A new discussion of the question: Should Legal Informatics Technologies Be Open Source? is currently underway. The conversation was begun by Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group, with a new post at the Legix.info blog entitled To Go Open Source or Not? In that post, Mr. Vergottini poses two questions: Which data models should be usedRead… Read more »
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 participationRead… Read more »
Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has released an unofficial RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) for California legislation, according to a post by Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw, and a member of our community. Specifications for the API are available here and here. The publication of the specifications for Tthis API is the first product of Mr.Read… Read more »
Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw — and a member of our community — is proposing “a hackathon to create a new, open website for California’s laws and legislation,” using the SQL files available at http://leginfo.ca.gov/. Mr. Hershowitz says this effort is inspired by Waldo Jaquith‘s The State Decoded project.
An interesting discussion — among members of our community — of version control for legislation in digital formats took place this past week on Quora. Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw (GovLoop profile here) began the discussion. Contributors to the discussion included Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute (GovLoop profile here), Marci Harris of POPVOX (GovLoopRead… Read more »