May 10-11: Legal Hackathon Miami, co-sponsored by Knight Foundation

Legal Hackathon Miami, co-sponsored by The Knight Foundation, will be held 10-11 May 2013, in Miami, Florida, USA.

The event is being held in conjunction with AT&T Mobile App Hackathon.

The top prize for best legal app is $5,000.

The Twitter account for the event is @LegalHackMiami

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #atthack

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from Legal Hackathon Miami, in .csv format.

Nancy Dahlberg describes the event in the Miami Herald.

The event has a Facebook page.

Here is a partial description of the event, from the event’s eventbrite page:

This special Mobile App Hackathon focused on legal apps is an event produced by the AT&T Developer Program in coordination with Legal Hackathon Miami, Lalchandani Simon PL, Pipeline, and New Frontier Nomads, that is designed for attendees (technical & non-technical) to build apps/mobile apps, get fed, compete for prizes across different categories and most importantly: meet new people and scout for teammates to work on new or current projects. Our hackathon will introduce you to the latest cutting edge tools to help deploy your own app with a website backend, fully hosted in the cloud.

Legal Hackathon Miami (LHM) will bring together the brightest minds from law and technology to develop applications that benefit the legal profession. Technology in the legal sector has needlessly lagged behind other industries. The LHM was developed to change that by bringing together attorneys and developers to create the next generation of cutting edge legal software. Sponsored by national and local leaders in law and tech, the LHM will give development teams access to top attorneys to brainstorm concepts and ideas as they design these valuable applications.

We Supply: Quick presentations and code samples that help to bootstrap your hacking, food to keep you going, and caffeine to keep you awake. Along with technical senseis to assist you in building faster, smarter, and with new tools.

You Bring: Your laptop, skills & ideas. Come with a collaborative, team focused mindset and/or team up in advance on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ via the #atthack hashtag. Whether you are a backend person and code in Ruby/PHP/.NET or are a designer and only work with Illustrator, you are invited to attend this event. Every group needs a good balance of talent and your development skills are needed! [...]

For more details, please see the article, Facebook page, and eventbrite page.

HT @ndahlberg

Legal Informatics Projects Featured at Open Data Day DC 2013

The program for Open Data Day DC 2013, also called Open Data Day 2013 Hackathon – DC Metro — to be held 23 February 2013 in Washington, DC, USA — includes at least four legal informatics projects:

• Contract/Procurement Visualization Sprint (Visualizing.org) [...]
• Open DC Zoning Data (@andrewsalzberg) [...]
• Parse dates and legal citations from RECAP documents [...]
• Discover Bill Pedigree

The Twitter hashtags for the event appear to be #opendataday #dc

Updates about the Open Data Day DC 2013 activities are available on the event’s hackpad.

If you know of other legal informatics projects to be discussed at Open Data Day DC 2013, please mention them in the comments.

Information about other legal hacking events appears here and here.

HT @JoshData

Law Hack Camp London postponed until April

Amanda Bancroft announced today that the legal hacking event Law Hack Camp in London has been postponed until April 2013.

Bancroft says she will announce precise dates and other details shortly.

The Law Hack Camp Website is at
http://lawhackcamp.com/
and its Twitter handle is @LawHackCamp.

HT @_millymoo

Call for Papers: Law Hack Camp, Legal Hackathon, London, 26-27 January 2013

[NOTE: Law Hack Camp has been postponed until April, @_millymoo announced on 6 January 2013.]

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 25 December 2012 — has been issued for Law Hack Camp, a legal hackathon to be held 26-27 January 2013, London, England, UK.

The event is being organized by Amanda Bancroft and Jon Harman.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #lawhackcamp

The Twitter account for the event is @lawhackcamp

For more details, please see the conference Website and the contact information listed there, or contact the organizers.

Click here for information on other recent legal hacking events.

HT @_millymoo

Hwang on Scoping Legal Hacking

Tim Hwang of the University of California Berkeley School of Law has posted Letter One: Scoping “Legal Hacking”, at the Robot, Robot & Hwang Blog.

In this post Tim defines the terms “legal hackers” and “legal hacking” respecting three dimensions of meaning: “The Organizational and Human Capital of the Lawyer,” “The Tools of The Lawyer,” and “An Approach Towards The Law.” Respecting the last dimension, he explains:

Lawyers, then, are legal hackers insofar as they play with the law, find loopholes, stretch definitions, and make novel arguments. Technologists are legal hackers insofar as they launch technologies which disrupt existing legal distinctions, subvert the application of law, or otherwise raise questions about the integrity of the system.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Click here for more on recent legal hacking events.

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.

Posts and Resources for Open Legislation Hackathon 2012, Victoria, BC

Here are resources related to the Open Legislation Hackathon 2012, held 2 June 2012, at Queen’s Printer British Columbia, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

The event was sponsored by “the Queen’s Printers Association of Canada (QPAC) and the Open Data Society of BC.”

Click here for archived tweets from the event (in .csv format). The Twitter hashtag for the event is #QPhack.

Click here for a spreadsheet describing projects worked on during the event (scroll to the projects with Timestamp of 6/2/2012).

The projects worked on at the event that involved legal data include the following:

• LexView — developed by Lexum — “an end-user interface for publishing large structured documents on the web.”
• You Rule — developed by Herb Lainchbury — “an application that monitors legislation and let’s you know what’s changed. It lists each change as a separate page so that citizens can view, rate and comment on the change.”
• Law Server — developed by Kevin McArthur — “[a] tool for developers [that] uses a standard Uniform Resource Locator (URL) schema for legislative data, and allows the easy translation into different data formats.”

Here are posts about the event that I’ve been able to identify:

• Loren Mullane’s post: Queen’s Printers Continue to Innovate
• Herb Lainchbury’s post: QP Hackathon Summary
• DataBC’s post before the event: Legislation Hackathon in Victoria June 2nd

Click here for upcoming legal hacking events.

On Twitter, the hashtags for legal hacking news are #legalhack and #legalhacks.

Regards Citoyens Publishes Legislative Open Data About l’Assemblée nationale Française: NosDéputés

Regards Citoyens, the French citizen engagement and open data organization, has posted Embarquons NosDéputés pour les législatives 2012!, at the Regards Citoyens Blog.

In this post, the members describe new data that has been added to NosDéputés.fr, an open legislative data site respecting the activities of l’Assemblée nationale Française, the French national Parliament.

According to the post, NosDéputés.fr now includes data respecting representatives’ activities during the entire 13th legislature (beginning in 2007), as well as during the past 12 months.

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou of Regards Citoyens discussed the new data last week on the Ecrans.fr podcast/Webcast.

Regards Citoyens is co-sponsoring a conference on open legislative data: Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, to be held 6-7 July 2012, in Paris, France.

For more information, please see the complete post or the podcast/Webcast.

Click here for other upcoming legal hacking events.

June 2: Open Legislation Hackathon, Victoria, BC

An Open Legislation Hackathon will be held 2 June 2012, at Queen’s Printer British Columbia, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, according to this announcement.

According to the announcement, the event is sponsored by “the Queen’s Printers Association of Canada (QPAC) and the Open Data Society of BC.”

Here is the description of the event:

It’s a chance to build mobile or online applications using legislative data from across the provinces of Canada.[...]

The goal is to share the experience, findings, and difficulties of creating online apps based on legislative data published by the different Queen’s Printers of Canada. Present your apps and experience to representatives of the annual QPAC conference from across Canada! Your app and presentation may change the way other provinces look at legislative data, online licensing and open data policies!

What are we building?

Anything you like! It would be great if it uses legislative data. We want to see what you can come up with! Focus on multiple jurisdictions, or just one.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @kimnayyer and @ColinLaChance.

Click here for other upcoming legal hacking events.

Call for Presentations: LawTechCamp London 2012

Presentation proposals — with submission deadline of 25 May 2012 — are invited for LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — to be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

Click here to submit a presentation proposal.

Here is a description of the event:

lawTechCamp is a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals including bloggers, twitters, legal-technology lawyers, social networkers, and those curious about new media and the law. Anyone with an interest in technology, law, and innovation–especially in the wake of UK deregulation–will want to attend.

Building off the strength of lawTechCamp Toronto – LawTechCamp London will be the first such event held in outside of North America.

lawTechCamp is not just for lawyers. If you are interested in the intersection of law and technology, such as legal issues facing startups, access to justice issues, or someone just interested in technology or law, then please join us – and bring a friend or colleague.

This event is casual, with active participation between the audience and the workshop presenters and event-attendees. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Dr. Richard Susskind.

This event is brought to you by the following organizers:

• Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
• Renee Newman Knake, Michigan State University College of Law
• Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of MyLegalBriefcase.com
• Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Law School
• John Flood, University of Westminster Law School
• David Allison, The College of Law
• Jon Harman, The College of Law 

LawTechCamp London 2012 is co-sponsored by Michigan State University College of Law, The University of Westminster, and The College of Law.

For more information, please see the LawTechCamp London 2012 Website, or the post at Computational Legal Studies.

HT Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz.