Bennett on Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted @Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress.org, at CitationStylist.

Here is a summary of the post:

I am very happy to announce the first operational end-to-end research and citation pipeline for MLZ [Multilingual Zotero] and its family of legal styles. The target site is OpenCongress.org, the excellent legislative tracking site sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. A screencast covering installation, content download and document drafting (in the breathtakingly short interval of 12 minutes) is available.

Professor Bennett adds:

The screencast shows only the capture of US Code provisions affected by an amending Act. With a bit more effort, we should be able to extend the software to cover the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and statutes referred to only by their popular names. It might be awhile before that happens, but it’s on the do-list. Contributions to that effort (of any sort) would of course be most welcome.

For more information, please see the complete post.

New on VoxPopuLII: Moore on OpenGovernment.org: Researching U.S. State Legislation

David Moore of the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) has posted OpenGovernment.org: Researching U.S. State Legislation, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Moore discusses OpenGovernment.org, a new, free, open, citizen engagement and transparency service for U.S. state legislation. The service currently provides legislative data for California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas, and Wisconsin.

OpenGovernment.org is a joint project of PPF and the Sunlight Foundation.

The post describes the motivations for launching OpenGovernment.org: to increase the transparency respecting current state legislation, to increase public participation in state legislative processes, and to reduce the influence of special interests.

Mr. Moore also describes the open source technology that powers OpenGovernment.org, and the place of the service in the larger open government data ecosystem. Mr. Moore invites interested developers to participate in further development of OpenGovernment.org.

This post should be of interest to the transparency community, the e-participation community, the democratic deliberation community, the open government data community, the e-government community, and citizens who want to participate more fully in state government, as well as to developers of legislative information systems.