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Imagining Government Data in the 21st Century

After the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency conference, I came away both encouraged and a little worried. I’m encouraged by the vast amount of progress we have seen in the past year, but at the same time a little concerned by how disjointed some of the initiatives seem to be. I would rather see new mandates forcing existing systems to be rethought rather than causing additional systems to be created – which can get very costly over time. But, it’s all still the Wild Wild West of computing.

What I want to do with my blog this week is try and define what I believe transparency is all about:

1. The data must be […]
   
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Legix.Info

What is Transparency?

I’ve been thinking a lot about transparency lately. The disappearance of Malaysian Airline Flight 370 (MH370) provided an interesting case to look at – and some important lessons. Releasing data which requires great expertise to decipher isn’t transparency.

My boss, when I worked on process research at the Boeing Company many years ago, used to drill into me the difference between information and data. To him, data was raw – and meaningless unless you knew how to interpret it. Information, on the other hand, had the meaning applied so you could understand it – information, to him, was meaningful.

Let’s recall some of the details of the MH370 incident. The plane disappeared without a trace – for reasons that remain a mystery. […]

Legix.Info

2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Last week, I attended the 2014 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference in Washington D.C. This one day conference was put on the by the U.S. House of Representatives and was held at the U.S. Capitol.

The conference was quite gratifying for me. A good part of the presentation related to projects my company, Xcential, and I are working on. This included Ralph Seep’s talk on the new USML format for the U.S. Code and the Phase 2 Codification System, Sandy Strokof’s mention of Legislative Lookup and Linking and the new Amendment Impact Program (which was demonstrated by Harlan Yu (@harlanyu)), Daniel Bennett’s (@cititzencontact) talk on the legal citation […]

Legix.Info

Building a browser-based XML Editor

Don’t forget the 2014 U.S. House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference this week.

I’m now hard at work on our second generation web-based XML editor. In my blog last week, I talked about the need for and complexities of change tracking in a legislative editor. In this blog, I want to describe more of the overall motivation.

A couple years ago, we built an HTML5-based legislative editor for Akoma Ntoso. We learned a lot from the effort and had some success with a couple customers whose needs matched the capabilities of the editor. The editor was built to use and exploit, to the fullest extent, many of the new APIs added to modern browsers to support HTML5. […]

Legix.Info

Tracking Changes with Legislative Drafting

We’re in the process of rebuilding our legislative editor – from the ground up. There are many reasons why we are doing this, which I will leave to my next blog. Today, I want to focus on the most important reason of all – change tracking.

Figure 1: The example above shows non-literal redlining and two different change contexts. An entire bill section is being added – the “action line” followed by quoted text. Rather than showing the entire text in an inserted notation, only the action line is shown. The quoted text reflects a different change context – showing changes relative to the law. In subsequent versions of this bill, the quoted text will no longer show […]

Legix.Info

Improving Legal References

In my blog last week, I talked a little about our efforts to improve how citations are handled. This week, I want to talk about this in some more detail. I’ve been participating on a few projects to improve how citations and references to legal citations are handled.

Let’s start by looking at the need. Have you noticed how difficult it is to lookup many citations found in legislation published on the web? Quite often, there is no link associated with the citation. You’re left to do your own legwork if you want to lookup that citation – which probably means you’ll take the author’s word for it and not bother to follow the citation. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you will […]

Legix.Info

Legal Citations and XML Editing for Legislation

It’s been quite some time since my last blog post – almost six months. The reason is that I’ve been very busy. We are doing a lot of exciting development within Xcential. We are developing a number of quite challenging projects around the globe.

If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember that I was working on an HTML5-based XML editor. That development was two years ago now. We’ve come a long way since then. The basic editor has been stripped down, componentized, and has being rebuilt to be a far more robust, scalable, and adaptable solution. There are more details below, which I will expand upon as the editor rolls out over the next year.

Legal Citations

It was […]

Legix.Info

Sheldon’s Roommate Agreement – in Akoma Ntoso

A Legal Open Document Hackathon was held yesterday at the University of Bologna in Italy – focused on Akoma Ntoso documents. You can learn more about it here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c03pd1llrcvg7d0t0fj5sh41cbk
http://codexml.cirsfid.unibo.it/material-for-legal-open-document-dec-10/

I wasn’t able to directly participate but I had my own mini-hackathon as well. But, rather than focusing on another boring piece of legislation that nobody wants to read, I thought I would have a little fun with it. If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory television show. You could say I have a few Sheldon-like tendencies of my own.

I’ve often thought that the complex roommate […]

Legix.Info

Is it time to rethink how we are governed?

We have seen the worst of our government in the past few weeks. Our politicians have seemingly forgotten that their mission is to solve problems. Instead, they’ve regressed back to settling differences through tribal conflict. Isn’t that something that we should have put behind us centuries ago?

Why is it that our politicians can never solve complex problems?

I have always been fascinated with complex problem solving. It’s why I found myself a job at the Boeing Company at the start of my career. My job was to find ways to use computer automation to help Boeing solve ever more complex problems. While at Boeing, I was introduced to the discipline of systems engineering.

In the 1940′s, with the urgency of World […]

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The U.S. Code in Akoma Ntoso

I’m on my way to Italy this week for my annual pilgrimage to Ravenna, Italy and the LEX Summer School put on by the University of Bologna. This is my fourth trip to the class. I always find it so inspirational to be a part of the class and the activities that surround it. This year I will be talking about the many on-going projects that we have underway as well as talking, in depth, about the HTML5 editor I built for Akoma Ntoso.

Before I get to Italy, I wanted to share something I’ve been working on. It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that I’ve been working on producing a version […]