OpenCongress — the free, open source, U.S. federal legislative current awareness and eparticipation service, sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation — has launched two new tools for enabling citizen engagement and political communication. David Moore of the Participatory Politics Foundation — and a member of our community — is one ofRead… Read more »
Ed Walters, Esq., of FastCase has posted Tear Down This (Pay)Wall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. In this post, Mr. Walters describes the extent to which U.S. state governments and for-profit legal publishers assert copyright in U.S.Read… Read more »
Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law has posted slides of a presentation entitled The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data. The slides describe an approach in which regulations from the Wetten.nl site were processed to enable improved public access, re-use, and inclusion of data in theRead… Read more »
Aspasia Papaloi and Dr. Dimitris Gouscos, both of the University of Athens Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, have published E-Parliaments and Novel Parliament-to-Citizen services, JeDEM: Journal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 3(1), 80-98 (2011). Here is the abstract: In an era of citizens’ discontentment on democratic institutions, parliaments as a democratic cornerstone, are constantlyRead… Read more »
The State Decoded is a proposed open government data platform — currently in development — aimed at providing free online access in interoperable formats to U.S. state codes, and, where possible, at connecting such codes to pending legislation and court decisions. On June 22, a Knight News Challenge grant was awarded for The State DecodedRead… Read more »
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 »
A number of legal information and legal communication issues are discussed in the U.S. Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC’s) recent report on the state of U.S. media, entitled Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age (2011). The report’s findings cover the following legal information / communication issues: In recent years, whileRead… Read more »
Full text of debates of the Lok Sabha — the lower house of the Parliament of India — from 1998 to present, are now available free of charge on Indian Kanoon, Dr. Sushant Sinha‘s free access to law service for India. Lok Sabha debates on Indian Kanoon can be retrieved along with the texts ofRead… Read more »
Tom Bruce, co-founder and director of the Legal Information Institute — and a member of our community — testified on 16 June 2011 before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Committee on House Administration of the U.S. House of Representatives. In his testimony, Tom called for the House to adopt an XML-based, point-in-time approach toRead… Read more »
OpenGovernment.org is a new transparency service for U.S. state legislative information, being developed by David Moore of the Participatory Politics Foundation and a member of our community. OpenGovernment.org is a joint effort of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. (Click here for the GovLaunch announcement of OpenGovernment.org.) For (currently) five U.S. states (California,Read… Read more »