The Parliaments on the Net XI Conference is being held 2-3 May 2013 in London, England, UK.
Click here for archived videos of the Day 1 and Day 2 sessions.
The conference is being live-blogged at http://potn2013.tumblr.com/
The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #potn2013
Click here for archived Twitter tweets from both days of the conference.
This post links to tweets and selected resources from the 16 April 2013 launch event for the Good Law Initiative, a project of the UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel.
The main page for the initiative appears to be called Good law – Detailed guidance – GOV.UK.
Click here for video of the event.
The Office’s announcement of the Good Law initiative is called Join the good law conversation.
Twitter tweets from the launch event are now archived in .csv format.
The Twitter hashtag for the event, and for other Good Law activities, is #goodlaw
On 16 April 2013 the Office published a new report entitled When laws become too complex: Review by Office of the Parliamentary Counsel into the causes of complex legislation, which is also called the OPC Good Law Report or the Good Law Report.
For more information about the Good Law Initiative, please see Good law – Detailed guidance, or Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible.
The UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is launching “the ‘Good Law’ initiative, with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation,” at an event to be held 16 April 2013, at the Institute for Government, London, England.
The Twitter hashtag for the initiative is #goodlaw
Here are excerpts of the announcement:
Legislation is difficult. The volume of statute law and regulations, together with their piecemeal structure, level of detail, and frequent amendments, mean that citizens find law complex, hard to understand, and difficult to comply with. That can generate barriers to economic activity, as well as burdens for individuals, businesses, and communities. It obstructs good government, and it undermines the rule of law.
Efforts have been made to address aspects of the problem. Parliamentary Counsel has adopted a simple, plain English style. The National Archives have improved access to up-to-date legislation through legislation.gov.uk. The Law Commission has a programme of special Bills for law reform, consolidation and repeals. But the problem remains.
At this event, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launches the ‘good law’ initiative with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation. Join us to discuss what ‘good law’ means in practice. What do users expect from legislation? How can we make it more accessible? When is complexity in legislation desirable? And when is unavoidable?
I believe that at the launch event, John Sheridan of The National Archives will give a presentation about the role of legislation.gov.uk in the Good Law initiative.
For more information about the launch event or to register for the event, please see the event announcement.
Click here for more information about the principles underlying the Good Law project.
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:
HT @sglassmeyer
Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s GovTrack free access to law and e-participation service now includes summaries of selected legislation, according to Dr. Aviad Eilam‘s post entitled Update: Adding Bill Summaries, at GovTrack Blog.
Here is an excerpt of the post:
Here at GovTrack we’ve gotten a fair amount of complaints about wordy, incomprehensible legislative language. So we’ve started doing our own research on certain bills, in an effort to provide simple and straightforward explanations of their content and purpose. These are bills that have gotten a lot of coverage in the press and social media, have many of our users tracking them, or have piqued our interest. Oftentimes, they have all three features.
Here’s a list of the bills we’ve summarized so far, ordered by the number of users tracking them:
H.J.Res. 15: A bill to repeal presidential term limits
S. 150, H.R. 437: Assault Weapons Ban of 2013
H.R. 138, S. 33: Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
H.R. 142, S. 35: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
H.R. 21: NRA Members’ Gun Safety Act of 2013
H.R. 141: Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2013
H.R. 193: Seed Availability and Competition Act of 2013
S. 22: Gun Show Background Check Act of 2013 [...]
For more details, please see the complete post.
HT @freegovinfo
Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation has posted House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.
Here is an excerpt:
On January 30th, the House of Representatives held a public meeting on its efforts to release more legislative information to the public in ways that facilitate its reuse. This was the second meeting hosted by the Bulk Data Task Force where members of the public were included; it began privately meeting in September 2012. (Sunlight and others made a presentation at a meeting, in October, on providing bulk access to legislative data.) This public meeting, organized by the Clerk’s office, is a welcome manifestation of the consensus of political leaders of both parties in the House that now is the time to push Congress’ legislative information sharing technology into the 21st century. In other words, it’s time to open up Congress.
The meeting featured three presentations on ongoing initiatives, allowed for robust Q&A, and highlighted improvements expected to be rolled out of the next few months. In addition, the House recorded the presentations and has made the video available to the public. The ongoing initiatives are the release of bill text bulk data by GPO, the addition of committee information for docs.house.gov, and the release of floor summary bulk data. It’s expected that these public meetings will continue at least as frequently as once per quarter, or more often when prompted by new releases of information. [...]
The Bulk Data Task Force was formed in part in response to the #freeTHOMAS movement. That movement seeks free public bulk access to the contents of the THOMAS U.S. federal legislative database, which is gradually being superseded by a new database called Congress.gov.
For more details, please see Daniel’s complete post.
This clip starts at the discussion of Legislation.gov.uk, the UK open legislation platform. The discussion covers John Sheridan‘s innovative work developing Legislation.gov.uk according to principles of open Linked Data, the new project to update the UK statute book by means of expert participation, a new platform that will allow UK Government personnel to edit legislation, and new tools that produce visualizations of the quantities of UK and EU statutes and regulations.
Click here for John Sheridan’s VoxPopuLII post about the technology of Legislation.gov.uk.
Click here for slides of John Sheridan’s recent presentation on Legislation as Data.
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.
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
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:
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.]
