Kraft and Jaquith: Launch of Maryland Decoded

Seamus Kraft and Waldo Jaquith tell us about the launch of Maryland Decoded, a new free-access-to-law site for the U.S. state of Maryland, built by Seamus and colleagues at the OpenGov Foundation, on Waldo’s State Decoded platform.

Here is a description, from the Maryland Decoded “About” page:

Maryland Decoded is a non-profit, non-governmental, non-partisan implementation of The State Decoded brought to you by the folks at the OpenGov Foundation. The State Decoded is a free, open source project that provides a platform to display state-level legal information in a friendly, accessible, modern fashion. Maryland is the third state to deploy the software, with more coming soon.[...]

For more details, please see Waldo’s post, OpenGov Foundation’s post, or the Maryland Decoded site.

HT @waldojaquith

Open DC Code Hackathon: Tweets and Resources

This post links to selected resources from the Open DC Code Hackathon, held 14 April 2013 in Washington, DC, USA.

Click here for the hackathon’s Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc

• Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc

Online discussions of issues addressed at the hackathon are available at https://github.com/openlawdc/dc-decoded/issues and https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser/issues

Tom MacWright has posted an FAQ about the DC Code and the hackathon.

Eric Mill has posted a detailed description of the hackathon: What Happens When You Open the DC Code.

The results of the hackathon are now available at the openlawdc repository on GitHub: https://github.com/openlawdc

Among the resources worked on at the hackathon was The Open DC Code browser.

• Code for the Open DC Code Browser is available at https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser
• Tom MacWright points to DC Code section 5-101.03 as an example of improvements made to the Open DC Code browser at the hackathon.

Another product of the hackathon is a new online version of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, developed by Joshua Tauberer and Harlan Yu.

For background on the effort to make the DC Code freely available on the Web, please see Freeing the DC Code: An Update.

HT @konklone @sglassmeyer @tmcw @waldojaquith

Freeing the DC Code: An Update

There have been several developments in recent weeks in the effort to make the District of Columbia statutory code freely available.

The project began in February 2013 when Tom MacWright posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, complaining that no free and open version of the DC Code was available for developers or the public to use.

Discussion then occurred regarding how to make the DC Code publicly available online in a version that was free of copyright.

In March 2013, Public.Resource.Org posted a digital version of the DC Code.

Last week, the DC Council said that they would not sue Public.Resource.Org for copyright infringement for posting a digital version of the code.

This week, the DC Council posted an unofficial digital version of the DC Code, licensed with the Creative Commons CC0 license.

This week it was announced that a hackathon to hack the DC Code will be held on 14 April 2013: Open DC Code Hackathon, in Washington, DC.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc

IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc

Among the notable aspects of this project are that it demonstrates how members of the legal informatics and open-government-data communities can use the Internet to coordinate their efforts to make legal data publicly available, address challenging policy issues, and realize several of the principles of the open government data movement.

Here are selected articles and posts about the effort to make the DC Code publicly available on the Web and free of copyright restrictions:

• Tom MacWright: DC’s laws aren’t yours
• Cory Doctorow: Municipal codes of DC, free for all — liberated without permission
• Waldo Jaquith: Washington D.C. and the Work Ahead
• Steve Schultze: The District of Columbia Claims Copyright on the Law
• Martin Austermuhle: Breaking the Law to Publish the Law: Open Government Advocate Digitizes Entirety of D.C. Code
• Tom MacWright: The Open Code
• Tom Lee: The D.C. Code is Open–Come Hack on It!
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer: DC opens its “code”, embracing principles of open laws

For additional news about development of the Open DC Code, please see the comments to this post.

Thanks to Eric Mill and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network for helping to gather the sources cited in this post.

Jaquith: Two Mini-Projects spun off from The State Decoded: Subsection Identifier & Definition Scraper

Waldo Jaquith has posted Two Mini-Projects: Subsection Identifier and Definition Scraper, at The State Decoded blog.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The State Decoded project has spun off a couple of sub-projects, components of the larger project that can be useful for other purposes, and that deserve to stand alone. (Both are found on our GitHub repository.)

The first is Subsection Identifier, which turns theoretically structured text into actually structured text. It is common for documents in outline form (contracts, laws, and other documents that need to be able to cross-reference specific passages) to be provided in a format in which the structural labels flow into the text. [...]

The second mini-project is Definition Scraper, which extracts defined terms from passages of text. Many legal documents begin by defining words that are then used throughout the document, and knowing those definitions can be crucial to understanding that document. So it can be helpful to be able to extract a list of terms and their definitions. Definition Scraper needs only be handed a passage of text, and it will determine whether it contains defined terms and, if it does, it will return a dictionary of those terms and their definitions. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

The State Decoded is Waldo’s free and open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states.

Click here for other posts about The State Decoded.

HT @StateDecoded here and here

MacWright on Copyright Barriers to Creating a Free and Open DC Code

Tom MacWright of MapBox has posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, at macwright.org.

Here are excerpts:

You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code. You cannot have a public domain version of the code, despite it being legally public domain. [...]

You cannot. There is no-one to ask who can give you one and who wants to. The government only has copyright-infected copies, and the contractor has no reason to endanger their information monopoly.

To preclude misunderstandings: this is not a failure of the [DC] Council itself. [...]

The Council composes and publishes its bills and makes every effort at transparency: this is a failure of the last step, in which the bill is compiled and de-facto owned by a private contractor.

This is not a question of hacking or technology. Writing a scraper for the portal is an afternoon project, but is illegal, and can be construed as a felony by the federal government.

This is a failure of the public/private contracting system and the government’s ability to write strong and precise contracts that are geared for the internet era.

This is a failure of Westlaw and LexisNexis. It’s possibly a reiteration of a well-known court case focused on their previous attempt to do the same thing: monetize what should be a basic unit of democracy.

Next up: how this is possible, what it means, and how we can fix it.

Click here for a storify of some responses to the post.

For more details, please see the complete post.

Ed Walters of Fastcase has written powerfully about this problem in his post, Tear Down This Paywall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, at VoxPopuLII.

Waldo Jaquith has developed a free and open platform for statutory codes, called The State Decoded.

HT Dan Nagy

Jaquith: Version 0.6 of The State Decoded released

Waldo Jaquith has released version 0.6 of The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states, as explained in his new post entitled Version 0.6 Released at The State Decoded blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one—it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing laws! This is an important release of The State Decoded, one that stands to significant increase the accessibility of the project to developers, both within the software and without. A total of 23 issues were resolved, nearly all of which are towards those two goals. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @waldojaquith

Jaquith on Opening Up State Legal Data

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has posted Opening Up State Legal Data, at VoxPopuLII.

In this post Waldo provides an update on The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states.

A new version 0.5 of The State Decoded has just been released.

Some code for The State Decoded is on GitHub:

• Waldo’s repository is here;
• Others’ repositories are here.

HT @LIICornell and @waldojaquith

Jaquith on the Use of Solr Document Indexing Software in The State Decoded

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has posted The State Decoded, Now Solr-Powered, at PBS MediaShift IdeaLab.

Waldo writes:

The use of Solr has been tested out on Virginia Decoded, which is one of the state-level implementations of the State Decoded software. That work was donated by Open Source Connections, a Solr consultancy shop with an interest in good governance.

The post goes on to evaluate how Solr is working so far in Virginia Decoded.

The State Decoded is Waldo’s open legal data platform for states, being developed with support from the Knight Foundation.

The State Decoded has now been released for Virginia and Florida.

For more information on The State Decoded, please see Waldo’s State Decoded blog and my interview with Waldo about the service.

Florida Version of The State Decoded Now Available As a Public Alpha Test

The Florida version of The State Decoded open legislative data platform is now available as a public alpha test, according to Waldo Jaquith‘s post entitled Sunshine Statutes Goes into Public Alpha, at The State Decoded.

The new Florida site, called Sunshine Statutes, provides a free, open, and user-friendly version of Florida state statutes.

According to the post, developer Michael Tahani has worked on the Sunshine Statutes project, which has been supported by the Florida Society of News Editors, the First Amendment Foundation, and Rick Hirsch of the Miami Herald.

Participation in the development of Sunshine Statutes is welcome. If you would like to contribute to the development of Sunshine Statutes, feel free to contact The State Decoded.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information on The State Decoded or its first state-level version, Virginia Decoded, please see:

• Waldo’s posts about the project at The State Decoded Website
• this post about the launch of Virginia Decoded
• this interview with Waldo about the development of The State Decoded.

Jaquith Profiled as Open Government Champion by Sunlight Foundation

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded is the subject of a new video entitled OpenGov Champions: Waldo Jaquith, produced by the Sunlight Foundation.

Among Waldo’s projects discussed in the video are the open legislative data projects The State Decoded, Virginia Decoded, and Richmond Sunlight.

For more information on The State Decoded or Virginia Decoded, please see:

• Waldo’s posts about the project at The State Decoded Website
• this post about the launch of Virginia Decoded
• this interview with Waldo about the development of The State Decoded.