May 10-11: Legal Hackathon Miami, co-sponsored by Knight Foundation

Legal Hackathon Miami, co-sponsored by The Knight Foundation, will be held 10-11 May 2013, in Miami, Florida, USA.

The event is being held in conjunction with AT&T Mobile App Hackathon.

The top prize for best legal app is $5,000.

The Twitter account for the event is @LegalHackMiami

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #atthack

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from Legal Hackathon Miami, in .csv format.

Nancy Dahlberg describes the event in the Miami Herald.

The event has a Facebook page.

Here is a partial description of the event, from the event’s eventbrite page:

This special Mobile App Hackathon focused on legal apps is an event produced by the AT&T Developer Program in coordination with Legal Hackathon Miami, Lalchandani Simon PL, Pipeline, and New Frontier Nomads, that is designed for attendees (technical & non-technical) to build apps/mobile apps, get fed, compete for prizes across different categories and most importantly: meet new people and scout for teammates to work on new or current projects. Our hackathon will introduce you to the latest cutting edge tools to help deploy your own app with a website backend, fully hosted in the cloud.

Legal Hackathon Miami (LHM) will bring together the brightest minds from law and technology to develop applications that benefit the legal profession. Technology in the legal sector has needlessly lagged behind other industries. The LHM was developed to change that by bringing together attorneys and developers to create the next generation of cutting edge legal software. Sponsored by national and local leaders in law and tech, the LHM will give development teams access to top attorneys to brainstorm concepts and ideas as they design these valuable applications.

We Supply: Quick presentations and code samples that help to bootstrap your hacking, food to keep you going, and caffeine to keep you awake. Along with technical senseis to assist you in building faster, smarter, and with new tools.

You Bring: Your laptop, skills & ideas. Come with a collaborative, team focused mindset and/or team up in advance on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ via the #atthack hashtag. Whether you are a backend person and code in Ruby/PHP/.NET or are a designer and only work with Illustrator, you are invited to attend this event. Every group needs a good balance of talent and your development skills are needed! [...]

For more details, please see the article, Facebook page, and eventbrite page.

HT @ndahlberg

Updated as of May 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Open DC Code Hackathon: Tweets and Resources

This post links to selected resources from the Open DC Code Hackathon, held 14 April 2013 in Washington, DC, USA.

Click here for the hackathon’s Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc

• Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc

Online discussions of issues addressed at the hackathon are available at https://github.com/openlawdc/dc-decoded/issues and https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser/issues

Tom MacWright has posted an FAQ about the DC Code and the hackathon.

Eric Mill has posted a detailed description of the hackathon: What Happens When You Open the DC Code.

The results of the hackathon are now available at the openlawdc repository on GitHub: https://github.com/openlawdc

Among the resources worked on at the hackathon was The Open DC Code browser.

• Code for the Open DC Code Browser is available at https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser
• Tom MacWright points to DC Code section 5-101.03 as an example of improvements made to the Open DC Code browser at the hackathon.

Another product of the hackathon is a new online version of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, developed by Joshua Tauberer and Harlan Yu.

For background on the effort to make the DC Code freely available on the Web, please see Freeing the DC Code: An Update.

HT @konklone @sglassmeyer @tmcw @waldojaquith

Freeing the DC Code: An Update

There have been several developments in recent weeks in the effort to make the District of Columbia statutory code freely available.

The project began in February 2013 when Tom MacWright posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, complaining that no free and open version of the DC Code was available for developers or the public to use.

Discussion then occurred regarding how to make the DC Code publicly available online in a version that was free of copyright.

In March 2013, Public.Resource.Org posted a digital version of the DC Code.

Last week, the DC Council said that they would not sue Public.Resource.Org for copyright infringement for posting a digital version of the code.

This week, the DC Council posted an unofficial digital version of the DC Code, licensed with the Creative Commons CC0 license.

This week it was announced that a hackathon to hack the DC Code will be held on 14 April 2013: Open DC Code Hackathon, in Washington, DC.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc

IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc

Among the notable aspects of this project are that it demonstrates how members of the legal informatics and open-government-data communities can use the Internet to coordinate their efforts to make legal data publicly available, address challenging policy issues, and realize several of the principles of the open government data movement.

Here are selected articles and posts about the effort to make the DC Code publicly available on the Web and free of copyright restrictions:

• Tom MacWright: DC’s laws aren’t yours
• Cory Doctorow: Municipal codes of DC, free for all — liberated without permission
• Waldo Jaquith: Washington D.C. and the Work Ahead
• Steve Schultze: The District of Columbia Claims Copyright on the Law
• Martin Austermuhle: Breaking the Law to Publish the Law: Open Government Advocate Digitizes Entirety of D.C. Code
• Tom MacWright: The Open Code
• Tom Lee: The D.C. Code is Open–Come Hack on It!
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer: DC opens its “code”, embracing principles of open laws

For additional news about development of the Open DC Code, please see the comments to this post.

Thanks to Eric Mill and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network for helping to gather the sources cited in this post.

Updated as of March 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Legal Informatics Projects Featured at Open Data Day DC 2013

The program for Open Data Day DC 2013, also called Open Data Day 2013 Hackathon – DC Metro — to be held 23 February 2013 in Washington, DC, USA — includes at least four legal informatics projects:

• Contract/Procurement Visualization Sprint (Visualizing.org) [...]
• Open DC Zoning Data (@andrewsalzberg) [...]
• Parse dates and legal citations from RECAP documents [...]
• Discover Bill Pedigree

The Twitter hashtags for the event appear to be #opendataday #dc

Updates about the Open Data Day DC 2013 activities are available on the event’s hackpad.

If you know of other legal informatics projects to be discussed at Open Data Day DC 2013, please mention them in the comments.

Information about other legal hacking events appears here and here.

HT @JoshData

20-21 January Legal Hackathon re: Trademark Technology, Silicon Valley

Tim Hwang tells us that there will be a legal hackathon focusing on trademark technology, on 20-21 January 2013, in Mountain View, California, USA, sponsored by AttorneyFee.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #TMHacks

Here is a description of the event:

AttorneyFee is holding its first hackathon ever, and we want you to join us! The event will kick off at 10:00 AM on January 20th and go till the next day at 5:00 PM. Copious amounts of caffeine, pizza, and beer will be provided. Come with a team, or come on your own and join a team. Come with an idea to work on, or join our ideation session in the morning to develop an idea. At the conclusion of the event each team will present their project, and the coolest project will win some swag.

The focus of the hackathon will be trademarks. Why trademarks, you ask? We recently finished building three super valuable APIs for trademarks that we hope will enable more open innovation in the space: (i) the AF TM applications API, (ii) the AF TM attorneys API, and (iii) the AF TM logos API. Together, these three APIs should enable devs to build a slew of cool new apps to disrupt the trademark industry. [...]

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

HT Tim Hwang

Updated as of January 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Law Hack Camp London postponed until April

Amanda Bancroft announced today that the legal hacking event Law Hack Camp in London has been postponed until April 2013.

Bancroft says she will announce precise dates and other details shortly.

The Law Hack Camp Website is at http://lawhackcamp.com/ and its Twitter handle is @LawHackCamp.

HT @_millymoo

Call for Papers: Law Hack Camp, Legal Hackathon, London, 26-27 January 2013

[NOTE: Law Hack Camp has been postponed until April, @_millymoo announced on 6 January 2013.]

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 25 December 2012 — has been issued for Law Hack Camp, a legal hackathon to be held 26-27 January 2013, London, England, UK.

The event is being organized by Amanda Bancroft and Jon Harman.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #lawhackcamp

The Twitter account for the event is @lawhackcamp

For more details, please see the conference Website and the contact information listed there, or contact the organizers.

Click here for information on other recent legal hacking events.

HT @_millymoo