Schuman on Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation has posted Questions from Paris on PMOs, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

In this post Mr. Schuman comments on the development of an international network of parliamentary monitoring organizations, in light of the recent conferences — Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, held 6-7 July 2012; and the International Meeting: Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures thru Open Document Standards, held 27-29 February 2012 in Washington, DC — and the drafting of a Declaration on Parliamentary Openness.

In his post Mr. Schuman reflects on the principles and values informing and motivating parliamentary monitoring organizations, the internal dynamics within such organizations, and the challenge of making such organizations sustainable.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information about Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, click here.

For more information about the International Meeting: Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures thru Open Document Standards, click here.

Verrier: Visualizations of the French Civil Code

Jacques Verrier has posted two visualizations of the French Code civil:

• Code civil – Cartographie [a video showing the evolution of the Code civil by means of network graphs]
• Code civil des Français [a network graph of the structure of the Code civil linked to the full text of the code]

According to the Code civil des Français “Aide” screen, the source of that visualization is the version of the Code civil that is available on Legifrance, the official French open legislation service. Verrier continues:

Un noeud représente un texte de loi (un article, une loi, un décret ou même une ordonnance) et deux textes sont connectés si l’un cite l’autre, le modifie, ou le créé. Le graphe contient donc tous les articles du code civil plus d’autres textes juridiques qui s’y rapportent. [...] Ce graphe est une exemple de réseau “invariant d’échelle” ou la distribution des liens suit une loi de puissance.

According to the Code civil des Français “Aide” screen:

Le graphe a été spatialisé avec Gephi et l’interface utilise sigmajs et jQuery.

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

For more information, please see the post entitled Lexmex : “voir la loi” at L’Atelier de Cartographie, and the Code civil des Français “Aide” screen.

It may be useful to compare these visualizations with those created by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of the Michigan State University College of Law and Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies:

• The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court
• Measuring the Complexity of the Law : The United States Code
• The Structure and Complexity of the United States Code
• The Structure of the United States Code

HT @LaNetscouade.

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.