White House publishes Open Data Policy memorandum on GitHub, enabling eParticipation

Among the interesting features of the White House’s new Open Data Policy is that the memorandum that provides policy guidance to agencies in complying with the policy (M-13-13) was published on GitHub, using GitHub’s “Pages” service — see the White House’s Project Open Data GitHub page.

Publishing the memorandum on GitHub allows citizens to propose revisions to the policy, through GitHub’s “commit” and “pull request” functions.

The White House’s publishing choice thus enables citizen participation in the process of crafting the government’s open data policy.

Nick Judd at TechPresident reports that developers have already begun to submit revisions to the policy on GitHub.

GitHub’s Ben Balter comments on this use of GitHub to enable citizen participation in policy making: The Revolution Will Be Forked.

HT Alan deLevie

Kuhlman: legal-markdown Ruby gem

Casey Kuhlman, Esq., of Watershed Legal Services has posted legal-markdown to GitHub.

Here are excerpts from the readme:

This gem was built specifically to empower the creation of structured legal documents using markdown, and a markdown renderer. This gem acts as a middle layer by providing the user with structured headers and mixins that will greatly empower the use of md to create and maintain structured legal documents. [...]

This gem will parse YAML Front Matter of Markdown Documents. Typically, this gem would be called with a md renderer, such as Pandoc, that would turn the md into a document such as a .pdf file or a .docx file. By combining this pre-processing with a markdown renderer, you can ensure that both the structured content and the structured styles necessary for your firm or organization are more strictly enforced. Plus you won’t have to deal with Word any longer [...]

Gitlaw is markdown agnostic at this point and needs to be called independently of any markdown renderer. It is easy enough to build it into your work flow by editing the way that your markdown renderer is called. For instance you can call this file just before pandoc builds it. [...]

For more details, please see the complete documentation.

Related repositories are at https://github.com/compleatang/, including Legal-Snippets-Sublime and Legal-Markdown-Sublime.

The idea of using Markdown to edit legal documents has been raised in the context of the GitLaw discussion.

HT @BenBalter

Mill: Sunlight Foundation releases Congress API

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation points us to Sunlight Congress API released yesterday.

Here is a description:

A live JSON API for the people and work of Congress, provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

Features

Lots of features and data for members of Congress:

• Look up legislators by location or by zip code.
• Official Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
• Committees and subcommittees in Congress, including memberships and rankings.

We also provide Congress’ daily work:

• All introduced bills in the House and Senate, and what occurs to them (updated daily).
• Full text search over bills, with powerful Lucene-based query syntax.
• Real time notice of votes, floor activity, and committee hearings, and when bills are scheduled for debate.

All data is served in JSON, and requires a Sunlight API key. An API key is free to register and has no usage limits.

We have an API mailing list, and can be found on Twitter at @sunlightlabs. Bugs and feature requests can be made on Github Issues. [...]

About the source of the bill data, Eric says:

it’s built on the github.com/unitedstates work that GovTrack and Sunlight and others created, which ultimately comes from THOMAS.

He adds:

there’s a mix of other (documented) official sources too. One of the API’s purposes is to connect and de-silo information.

For more details, please see the Sunlight Congress API site.

For more information on the github.com/unitedstates repository, which was co-developed by Eric, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, please see the post entitled New Congressional Data Available for Free Bulk Download: Bill Data 1973- , Members 1789-

HT @konklone

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

French Constitution and Codes Available in Bulk on GitHub

Full text of the French Constitution and Codes, in ASCII .txt format, have been made available for bulk download on GitHub, by Legifrance.

Respecting the Constitution, texts available include:

• Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen de 1789
• Préambule de la Constitution du 27 octobre 1946
• Constitution du 4 octobre 1958
• Charte de l’environnement de 2004

Respecting the Codes, all national codes currently in force appear to be available.

According to the README file, these texts are being distributed as part of the French Government’s Grande Participation Citoyenne initiative.

This repository is another example of GitLaw.

HT Benoit Boissinot

Wonderlich on Legislative Collaboration and Version Control

John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation has an interesting new post entitled On Legislative Collaboration and Version Control, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

He writes:

Proponents of applying version control systems to law have a powerful vision: a bill or law, with its history laid bare and its sections precisely broken out, and real names attached prominently to each one. Why shouldn’t we able to have that? And since version control systems are helpful to the point of absolute necessity in any collaborative software effort, why wouldn’t Congress employ such an approach?

When people first happen upon this idea, their reaction tends to fall into two camps, which I’ll refer to as triumphalist and dismissive. [...]

The Sunlight Foundation‘s approach can probably be described as qualified triumphalism. [...]

Click here for recent developments concerning legislative version control, including the topic known as GitLaw.

Click here for a list of legislative crowdsourcing projects in the U.S., compiled by OpenCongress, that John cites in the post.

HT @EllnMllr

GitLaw in Germany: Deutsche Bundesgesetze- und verordnungen im Markdown auf GitHub = German Federal Laws and Regulations in Markdown on GitHub

German federal laws and regulations appear to have been marked up in Markdown format and placed on GitHub, at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze#german-federal-laws-and-regulations.

According to the project’s ReadMe, “The source is the XML version of the laws from www.gesetze-im-internet.de “

Scrapers and other tools associated with this project appear to be on GitHub at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze-tools.

The project seems consistent with the recent trend commonly called GitLaw.

For details on updates and other issues, please see the project’s ReadMe.

The names of the personnel on this project are unknown. The Twitter account associated with this project appears to be @bundesgit.

HT @newsycombinator and @sclopit.

Moore on an Open Version Control System for Legislation

David Moore of Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) has posted Yes, let’s stride towards an open VCS for legislation (or, GitHub for laws on OC), at the OpenCongress Blog.

David’s post is a response to Abe Voelker’s recent post entitled GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents – a Tourniquet for American Liberty.

Here is David’s description of his new post:

I finally got around to posting a rambling blog post response on OC [OpenCongress]: yes, let’s move towards an open VCS [version-control system] for legislation. My major points :

1. GitLaw is inherently desirable, both for accountability & data-driven lawmaking & mitigating corruption;
2. Powerful hurdles / objections exist, viz. that leg[islative] process is too idiosyncratic for Git to account for; putting aside institutional foot-dragging & lack of transparency culture;
3. But using GitHub or new VCS features in open-source code on OC to draft bills w[ith] public & expert commentary before they’re submitted to legacy Congressional processes is perfectly feasible today; with a focus on specific topics or issue areas where fewest changes would potentially be made to draft legislation once in official channels;
4. PPF seeks non-profit funding support to build GitLaw features in open standards & open-source Rails code on OpenCongress.

… input welcome. Drafting leg[islation] in public before submitting would be a fine & significant step forward for #opengov, it seems to me, towards a two-way continual reciprocal platform for constituent communication & participatory democracy.

David adds:

one main claim [of his post is that] better #UIs [user interfaces] are possible for #GitLaw.

For more information, please see David’s complete post.

Many thanks to David for granting permission to post his summary.

For my earlier response to Voelker, click here.

Voelker on GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents

Abe Voelker of the Wisconsin Court System has posted GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents – a Tourniquet for American Liberty, at his blog.

In this post, Mr. Voelker advocates creating a version-control and version-tracking system for U.S. federal legislation using Git version tracking software.

Mr. Voelker also endorses the creation of “a new markup language for legal doc[ument]s that would work similar[ly] to Markdown.” As a possible model he cites Fountain, “a markup syntax for screenplays.” He rejects RDF and XML formats for legislation because they are “not very readable.”

Mr. Voelker observes that sharing a common legislative format at the local, state, national, and international levels would yield benefits.

Mr. Voelker argues that using a Git-based standard format for personal legal documents, such as wills and powers of attorney, would benefit consumers by improving security for those documents, and by allowing consumers to use standard forms and avoid hiring lawyers to advise on legal document preparation.

Mr. Voelker also speculates that use of Git-based legal document standards might help consumers feel more comfortable with the law, and might “inspir[e] a move to more plain English legal wording.”

Most of these issues appear to have been discussed recently, or are the subject of current projects and meetings, but none of that discussion or activity is cited or linked to in Mr. Voelker’s post. I’ve described those discussions and activities in this post.

In the comments to that post, please feel free to identify other relevant discussions, activities, or resources that I’ve overlooked.

HT @hackernewsbot.