Glassmeyer: Electronic Legal Copyright, Citation, and Preservation Information Integrated with Open States Legislative Data Report Card

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted a spreadsheet that integrates the Open States Open Legislative Data Report Card ratings with the National Inventory of Legal Materials (NILM).

The NILM, compiled by the American Association of Law Libraries, lists data about each U.S. state’s online legal materials regarding copyright assertion, authentication, preservation, official status, permanent public access, uniform citation, and enactment of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act.

For more information on the NILM, please see:

• Emily Feltren‘s December 2012 AALL Washington Blawg post, Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials
• Emily Feltren and Tina S. Ching‘s February 2012 VoxPopuLII post, Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials.

HT @sglassmeyer

Videos of Legal Information-related Presentations at Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Click here for videos of legal information-related presentations at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Public access to law-related data @ Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Public access to law-related data is likely to be addressed at Kick-starting the 113th Congress, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, to be held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Public access to legal data is likely to be addressed by at least two speakers at the conference:

• Jeremy Miller, Esq., of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics: [video of presentation:] Expanding Access to OLC
• Jeremy Miller, Esq., of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics: [video of presentation:] Make CRS Reports Public
• Stephen J. Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy: [video of presentation:] Open PACER
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack: [video of presentation:] Hire a Transparency Director
• Dr. Harlan Yu of Robinson + Yu LLC: [video of presentation:] Making Law Easier to Understand

Click here for videos of many of the presentations at the conference.

Click here for more information on speakers, or to RSVP.

For videos of presentations and reports on the conference, please see the comments to this post.

HT @govtrack

[NOTE: Updated 2 February 2013 to list Jeremy Miller's and Harlan Yu's presentations and to link to video.]

New Zealand statutes on GitHub

I just learned that developer Brenda Wallace has posted many New Zealand statutes to GitHub.

The statutes appear to have been posted in 2010, and it’s unclear whether they have been updated since.

This repository is another example of GitLaw.

HT @legify_law

Sheridan on Legislation as Data

John Sheridan of the National Archives gave a presentation entitled Legislation as Data, 25 January 2013, at the Open Data Institute in London.

Click here for the presentation slides.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the event, in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #odifridays

For posts about the presentation, please see the comments to this post.

HT @JeniT

[NOTE: Updated 31 January 2013 to add a link to the slides.]

July 6-7, 2012: Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics

Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, is being held 6-7 July 2012, at Sciences Po, Paris, France.

[To see details about the conference, click here, and then, on the menu bar, cursor over "Conference / Conférence".]

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #oldp.

Click here for livestream of the conference.

Click here for collaborative notes from the conference.

The conference is sponsored by Regards Citoyens, Centre d’études européennes Sciences Po, and Le médialab Sciences Po.

Call for Proposals: Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics

A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 28 April 2012 — has been issued for Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, to be held 6-7 July 2012, at Sciences Po, Paris, France.

[To see details about the conference, click here, and then, on the menu bar, cursor over "Conference / Conférence".]

The conference is sponsored by Regards Citoyens, Centre d’études européennes Sciences Po, and Le médialab Sciences Po.

According to the conference announcement, proposals are invited:

on any aspects of parliamentary studies linked to the use of computer science, be it in order to present existing projects, to explore new informatics tool, to discuss their effects, to analyze legislatures through open parliamentary data . . .

Special attention will be given to the five following areas:

1. Law tracking. How MPs change draft bill in assemblies? Is there a way of collecting and presenting systematic data about the amendments?
2. Roll call analysis. How MPs vote in assemblies? How can their votes be presented through dynamic informatics visualization? Public access to their votes being almost always partial, what is the value of focusing only on on-line accessible votes? Also, what is the added-value of software developments for the spatial theory of voting in assemblies?
3. Discourse analysis. How MPs talk in assemblies? Studies of political discourse through lexicometry computer programs have developed strong results to that question. What is therefore the impact of a greater online access to parliamentary public debate?
4. Parliamentary informatics in developing countries. What is the state of open data related to legislatures in developing countries? What is or can be the role of the on-line access to those data for improving democracy? For fighting against corruption?
5. The pros and the cons of opening data for parliaments. Can we assess concrete improvements of parliamentary democracy through the development of on-line access to their activity? On which aspect (corruption, attendance, law quality, parliamentary turnover, electoral participation…)? Conversely, what are the threats associated with increasing transparency in legislatures?

For more information, please see the announcement (on the menu bar, cursor over “Conference / Conférence” to see details).