New on VoxPopuLII: Baca and Parker on Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop

Matt Baca of the New York University School of Law and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Olin Grant Parker, also of the Kennedy School, have posted Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Baca and Mr. Parker describe LexPop, a new wiki that enables the crowdsourcing of legislative drafting. LexPop appears to be the first legislative crowdsourcing platform in the U.S.

The authors explain how LexPop works by reference to the current legislation being developed at the site, a net neutrality bill to be introduced in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

In their post, the authors lay out the key ideas motivating LexPop: (1) collaborative democracy, or the empowerment of citizens to make laws that serve the public interest, rather than the needs of special interests; and (2) the application of social media technology — Gov 2.0 — to achieve this.

The authors also discuss the two methods that the public can use to write legislation on LexPop: Policy Drives, which are structured, multistage processes that facilitate deliberation during the drafting process; and WikiBills, which are unstructured drafting exercises.

Finally, the authors respond to skeptical questions frequently posed to them about LexPop. In their responses, the authors explain how successful Web-based crowdsourcing projects — including Wikipedia, Linux, and Mozilla Firefox — serve as valuable models for LexPop. The authors conclude by encouraging readers to become involved in LexPop.

This post will be of interest to all citizens who wish to participate more fully in policy making; to the public policy community; to government technologists; and to the legal informatics community.

New on VoxPopuLII: Holmes on Accessible Law

Nick Holmes of infolaw has posted Accessible Law, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Holmes discusses the state of the free access to law movement, and the challenges of making free law usable by ordinary citizens. Mr. Holmes describes FreeLegalWeb, his new free access to law service, that combines free primary law with expert legal commentary presented via blogs, to make the law more accessible to the people.

Mr. Holmes also discusses the recent debate between Bob Berring, Tom Bruce, and others over the quality of access to law provided by commercial computer assisted legal research services and free law services, as well as Jason Wilson’s concept of online legal publishing as curation.

This post will be of interest to those who develop or manage legal information systems; to the legal publishing community; to the free access to law community; and all who are interest in improving public access to legal information.