The other day a friend came to me because he heard about the openlaws.eu project. He said: “Hey, openlaws sounds great – does that mean that I can write my own laws now?”. I had to tell him no, but that it was almost as good as that… Continue reading »
VoxPopuLII
New voices in legal information
Last June after a relatively brief 18 months of negotiations, the European Parliament adopted a proposal for a revised PSI Directive. Quite something if one takes into account the ‘horizontal’ and far reaching effects of the new rules, affecting the information position of almost any public sector body across Europe. So what’s in the new Directive? And how should we judge it?
High hopes
“Today we can celebrate our efforts to bring government data closer to citizens and businesses in Europe. We are finally getting the much needed legal framework to boost the economy and create new jobs.” This is how EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes announced the adoption of the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 2003/98/EC on re-use of public sector information in June 2013. Ms Kroes had initiated the process in December 2011, acknowledging evidence (in particular demonstrated in the the POPSIS Report and the Vickery Report) that European socio-economic potential was unexploited and complaints from large groups within the Open Data community that the 2003 legal framework required to be reviewed. This legal framework had been put in place by the European legislator with the aim of opening up Member States’ public informational resources in order to stimulate economic growth and enhance transparencies and to take away barriers that may refrain them to flow freely across Europe.
Slight sense of disappointment
Truly believing in the spirit of Open Data, but aware of the sensitivity of the subject especially in these times of economic crisis, I must confess that an appraisal of the outcome against the ambitions set in December 2011 leaves a slight sense of disappointment, as some of the more forceful, much-needed measures have been watered down. In my view, the original proposal held some remarkable provisions that would have significantly changed the equation between public data holders and re-users. Alas, they have been lost in the trenches of negotiations in Parliament and the Council in particular.
No charges and a watchdog
The first novelty the proposal had sought to introduce was a stringent pricing regime for public sector information (PSI), as a rule disallowing public sector bodies (PSBs) from charging above the marginal (reproduction, provision and dissemination) cost level, which is practically zero in a digital environment. Exceptions were to be allowed only if this would entail instant bankruptcy of the PSB. In such exceptional cases, higher charges could be set. The PSB had to show that the charges were determined by objective, transparent and verifiable criteria and obtain approval from an independent authority. That was the second novelty introduced. The independent re-use watchdog was also to be endowed with specific regulatory powers regarding PSI re-use, serving as a means of redress. Its decisions were to be binding and, in doing so, would mimic the fairly successful models used in the United Kingdom and Slovenia.
Lost in battle
Alas, we lost both. Now the Directive, by its article 4(4), also allows the independent authority to be an existing
national judicial authority. This means lengthy and costly procedures instead of swift decisions, which are much needed by re-users, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Article 6 continues to refer to a marginal cost regime by default, but the system is as solid as Swiss cheese: PSBs that are required to generate revenue to cover a substantial part of their costs relating to the performance of their public task, as well as documents for which the PSB is required to generate sufficient revenue to cover a substantial part of the costs relating to their collection, production, reproduction and dissemination are exempted. This means that costs can be recovered, including a reasonable return on investment (being the ‘old’ article 6 regime). However, even this cloud has silver lining: terms are to be set up-front and published, including the structure and the principles underlying the charges.
Synchronization access and re-use
Of course the revised Directive also introduces some new elements that are a step forward. Firstly, it introduces a new paradigm. Where under the old regime PSBs could disallow re-use of publicly accessible documents, the new Directive synchronizes access and re-use: if there is a right of access, then there is a right of re-use. And although PSBs can still impose conditions, including charges, under article 8(1), those conditions shall not unnecessarily restrict possibilities for re-use and shall not be used to restrict competition. This implies a kind of ‘compulsory licence’ for material protected by (Crown) copy and data base rights.
Accessibility
Secondly, the new Directive addresses the issue of accessibility. According to consideration 11, PSBs should make documents available through open and machine readable formats and together with their metadata, at the best level of precision and granularity, where possible and appropriate, in a format that ensures interoperability, e.g. by processing them in a way consistent with the principles governing the compatibility and usability requirements for spatial information under the INSPIRE Directive. Although not incorporated in the actual provisions — which are to be transposed into national legislation — this is a clear encouragement to the Member States to rely on the INSPIRE framework also for other areas of PSI. This being said, the Directive (article 5(2)) explicitly states that this does not imply an obligation to create or adapt documents or provide extracts in order to comply with that paragraph if this would involve disproportionate effort, going beyond a simple operation. Put differently, the success of expanding the INSPIRE regime will depend on the willingness of individual PSBs. One would expect that this will happen in those sectors that are close to or partly reliant on INSPIRE-related information.
The final judgement
My feeling is that if we ever had a chance to truly accelerate the adoption of Open Data in a fairly harmonised European context, this was definitely the moment: the Open Data movement had managed to arouse political attention and we had a Commissioner with a genuine connection to the dossier, where the PSI Directive is fuelled and driven by competition law spirit and concepts. On the other hand, looking at the bigger picture, the new Directive is the next and necessary step of a process started more than 14(!) years ago with the adoption of the 1999 Green Paper ‘Public Sector Information : A Key Resource for Europe’. It is part of the transition that we are witnessing: governments are gradually returning to their core public tasks and enabling companies and citizens to avail of opportunities (and take on responsibilities no longer catered for) and to fill the vacuum created by this retreat. This appears to be an irreversible process. The watering down by the Council (read: Member States, including some of the big ones like the UK) of the charging and redress provisions should be put in context of the time needed to reconsider public data holders’ funding models that are moving from fee-based models to general State budget financing. This shift is unmistakably taking place, judging from the ever increasing number of PSBs adopting Open Data policies across Europe. The new Directive will catalyse this process, where the transposition obligation will put these points on the political agenda for the next two years.
Exciting times!
Marc de Vries has professional degrees in both law and economics (Utrecht 1991). He has been active in the field of PSI re-use for more than 15 years, both at the national and European levels. Any comments are welcome: marc@thegreenland.eu | www.thegreenland.eu | +31 653897002 | http://www.linkedin.com/pub/marc-de-vries
VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.
Sep 302012
At my organization, the Sunlight Foundation, we follow the rules. I don’t just mean that we obey the law — we literally track the law from inception to enactment to enforcement. After all, we are a non-partisan advocacy group dedicated to increasing government transparency, so we have to do this if we mean to serve one of our main functions: creating and guarding good laws, and stopping or amending bad ones.
One of the laws we work to protect is the Freedom of Information Act. Last year, after a Supreme Court ruling provided Congress with motivation to broaden the FOIA’s exemption clauses, we wanted to catch any attempts to do this as soon as they were made. As many reading this blog will know, one powerful way to watch for changes to existing law is to look for mentions of where that law has been codified in the United States Code. In the case of the FOIA, it’s placed at 5 U.S.C. § 552. So, what we wanted was a system that would automatically sift through the full text of all legislation, as soon as it was introduced or revised, and email us if such a citation appeared.
With modern web technology, and the fact that the Government Printing Office publishes nearly every bill in Congress in XML, this was actually a fairly straightforward thing to build internally. In fact, it was so straightforward that the next question felt obvious: why not do this for more kinds of information, and make it available freely to the public?
That’s why we built Scout, our search and notification system for government action. Scout searches the bills and speeches of Congress, and every federal regulation as they’re drafted and proposed. Through the awe-tacular power of our Open States project, Scout also tracks legislation as it emerges in statehouses all over the country. It offers simple and advanced search operators, and any search can be turned into an email alert or an RSS feed. If your search turns up a bill worth following, you can subscribe to bill-specific alerts, like when a vote on it is coming up.
This has practical applications for, really, just about everyone. If you care about an issue, be it as an environmental activist, a hunting enthusiast, a high (or low) powered lawyer, or a government affairs director for a company – finding needles in the giant haystack of government is a vital function. Since launching, Scout’s been used by thousands of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, by professionals and ordinary citizens alike.
Search and notifications are simple stuff, but simple can be powerful. Soon after Scout was operational, our original FOIA exemption alerts, keyed to mentions of 5 U.S.C. § 552, tipped us off to a proposal that any information a government passed to the Food and Drug Administration be given blanket immunity to FOIA if the passing government requested it.
If that sounds crazily broad, that’s because it is, and when we in turn passed this information onto the public interest groups who’d helped negotiate the legislation, they too were shocked. As is so often the case, the bill had been negotiated for 18 months behind closed doors, the provision was inserted immediately and anonymously before formal introduction, and was scheduled for a vote as soon as Senate processes would allow.
Because of Scout’s advance warning, there was just barely enough time to get the provision amended to something far narrower, through a unanimous floor vote hours before final passage. Without it, it’s entirely possible the provision would not have been noticed, much less changed.
This is the power of information; it’s why many newspapers, lobbying shops, law firms, and even government offices themselves pay good money for services like this. We believe everyone should have access to basic political intelligence, and are proud to offer something for free that levels the playing field even a little.
Of particular interest to the readers of this blog is that, since we understand the value of searching for legal citations, we’ve gone the extra mile to make US Code citation searches extra smart. If you search on Scout for a phrase that looks like a citation, such as “section 552 of title 5”, we’ll find and highlight that citation in any form, even if it’s worded differently or referencing a subsection (such as “5 U.S.C. 552(b)(3)”). If you’re curious about how we do this, check out our open source citation extraction engine – and feel free to help make it better!
It’s worth emphasizing that all of this is possible because of publicly available government information. In 2012, our legislative branch (particularly GPO and the House Clerk) and executive branch (particularly the Federal Register) provide a wealth of foundational information, and in open, machine-readable formats. Our code for processing it and making it available in Scout is all public and open source.
Anyone reading this blog is probably familiar with how easily legal information, even when ostensibly in the public domain, can be held back from public access. The judicial branch is particularly badly afflicted by this, where access to legal documents and data is dominated by an oligopoly of pay services both official (PACER) and private-sector (Westlaw, LexisNexis).
It’s easy to argue that legal information is arcane and boring to the everyday person, and that the only people who actually understand the law work at a place with the money to buy access to it. It’s also easy to see that as it stands now, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If this information is worth this much money, services that gate it amplify the political privilege and advantage that money brings.
The Sunlight Foundation stands for the idea that when government information is made public, no matter how arcane, it opens the door for that information to be made accessible and compelling to a broader swathe of our democracy than any one of us imagines. We hope that through Scout, and other projects like Open States and Capitol Words, we’re demonstrating a few important reasons to believe that.
Eric Mill is a software developer and international program officer for the Sunlight Foundation. He works on a number of Sunlight’s applications and data services, including Scout and the Congress app for Android.
VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.
[Editor’s Note: For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see, among others: Nick Holmes, Accessible Law; Matt Baca & Olin Parker, Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop; and John Sheridan, Legislation.gov.uk
As guest bloggers to this site, we have been asked to write about big ideas. We’ll get to those. But first, a note about hackathons.
Could legal hackathons be like this one day?
Hackathons used to be the exclusive domain of soda-and-coffee-guzzling, pizza-eating, all-night hacking, highly competitive computer programmers. The result of such a hackathon is often supposed to be a cool app (like the forerunner of Twitter) that is even cooler because it was built in the compressed schedule of the event. More recently, hackathons have been popping up in a variety of places, with some unexpected contexts and sponsors including the U.S. House of Representatives, NASA, Brooklyn Law School, New York City government, and others. These events serve as a way to prove (or build) the sponsor’s tech credentials and to cross-fertilize policy and technology expertise. There has been some handwringing and thoughtful commentary about the expansion of “civic” hackathons and what sustainable outcomes they produce.
As co-organizers, with Karen Suhaka, Greg Wilson, Charles Belle and others, of two legislative focused, hackathon-inspired events–the California Law Hackathon, and the International Legislation Un-hackathon–we can attest to their value in bringing engineers and lawyer and policy folks together. We can give some insights into the kinds of benefits these events have had in propelling efforts on legislative data standards, and some of the advances that have taken place in the development of these standards over the last year.
Big Idea: Legislative Data Standards
And now to the big idea: to represent all the world’s legislation in a standard structured data format. That’s actually two big ideas: (1) putting legislation into a structured data format, and (2) designing that format so that it is compatible with the wide variety of laws and legislative document types worldwide.
There are reasons for doing these things: First, introducing structured data to legislation can make it possible to search and analyze the law with greater precision and efficiency. And second, having a common standard can permit more comprehensive bill-tracking and comparison between jurisdictions.
California Bill with Metadata
It also can make it possible for legislatures with small (and shrinking) budgets to benefit from some of the same bill drafting software that is being developed for much larger jurisdictions. (Full disclosure: Xcential has developed such software for more than ten years, including the drafting platform used by the State of California.)
In the age of Google, these ideas may not seem so big; in fact, they are a subset of Google’s far-reaching mission. However, legislation is a corner of the world’s information that Google has not yet addressed in a systematic way. And as regular readers of this blog know, legislation presents its own hurdles, technical and bureaucratic (not necessarily in that order), that make this both an interesting and a challenging problem. One of the challenges is that the kind of people who generally work with data (we’ll call them engineers) and the kind of people who generally work with legislation (we’ll call them lawyers and policy folks) don’t often work on data and legislation together. One of us, a lawyer and policy type, has made this point graphically (and somewhat hyperbolically) in a Quora response to a question about whether version control software could be used for legislation. That question, and a subsequent discussion generated in response to a blogpost by software engineer Abe Voelker about version control for legislation, drew in many engineers and some lawyers and policy folks.
For software engineers who consider such things, it is very attractive to think about treating legal text as if it were software code; we could automatically highlight and cross-validate key terms, run test cases, automate redlining and version control, etc. It would be easy to see what the state of the law was at any particular point in time, and to trace the series of amendments that got us into the mess we’re in today. This desire is often expressed as “What if we had a Github for legislation?” On the other hand, people who work closely with legislation–researching it, drafting it or developing information systems to deal with it–tend to see the many places that the analogy between computer code and legal code break down. Legal texts have been shaped over hundreds of years by technologically conservative institutions, using print-based systems.
The full transformation of law to digital information is not going to happen overnight. While most law is already accessible in electronic format (often pdf), it is not encoded in a way that software engineers could start using their favorite text-munching tools. One of us, an engineer, has described this as the difference between computerization and automation. The move toward better digital tools for automating legislative drafting and research tasks will require more dialogue and working exchanges between engineers and the lawyers and policy folks.
That brings us back to hackathons.
What is a Legislative Hackathon?
Recognizing the need to bring lawyers and engineers together in order to implement our big idea(s), and appreciating the valuable bandwagon that hackathons have become, we decided to jump onboard. The first event we organized, the California Law Hackathon, was hosted just over a year ago, in September 2011, in Berkeley at the offices of Maplight, and in Denver by Karen Suhaka’s team at BillTrack50. The event focused on building web-based visualization tools to track the timeline of amendments to California legislation, and to link particular amendments, through their legislative sponsors, to particular donors or interest groups. We were joined remotely by a number of international participants, including John Sheridan, head of e-services for legislation.gov.uk, and a fellow guest contributor to this blog. As one participant noted, we learned a great deal at the event, including the limits placed on us by the existing data. Neither the legislative record, nor the donations databases are detailed enough to trace influence in politics in the way we hoped. This helped spark an interest in a more in-depth exploration of legislative data formats, and in particular how more and better metadata could be added to legislation.
That led to the International Legislation Un-hackathon, held simultaneously at UC Hastings, Stanford and Denver, with participants from the University of Bologna (Ravenna campus) and around the world. So assuming you can get engineers together with lawyers and policy folks, what do you do with them? We decided that we’d need a user-friendly tool that could be used to explore and add metadata to legislation from around the world. This could highlight a developing legislative XML standard, Akoma Ntoso (more about this standard soon), and give hands-on experience to lawyer and policy types kinds of text and analysis tools that engineers take for granted.
Hacking With A Legislative Editor
So one of us (the engineer, naturally) started building a web-based editor for legislation, while the other (the lawyer, naturally) started organizing the next hackathon. Of course, thought the lawyer, it would just
Legislative Editor at legalhacks.org
be a matter of time before all governments worldwide use such editors to draft their laws and regulations in a standard data format.
Advances in Legislative Data Standards Efforts
Akoma Ntoso
Akoma Ntoso (AkN) is a strong contender to be that format. Developed under the auspices of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, AkN is an XML data structure that is meant to capture high-level forms and semantic ideas that are common to a broad variety of legal texts. OASIS, the folks who brought us the DocBook standards, among others, have convened a standards committee to create an official legislative data standard based on AkN. (More disclosure: the engineer is a member of this committee.) There’s just one problem. Few governments are using AkN to draft or store their legislation.
AkN itself is fast evolving, and with more exposure to legal data structures from different jurisdictions, the OASIS committee will be able to adapt AkN to better model those structures.
We saw the International Legislative Un-Hackathon as a venue to kick off this process. It was conceived with Charles Belle of UC Hastings, as part of the Legal Hacks initiative. The event was held simultaneously at UC Hastings, Stanford, in Denver. Jim Harper and Francis Avila of the Cato Institute came to the Hastings Event. We also had many international participants. Key among them were Professors Monica Palmirani and Fabio Vitali of the University of Bologna, the architects and primary evangelists of AkN. Over the course of the day, participants learned about AkN and, importantly, got a chance to try it out, marking up documents of their choosing with the web editor. In the process, as expected, we found bugs in the software and bugs in the standard. We found structures in U.S. legislation that didn’t fit well with the existing AkN element set. We saw places where there was confusion in applying AkN’s data structures to documents. All of this information was collected to incorporate in the development of both the editor and AkN, underscoring again the importance of getting more practical exposure for both.
University of Bologna Summer School–Ravenna
And we are working to expand the venues for this kind of practical exposure to develop the AkN standard. Every September, the University of Bologna hosts the LEX Summer School in Ravenna, Italy. For them, it’s an opportunity to introduce Akoma Ntoso to new groups of students from around Europe and around the world. For the students, it’s an opportunity to learn about the application of XML to legislation, see the success various groups are having around the world, and to meet interesting new people having a passion for legal informatics. One of us, the engineer, who was a student two years ago, was invited to return last year to present a success story, and this year is returning once more to deliver a class in how to build and use the HTML5-based editor for drafting legislation in XML. For us, this is an opportunity to expose the editor to the European legal traditions in order for us to better understand how our editor must evolve to fulfill our vision of a unified standard around the world with common, highly adaptable, tools.
Chile National Library of Congress Browser-based editor
Another step toward adoption of legislative data standards is a project by Chile’s National Library of Congress (BCN in Spanish) called the “History of the Law” (Historia de la Ley). This ambitious project aims to bring together machine learning, a legislative editor and other features to mark up Chile’s legislative record and other legislative documents. The BCN has chosen Xcential’s browser-based editor, working with the AkN standard, to conduct the mark-up and correction after documents are passed through an automated parser. As with the hackathon, but on a larger scale, we are learning from experience the modifications that are needed to AkN, to make it work with Chile’s live documents. Excitingly, each mismatch we find between AkN and actual legislation can be fed back into the OASIS committee process, to make AkN able to handle a wider variety of real-world use cases.
Other Efforts and the Future of Legislative Data Standards
We see these steps as just the beginning. European governments are also flirting with legislative standards, and Karen Suhaka’s group at BillTrack50 has converted all U.S. bills from all states into a single standard XML format showing that the technical hurdles can be overcome, and many of the practical benefits of doing so. In focusing on the projects (and hackathons) we are most closely involved with, we have certainly left out a lot of the initiatives that are advancing legislative data standards around the world. That’s what the comments are for. Let us know your experience with Akoma Ntosa as a legislative standard, and what you’re doing or interested in doing with AkN or other legislative data standards worldwide.
Grant Vergottini (the engineer) is a founder of Xcential. He is a leading authority on applications of XML data to legislation. Prior to founding Xcential, Grant was the Director of Applications at Chrystal Software, a company dedicated to XML design and reporting software. Before Chrystal, Grant led the redesign of Homestore.com, and founded Genedax Design Automation, which developed innovative team and data management applications for electronics design. Bringing data structures and automation tools to the legislative drafting process parallels the work that Grant did earlier in his career at Mentor Graphics and the Boeing Company, where he participated in the transformation from manual drafting to CAD software. Mr. Vergottini holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cleveland State University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.
Ari Hershowitz (the lawyer) is a consultant at Xcential, and founder of Tabulaw. Tabulaw develops software for lawyers, including a web-based legal research and writing platform. Prior to Tabulaw, Ari worked to protect wildlife and habitats from Chile to Mexico as Director of the BioGems project for Latin America at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Ari has a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center, a Masters in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech, and a Bachelors in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale College.
VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.
[Editor’s Note: For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Núria Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of legal information … Are we up for the challenge?; João Lima, et.al, LexML Brazil Project; and Rinke Hoekstra, The MetaLex Document Server
When I started to write a post about THOMAS and its place in open government about three months ago, I was feeling apologetic. I was going make a heavy-handed, literal comparison of the opening hours of the Law Library of Congress (one of the maintainers of THOMAS, and my former employer, whose views are not at all represented here) with open government. I planned to wax sympathetic on the history of THOMAS, and how little has changed since it was first built. But, that post would not have added anything new to the #opengovdata conversation, or really mentioned data at all.
Just over one month ago, #freeTHOMAS reached a fever pitch surrounding the passage of H.R. 5882, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act for FY2013. Just before passage, H.Rpt.511 directed official conversation on open legislative data for the coming fiscal year by saying, “let’s talk.” In a section about the Government Printing Office, the House Appropriations Committee expressed concerns about authentication and open legislative data, but called for a task force “composed of staff representatives of the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, the Clerk of the House, the Government Printing Office, and such other congressional offices as may be necessary,” to look in to the matter.
Opengovdata was disappointed in government. The tone of the House Report suggested that government had been dismissive of opengovdata–and in all fairness, others were beginning to be dismissive of opengovdata as well.
But, a clear classification problem was emerging. Inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s Freedom To Connect speech at the AFI in late May, I had a very librarian moment on organizational hierarchies.
#OpenGov is a really big tent. 
People who want a more open environment for government to communicate with the governed want data, increased transparency, plain language legislation, open court filings, access to government funded research, silly walks, etc. Accountability through transparency often dominates the conversation, thanks to well-funded non-profits and high profile projects. However, there’s more to the movement. In that spirit…
Let’s be transparent about transparency.
When the goal of an open government project is legislative transparency through freely accessible data, let’s focus on that. When the goal is something else, let’s focus on that too. We hear about government accountability through data because the voices calling for it are loud. But data can do much more than bring about a more transparent lawmaking process.
In the words of a wise man, make transparency your Number Two.
If you haven’t had the chance to watch this aforementioned Freedom To Connect talk, and you’ve got half an hour to spare, I highly recommend it. The subject is community broadband, but it’s hard not to be inspired to frame other issues smarter, with transparency ever-present in the background.
Let’s focus on Number One.
If the THOMAS data, for example, were open right now, this instant, you couldn’t watch it on TV. You couldn’t read it on your Kindle. It’s mere presence would not increase transparency. Someone would have to do something with it. Number One is the thing you do with the data to reach your own goal–and that goal might not be legislative transparency.
As a public law librarian to a broad constituency, my goals are different than those of a non-profit think tank, or a law firm, or a law school, or even a non-law public library. In a climate of doing more with less, of needing to show much return for little investment, we each have to frame specific, measurable, achievable Number Ones tailored to the needs of our institutions. Without these Number Ones (goals, mission statements, benchmarks, or whatever management word your organization uses), we flounder off-mission, lose focus, and potentially lose funding.
Librarians are foot soldiers for the First Amendment–we like open information, we place a high value on the freedom to know. However, we’re among the first to be cut in tight budget situations, and we’re all too familiar with the perils of asking for something that’s overly broad, or asking for something that you can’t show narrowly tailored value for later on.
With respect to open gov data: government accountability is not unimportant to me as a voter. However, as a law librarian, I need to focus on Number Ones with more specific, smaller-scale goals than transparency, that will create measurable outcomes, allowing me to show concrete value to my institution. The big picture of how information is available, and the relationship between the government and the governed is important, but it doesn’t always get you funding, and it can’t always answer the question of the patron in front of you.
What’s your Number One?
There’s plenty of data out there. What are you doing with it? How can you manipulate raw free resources into something good for your institution? There is much to be said for information for the sake of information. I can’t imagine needing to convince most library-types of that. That said, we library-types, we information professionals, we decision makers, and perhaps we citizens need to narrow open gov to make it work for us. Data is good, but a real-time interactive civics education program based on THOMAS data for K-12 students is better. Let transparency folks fight the good fight, and don’t forget their work. But while you’ve got your librarian hat on, focus on a Number One that works for you.
Meg Lulofs is an information professional at large, blogging at librarylulu.com, editing Pimsleur’s Checklists of Basic American Legal Publications, and making mischief. She earned a J.D. from the University of Baltimore, and a M.L.I.S. from Catholic University. She welcomes feedback at meglulofs@gmail.com. You can follow her on Twitter @librarylulu, or on Facebook at facebook.com/librarylulu.
VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.
[Editor’s Note] For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Nick Holmes, Accessible Law; John Sheridan, Legislation.gov.uk; David Moore, OpenGovernment.org: Researching U.S. State Legislation.
