Lawmaking as Geo-Design : Propylon at ESRI User Conference

We will be exhibiting and presenting at the ESRI User Conference this year. Looking forward to it. If you are going to the event and want to talk about the power of GIS in Law Making, contact me.

Access to good law : the nub of the problem

Very good piece on binarylaw blog about accessible law. It is a tragedy that the Governments who produce the stuff are not considered to be good sources of the raw materials.

I have no problem with the idea of commercial third parties adding value on top of the base corpus but it is just not healthy to have the base corpus itself unavailable, not only to citizens but to entrepreneurs in the space. The situation is so bad currently in many jurisdictions that Government bodies buy back access to their own work product:-/

Anf by base corpus here I mean bills, journals, statute, regulations, case law etc. You need the entire corpus to have a full picture of legislation. If any one part of the above is missing, you don't have a complete base from which to work.

KLISS : A hybrid cloud

In most of my posts about KLISS I have concentrated on the logical architecture aspects and have not spent much time talking about how the "iron" underneath is handled.

KLISS is a hybrid cloud built with Cisco networking, HP compute, EMC storage/backup, VMWare virtualization, RedHat OS and LWB.

Paperless operation, time-based XML, content authentication etc.

Great stuff from Tom Bruce testifying before Congress.

"Such a point-in-time system -- one that makes it possible to know what the state of the law was at a particular time in the past, or what it will be at some point in the future when pending laws come into effect -- would be a very valuable tool".

Indeed. I would go further however. Without such a system you do not have a comprehensive audit trail that explains how your laws came to say what they do. Nobody would accept a P+L and a Balance Sheet without detailed transactions to back it up. Why do we accept it for something as critically important as law?

It is nice to see many of the concepts that underpin the LWB architecture coming more into main stream thinking about legislative IT.

Testimony

Video