September 17: California Law Hackathon

The California Law Hackathon — an effort to build software and tools to improve access to California legislation, on the free Web — will be held 17 September 2011.

Physical locations for the Hackathon, to date, are Berkeley, California, at the Maplight Foundation, and Denver, Colorado, at the Denver Open Media Foundation. Remote online participation will also be enabled; contact Ari Hershowitz for details.

The Hackathon‘s organizers are Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw — a member of our community — and Grant Vergottini of Xcential. [And Mr. Hershowitz told us the following on 9-15-11:] Greg Willson and Karen Suhaka are the organizers for Denver.

The Twitter hashtag for the Hackathon is #calawhack.

According to Mr. Hershowitz’s latest post, agenda items for the hackathon include:

• Cluster related code sections, for search and navigation
• Create a timeline view for each code section
• Bulk downloads for codes and legislation
• Create identifiers for useful legislative units (e.g. language on “unfair practices”)
• Track movement of statutory text from one place in the code to another

For background on the Hackathon, see these posts on Mr. Hershowitz’s blog.

For more information or to sign up, please see the Hackathon wiki or the Hackathon Facebook page.