When I started my blog five years ago, I said would try not to get too technical. Overall, I’ve stuck to that. However, with Akoma Ntoso now essentially standardized, I think it is time to start covering some areas of it in a little more technical detail. So, from time to time, I’m going to delve into a little technical mumbo jumbo to cover some subjects that come up frequently.
For the past two weeks I’ve been in Italy attending the LEX Summer School and Akoma Ntoso Developer’s Workshop at the Ravenna campus of the University of Bologna. This is my eighth summer school in Ravenna and my tenth overall LEX Summer School including the two U.S. editions. It’s always one of the highlights of my year.
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”.
Do you need to escape a technology eddy? In fluid dynamics, an eddy is the swirling of a fluid that causes a reverse current against a downstream flow. It often forms behind a major obstacle. The swirling motion of an eddy creates resistance to forward motion by creating a backward force. Eddies are also seen in air and electromagnetic systems.
I recently worked out that I’ve learned, on average, a new programming language every two to three years. These many languages have been part of my toolbox for somewhere between four to six years before falling away to make room for new technologies. However, there is one programming language that has been a major part of my programming repertoire for almost 22 years now – and that is JavaScript.
Yes, we’ve now built a full real-world legislative drafting editor using the final release of the new OASIS standard for legislative XML known as Akoma Ntoso. No, it wasn’t easy, but drafting tools never are. While our project is not yet a finished implementation, it shows that Akoma Ntoso is adaptable to some of the most challenging demands it will face as a world-wide standard for digital legislation.
Lately we’ve become quite Agile. More and more, our government customers have started to impose Agile methodologies on us. While I’ve always thought of our existing methodologies as being quite nimble, adopting Agile and Scrum methodologies has required some adaptation on my part.
Early in the game, I started to find Agile to be more of a hindrance than a help. The drumbeat of each sprint was wearing me out – and I started to feel the inevitable effects of burnout creeping into the my every thought.
But then a remarkable thing happened. I found myself not only defending Agile, but advocating it for our other projects. I was quite surprised to find myself having become such a big supporter. So what […]
With LegisPro technology, you can create with efficiency, accuracy, collaboration, and transparency.
While there are many challenges in the world of legislative and regulatory drafting, authoring error-free content under deadline pressure may be the most stressful one. Helping you resolve this issue was at the forefront of our developers’ minds as we created LegisPro, a modern drafting platform with an array of editing features to give you more time to draft complex documents with 100% accuracy.
Government IT professionals who are not working with today’s state-of-the-art, nimble software development tools are extremely limited in what they can control, configure, and build upon. Upgrading to LegisPro’s web-enabled legislative and regulatory drafting tools will allow you to customize your drafting, amending, publishing, and codification software and improve efficiency, performance, and responsiveness.
Government organizations today aspire to have access to sophisticated internet-based systems that deliver new ways to link and efficiently draft and share documents, increase public access, and free up drafters and IT teams from vendor lock-in. The path to achieving these goals will be much shorter once common data standards are widely accepted and used to digitally produce, classify and share parliamentary and legislative documents. At Xcential, we strongly support the worldwide adoption of the Akoma Ntoso standards for greater data transparency, improved efficiency and accuracy and reduced cost in the drafting process.
