Palmirani and Vitali on Legislative Drafting Systems

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID, and Professor Dr. Fabio Vitali of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione, have published Legislative Drafting Systems, in Elizabeth Buie and Dianne Murray (Eds.), Usability in Government Systems: User Experience Design for Citizens and Public Servants (pp. 133-151). Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier, 2012.

Here is the abstract:

This chapter discusses concrete experiences with the problems of introducing XML-based tools (and in particular document editors) in the legal drafting offices of a number of national and local parliaments, and the conclusions we were able to draw, especially regarding the role of traditions and the resilience of preexisting roles and job descriptions in accepting and integrating such tools.

Vergottini Releases HTML5-Based XML Editor for Legislation, with Tutorial

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has released his new HTML5-based XML editor for legislation, called AKN/Editor, with a video tutorial, in his new post entitled An HTML5-Based XML Editor for Legislation!, at his Legix.info blog.

In the post, Mr. Vergottini explains his approach to developing this editor, in terms of three reasons:

• “The editor uses an open standard for storing legislative data.”
• “The editor is built upon open web standards.”
• “Cloud-based computing is the future.”

The editor will be used at the International Legislation Unhackathon, being held in San Francisco and Stanford, California, in Denver, Colorado, and online, on 19 May 2012.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Vergottini on Building a Web-Based Legislative Editor

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted Building a Web-Based Legislative Editor, at his Legix.info blog.

Here are excerpts from the post:

With HTML5, it is now possible to build a full fledged browser-based legislative editor. For the past few months I have been building a prototype legislative editor in HTML5 that uses Akoma Ntoso as its XML schema. The results have been most gratifying. Certainly, building such an editor is no easy task. Having been working in this subject for 10 years now I have all the issues well internalized and can navigate the difficulties that arise. But I have come a long way towards achieving the holy grail of legislative editors – a web-based, standards-based, browser-neutral solution. [...]

Our plan is to use this prototype for the [International Legislation] Unhackathon at UC Hastings and Stanford Law School on May 19th and then in follow-on events elsewhere. In a few days I will provide a link to the prototype for everyone to try it out. It’s still early days and the editor is far from being a complete and robust tool suitable for production, but what I have now confirms my belief that the next generation of legislative systems will be web-based and built on open-standards.

In my next post I will provide a little mini-tutorial to set the stage for the upcoming pre-beta release.

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @arihersh.