{"id":39,"date":"2008-06-23T10:36:34","date_gmt":"2008-06-23T15:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2008\/06\/23\/running-with-the-big-docs\/"},"modified":"2008-06-23T12:56:33","modified_gmt":"2008-06-23T17:56:33","slug":"running-with-the-big-docs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2008\/06\/23\/running-with-the-big-docs\/","title":{"rendered":"Running with the Big Docs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bigdog.gif\"<\/a>Along with LII Editorial Boss Sara Frug, I spent yesterday morning with the folks at the Sunlight Foundation<\/a> — an organization with a compelling mission and a growing set of activities that reflect it. Founded with the idea of using Web 2.0 techniques to bring transparency to Congress, Sunlight is now becoming a rallying point for a diverse community of folks <\/a>who share the idea of making government better by making the information it generates and consumes more accessible.<\/p>\n

That’s an idea we find really attractive. We’ve been amazed — shocked, really — at how little access government has to its own work product (never mind the public). We recently learned that some branches of the Federal courts limit access to the commercial legal information services based on seniority; we understand that the same is true of Federal agencies, where junior people don’t have access to Lexis and Westlaw [note to legal research teachers: “junior” would pretty much describe our recent graduates, wouldn’t it? Think we should be teaching them more about free online sources? ]<\/em> Our e-mail is chock-full of questions and testimonials from government attorneys who rely on our edition of the US Code<\/a> and our Federal rules collections<\/a>. Our most successful projects over the last fifteen years have involved improving or re-mixing the presentation of Federal data to make it more easily used and understood by a broad audience.<\/p>\n

So our question for John Wonderlich at Sunlight was “how can we help?”.<\/p>\n

Turns out there are a number of ways. We have a lot of expertise in the arcana of Federal data online, experience with data standards, software tools that have remained in-house because we didn’t think anyone else had any use for them, and so on. There are a lot of ways that the LII can and will participate in the growing community of technologists who want to “hack government”. One of the best ways we thought of involves some help from you… particularly if you are a law librarian, legal scholar, or anyone else with experience working with government documents.<\/p>\n

We know from experience that some online documents are especially useful to people building new services on top of government information. Here are some examples of these “linchpin” documents:<\/p>\n