiralty station in Hong Kong to head back to the office, I learned that I am writing a book. +Ari made the announcement on his blog. It seems that Ari has...
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Transparent legislation should be easy to read
Legislation is difficult to read and understand. So difficult that it largely goes unread. This is something I learned when I first started building bill drafting systems over a decade ago. It was...
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Akoma Ntoso Challenge by the Library of Congress
As many of you may have already read, the U.S. Library of Congress has announced a data challenge using Akoma Ntoso. The challenge lasts for three months and offers a $5,000 prize to the winner. In...
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U.S. House of Representatives release the U.S. Code in XML.
This week marked a big milestone for us. The U.S. House of Representatives released the U.S. Code in XML. You can see the announcement by the Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-Ohio), here. This is...
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Free Akoma Ntoso Validator
How are people doing with the Library of Congress’ Akoma Ntoso Challenge? Hopefully, you’re making good progress, having fun doing it, and in so doing, learning a valuable new skill with this important...
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Web-Based XML Legislative Editor Update
It’s been quite a while since I gave an update on our web-based XML legislative editor – LegisProweb. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has been going on. Quite the contrary, this has been a busy year...
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The U.S. Code in Akoma Ntoso
I’m on my way to Italy this week for my annual pilgrimage to Ravenna, Italy and the LEX Summer School put on by the University of Bologna. This is my fourth trip to the class. I always find it so...
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Legal Citations and XML Editing for Legislation
It’s been quite some time since my last blog post – almost six months. The reason is that I’ve been very busy. We are doing a lot of exciting development within Xcential. We are developing a number of...
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Improving Legal References
In my blog last week, I talked a little about our efforts to improve how citations are handled. This week, I want to talk about this in some more detail. I’ve been participating on a few projects to...
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2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
Last week, I attended the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference in Washington D.C. This one day conference was put on the by the U.S. House of Representatives and was held at the U.S....
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What is Transparency?
I’ve been thinking a lot about transparency lately. The disappearance of Malaysian Airline Flight 370 (MH370) provided an interesting case to look at – and some important lessons. Releasing data which...
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Imagining Government Data in the 21st Century
After the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency conference, I came away both encouraged and a little worried. I’m encouraged by the vast amount of progress we have seen in the past year, but at the...
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