I got my start, like my father before me, as a draftsman. I worked for the Cleveland Switchboard Company drawing power distribution switchboards and panel boards while earning my engineering degree at university. That experience led to me getting a job at the Boeing Company supporting drafting tools as an electronics design engineer.
It was a pivotal time at Boeing, and indeed for the entire industry. When I started, we were supporting drafting tools which used computers to emulate drafting boards. But within a few years, drafting tools gave way to design tools. The reason was simple. Computers enabled a whole different way of thinking. It wasn’t just a matter of putting pencil to paper anymore. Design tools allowed you to use a computer to do the intellectual engineering work behind the schematics that would be produced. My focus shifted from schematic drawings to fault simulations – being able to identify the many ways a system might fail such that those failure modes would never happen (a skill Boeing seems to have lost of late).
The pace of change in legal informatics has been much slower — something that has been frustrating to me. The transformation I witnessed in electronic design today enables me to have a virtual supercomputer in my pocket. It’s time for legislation to make the same leap into the future.
We need to get beyond legislative drafting and rethink the process by which policy initiatives become legislation which ultimately become law. There’s much more to that process than just writing the text for the documents that become bills.
There are many stakeholders in the legislative process – constituents, special interests, politicians, government representatives, and even the lawyers that draft the legislation. Synthesizing all the information they provide into a bill draft is a complex process. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. In fact, it was realizing that XML was the best medium for transforming the legislative process, in a way like what I had experienced in electronics design, that led me to start Xcential.
We now have the tools, technologies, and the standards to make this transformation a reality. We have tools that allow the lawyers who draft legislation to focus on the intellectual process rather than the technical process of getting the formatting or wording right. We have tools that allow all the stakeholders to work together rather than individually. And we have technologies and standards that ensure the precise representation and handling of the law.
When I left Boeing, I took a job working at a design automation company to revolutionize how engineers work – something we called “concurrent design”. I was the product manager for the design management component at the very heart of that system. The company tagline reflected the vision: “Changing the way the world designs. Together.” It’s time for a such vision in our field.
