Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

New Discussion: Should Legal Informatics Technologies Be Open Source?

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:

1. Which data models should be used in legal informatics systems?
2. Which aspects of these models should be open source?

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw has responded with his new post at the Tabulaw blog, entitled Legislative Model: How Much to Open Source?

This topic has been much discussed in the past in the free-access-to-law community. On this blog, I’ve discussed several aspects of this topic. What are your views on this topic today?

Quora Discussion: Version Control for Legislation

An interesting discussion of version control for legislation in digital formats took place this past week on Quora.

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw began the discussion.

Contributors to the discussion included Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, Marci Harris of POPVOX, Sean McGrath of Propylon, John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK), and Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX.