Legis Info · Topic
Transparency
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Report on the Bússola Tech AI Conference in Brasília, Brazil
This past week I attended a conference in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, hosted by the Brazilian Senate and organized by Bússola Tech and the Organization of American States (OAS).…
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Changing the way the world legislates. Together.
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…
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Transparent legislation should be easy to read — part II
Over a decade ago, I wrote a blog questioning why federal bills are written the way they are. For someone experienced with state legislation, federal legislation is quite cryptic and…
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Changing the way the world is governed. Together.
I’ve recently been marveling at how software development has changed in recent years. Our development processes are increasingly integrated with both our government customers and our commercial partners — using…
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Connected Information
As a proponent of XML for legislation, I’m often asked why an XML approach is better than a more traditional approach using a word processor. The answer is simple –…
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Data Transparency Breakfast, LEX US Summer School 2015, First International Akoma Ntoso Conference, and LegisPro Edit reveal.
Last week was a very good week for my company, Xcential. We started the week hosting a breakfast put on by the Data Transparency Coalition at the Booz Allen Hamilton facility…
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Achieving Five Star Open Data
A couple weeks ago, I was in Ravenna, Italy at the LEX Summer School and follow-on Developer’s Workshop. There, the topic of a semantic web came up a lot. Despite…
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Look how far legal informatics has come – in just a few years
Back in 2001 when I started in the legal informatics field, it seemed we were all alone. Certainly, we weren’t – there were many similar efforts underway around the country…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Free Akoma Ntoso Validator
How are people doing with the Library of Congress’ Akoma Ntoso Challenge? Hopefully, you’re making good progress, having fun doing it, and in so doing, learning a valuable new skill…
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U.S. House of Representatives release the U.S. Code in XML.
This week marked a big milestone for us. The U.S. House of Representatives released the U.S. Code in XML. You can see the announcement by the Speaker of the House,…
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Akoma Ntoso Challenge by the Library of Congress
As many of you may have already read, the U.S. Library of Congress has announced a data challenge using Akoma Ntoso. The challenge lasts for three months and offers a…
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Transparent legislation should be easy to read
Legislation is difficult to read and understand. So difficult that it largely goes unread. This is something I learned when I first started building bill drafting systems over a decade…
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Legislative Data: The Book
Last week, as I was boarding the train at Admiralty station in Hong Kong to head back to the office, I learned that I am writing a book. +Ari made…
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2013 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
Last week I participated in the 2013 Legislative and Transparency Conference put on by the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington D.C. It was a one day event that featured…
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XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text
I find I’m often talking about an information model and XML as if they’re the same thing. However, there is no reason to tie these two things together as one.…
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Legal Reference Resolvers
After my last blog post I received a lot of feedback. Thanks to everyone who contacted me with questions and comments. After all the interest in the subject, I think…
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XBRL in Legislation
Over the past few weeks, my posts about the HTML5 editor I have been working on have received a lot of attention. One aspect that I have noticed throughout has…
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Unhackathon Wrapup
Well, we had our “unhackathon” and it was, overall, a great success. We learned a lot, introduced a lot of people to the notion of XML markup and Akoma Ntoso,…
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An Interesting Idea for how to Rethink How we are Governed
This past weekend I came across this interesting block by Abe Voelker. GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents – a Tourniquet for American Liberty. The reaction he got was…
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Imagine All 50 States Legislation in a Common Format
Last week I expressed dissapointment over NCSL’s opposition to the DATA Act (H.R. 2146). Their reasoning is that the burden this might create on the state’s systems will not be…
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The State of the Art in Legislative Editors and the DATA Act
(My plan was for my next blog to contain a mini-tutorial on my editor, that is still coming this weekend) A report on legislative editors has just been released in…
