This week I attended the 2014 LEX Summer School and the follow-on Developer’s Workshop put on by the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy. This is the fifth year that I have participated and the third year that we have had the developer’s extension.
It’s always interesting to me to see how the summer school has evolved from the last year and who attends. As always, the primary participation comes from Europe – as one would expect. But this year’s participants also came from as far away as the U.S., Chile, Taiwan, and Kenya. The United States had a participant from the U.S. House of Representatives this year, aside from me. In past years, we have also had U.S. participation from the Library of Congress, Lexus Nexus, and, of course, Xcential. But, I’m always disappointed that there isn’t greater U.S. participation. Why is this? It seems that this is a field where the U.S. chooses to lag behind. Perhaps most jurisdictions in the U.S. are still hoping that Open Office or Microsoft Office will be a good solution. In Europe, the legal informatics field is looking beyond office productivity tools towards all the other capabilities enabled by drafting in XML — and looking forward to a standardized model as a basis for a more cost effective and innovative industry.
As I already mentioned, this was our third developer’s workshop. It immediately followed the summer school. This year the developer’s workshop was quite excellent. The closest thing I can think of in the U.S. is NALIT, which I find to be more of a marketing-oriented show and tell. This, by comparison, is a far more cozy venue. We sit around, in a classroom setting, and have a very open and frank share and discuss meeting. Perhaps it’s because we’ve come to know one another through the years, but the discussion this year was very good and helpful.
We had presentations from the University of Bologna, the Italian Senate, the European Parliament, the European Commission, the UK National Archives, the US House of Representatives, and myself representing the work we are doing both in general and for the US House of Representatives. We closed out the session with a remote presentation from Jim Mangiafico on the work he is doing translating to Akoma Ntoso for the UK National Archives. (Jim, if you don’t already know, was the winner of the Library of Congress’ Akoma Ntoso challenge earlier this year.)
What struck me this year is how our shared experiences are influencing all our projects. There has been a marked convergence in our various projects over the last year. We all now talk about URI referencing schemes, resolvers to handle them, and web-based editors to draft legislation. And, much to my delight, this was the first year that I’m not the only one looking into change tracking. Everybody is learning that differencing isn’t always the best way to compute amendments – often you need to better craft how the changes are recorded.
I can’t wait to see the progress we make by this time next year. By then, I’m hoping that Akoma Ntoso will be well established as a standard and the first generation of tools will have started to mature. Hopefully our discussion will have evolved from how to build tools towards how to achieve higher levels of compliance with the standard.
I also hope that we will have greater participation from the U.S.
