The Sun is Rising on Akoma Ntoso — and LegisPro too!

Two great news piece of news this week! First, the documentation for Akoma Ntoso has now been officially released by OASIS. Second, we’re announcing the latest version of  our LegisPro drafting platform for Akoma Ntoso, codenamed “Sunrise”.

After several years of hard work, we’ve made a giant step towards our goal of setting an international XML standard for legal documents. You can find the documents at the OASIS LegalDocML website. A special thanks to Monica Palmirani and Fabio Vitali at the University of Bologna for their leadership in this endeavour.

Later this week, Xcential will be announcing and showing the latest version of “Sunrise” version of LegisPro, at both NALIT in Annapolis, Maryland and at the LEX Summer School in Ravenna, Italy. This new version represents a long-planned change to Xcential’s business model. While we have a thriving enterprise business, we’re now focusing on also providing more affordable solutions for smaller governments.

Part of our plan is to foster an open community of providers around the Akoma Ntoso standard for legislative XML. With Akoma Ntoso now in place as a standard, we’re looking for ways to provide open interfaces such that cooperative tools and technologies can be developed. One of my goals at this years summer school in Ravenna is to begin outlining the open APIs that will enable this vision.

The new edition of LegisPro will be all about providing the very best options:

1.  It will provide a word processing like drafting capability your drafters demand — along with the real capabilities you need:
   • We’re not talking about merely providing a way to style a word processing document to look like legislation.
   • We’re talking about providing easy ways to define the constructs you need for your legislative traditions, such as–
     • a configurable hierarchy,
     • configurable tagging of important information,
     • configurable numbering rules,
     • configurable metadata,
     • oh, and configurable styles too.
   • We’re talking about truly understanding your amending traditions and providing the mechanisms to support them, such as–
     • configurable track changes, because we understand that a word processor’s track changes are not enough,
     • as-published page and line markers, because we understand your real need for page and line numbers and that a word processor’s page and line numbering is not that,
     • robust typography, because we know there’s a quite a difference between the casual correspondence a word processor is geared for and the precision demanded in documents that represent laws and regulations.
2. It will be as capable as we can make it — for real-world use rather than just a good demo:
   • We’re not talking about trying to sell you a cobbled together suite of tools we built for other customers.
   • We’re talking about working with specialists in all the sub-fields of legal informatics to provide best-of-breed options that work with our tools.
   • We’re talking about making as many options available to you as we know there is no one-size-fits-all answer in this field.
   • We’re talking about an extensible architecture that will support on-board plug-ins as well as server-side web-services.
   • We’re talking about providing a platform of choices rather than a box of pieces.
3. It will be as affordable as we can possibly make it:
   • We’re talking about developing technologies that have been designed to be easily configured to meet a wide variety of needs.
   • We’re talking about using a carefully chosen set of technologies to minimize both your upfront cost and downstream support challenges.
   • We’re talking about providing a range of purchasing options to meet your budgetary constraints as best we can.
   • We’re talking about finding a business model that allows us to remain profitable — and spreads the costs of developing the complex technologies required by this field as widely and fairly as possible.
4. It is as future-proof as we can possibly make it:
   • We’re not talking about trying to sell you on a proprietary office suite.
   • We’re talking about using a carefully curated set of technologies that have been selected as they represent the future of application development — not the past — including:
     • GitHub’s Electron which allows us to provide both a desktop and a web-based option, (This is the same technology used by Slack, WordPress, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, and hundreds of other modern applications.)
     • Node.js which allows us to unify client-side and server-side application development with “isomorphic JavaScript,”
     • JavaScript 6 (ECMAScript 2015) which allows us to provide a truly modern, unified, and object-oriented programming environment,
     • Angular and other application frameworks that allow us to focus on the pieces and not how they will work together,
     • CSS3 and LESS that allows us to provide state-of-the-art styling technologies for the presentation of XML documents,
     • the entire XML technology stack that is critical for enabling an information-centric rather than document-centric system as is appropriate for the 21st century,
     • and, of course, using the Akoma Ntoso schema for legislative XML to provide the best model for sharing data, information, tools, and other technologies. It’s truly a platform to build an industry on.
5. It is as open as we can possibly make it:
   • We’re not talking about merely using an API published by a vendor attempting to create a perception of openness by publishing an API with “open” in the name.
   • We’re talking about building on a full suite of open source tools and technologies coming from vendors such as Google, GitHub, and even Microsoft.
   • We’re talking about using non-proprietary protocols such as HTTP and WebDAV.
   • We’re talking about providing an open API to our tools that will also work with tools of other vendors that support Akoma Ntoso.
   • And, while we must continue to be a profitable product vendor, we will still provide the option of open access to our GitHub repositories to our customers and partners. (We’ll even accept pull requests)

Our goal is to be the very best vendor in the legislative and regulatory space, providing modern software that helps make government more efficient, more transparent and more responsive. We want to provide you with options that are affordable, capable, and planned for the future. We want to do whatever we can to allay your fears of vendor lock-in by supporting open standards, open APIs, and open technologies. We want to foster an Akoma Ntoso-based industry of cooperative tools and technologies as we know that doing so will be in the best interests of everyone — customers, product vendors, service providers, and the people who support them. As someone once told me many years ago, if you focus on making the pie as large as you can, the crumbs left on the knife will be plenty enough for you.

Either come by our table at NALIT in Annapolis or join us for the Akoma Ntoso Developer’s Conference in Ravenna at the conclusion of the LEX Summer School to learn more. If neither of these options will work for you, you can always learn more at Xcential.com or by sending email to info@xcential.com.