Open Source Effort To Codify America's "Operating System" Online

Rubinstien writes "O'Reilly Radar is reporting on an effort to produce Law.gov, 'America's Operating System, Open Source.' The group Public.Resource.Org seeks to 'create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.gov. [They] envision Law.gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.' According to its new website, 'Law.gov would be similar to Data.gov, providing bulk data and feeds to commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use the raw materials of our democracy.'"

Nice

[sakdoctor]

Anyone got an RSS feed for bribes accepted per politician?
It's open access to this information that democracy is built upon.

VOLUME!

[Anonymous Coward]

The sheer VOLUME of laws forms a sea within which lawyers swim. This effort sounds like more utopian mental masturbation.

Bills are patches

[tepples]

Of course the U.S. Code has revision control. The actual bills look like patches: "Title 17, U.S. Code, section 301, is amended by striking 'foo' and inserting 'bar'." Try reading the Sonny Bono Act [gpo.gov] to see exactly how the U.S. copyright term got extended.

Waiting for the User Model

[FatherDale]

I deeply love this idea -- rationalizing our Bizarro World legal code, shining light in the dark corners, showing ourselves and the world who we are. Having seen a number of open source projects go all faily because they were dominated by one person/cabal, though, I'll wait until I see how they're going to distribute the workload before I sign up.

Re:Open source doesn't mean crap

[bsDaemon]

I'm pretty sure that they mean the effort itself is going to be based on open-source technologies, and not that there is an effort to open source the legislative procedure, which is something all together different. We have elected legislators to make laws, and citizens can petition directly or in groups (some people call them "special interest groups," but only because they aren't a member of one... when it's their own "special interest" then its magically a "citizen's organization" or something equally gay).

"Open Sourcing" the constitution and the laws really makes no sense. Creating a free service, built on open source technologies with open APIs for accessing data in open formats so that anyone can have access at any time to the text of laws makes a great deal of sense and is something which should have been done a long while ago, because thomas.loc.gov kind of pisses me off.

Re:Lexis and Westlaw?

[mcrbids]

I concur. Lawyers care only tangentially about the code itself. What they are looking for is case law - not what did the law say, but what does the law mean? And what the law means isn't determined by what the law says, but what a judge says it means - how the judge interprets it.

And that interpretation is pretty static - when a judge gives a ruling on a code, other judges are reticent to overturn that ruling. Instead, they'll try to clarify or eliminate ambiguity in the earlier ruling.

In the '90s, I tried to do a 'net startup by making it easy to search through state codes. I built elaborate pattern matching algorithms to break up state statutes by article, section, and number, and build a huge, hyper-relational database (think wiki on steroids) back when a Pentium 90 was cutting edge. It took me some 4-6 months of long, hard work to get my prototype together for a few large states. (California and Texas)

I succeeded, the product worked fine, but no lawyers were interested - even for free. That was a very short-lived enterprise.

Re:Is this where we can read the health care bill?

[buchner.johannes]

It'll be like digg -- you can vote a bill up or down and the most popular ones are passed :-P
It is outsourcing the reading process. And to those who don't like the system people will say -- similar to as they do now with wikipedia -- "if you don't like the bill, just vote it down'

Difference between Law and Code

[Zarf]

Laws can and must be broken. No government can survive the stringent enforcement of its own laws. This is the fundamental difference between law and procedural computer code. Law requires judgment while code merely requires execution.

On the level that this project seeks to work, however, the task might not be completely foolish.

Re:Bug Tracker?

[jawahar]

I think all the efforts to empower common man will be resisted because legislative, judiciary, administration & business community will not allow their clout to be diluted.