The KLISS workflow model

My last post in this KLISS series marked a half way point in this whirlwind tour of the KLISS architecture. Before proceeding, I'd like to summarize the main discussion points so far and link back to earlier posts for ease of navigation.

• In What is a legislature the top level "black box" model of a legislature/parliament was presented.
  
• In XML in legislature/parliament environments seven reasons were presented why the standard model for wielding XML is problematic in legislative/parliamentary environments. Namely:
  
  
  • The centrality of line/page numbers in amendment cycles
    
  • the complex nature of amendatory actions
    
  • The critical nature of fidelity with historically produced renderings
    
  • The fluid nature of work-in-progress legal assets.
    
  • the complexity of amendment cycle business rules
    
  • the subtle inter-play between legal content and legal content renderings
    
  • content aggregation and its role in content modeling and information architectures
    
  
  
• The concept of treating legal texts as source code was the subject of Law as source code
  
• Allocating good names was the subject of naming things well.
  
• The next post rigid designation continued the discussion about names.
  
• The next post covered the eventing model and the consistency model used in KLISS.
  
• Data architecture/organization was the topic of Organizing legislative materials and the post that followed it, argued that the search for a perfect data model is always doomed which is why the KLISS data model persistence architecture is – by design – sub-optimal for all possible use cases. It does not privilege any particular view of the data.

This agnosticism about data organization is a critical component of the KLISS workflow model which is the primary topic of this post. If you have been reading along in the series, it will come as no surprise that legislatures/parliaments pose many challenges when it comes to applying "off the shelf" standard models for databases or content management systems or video publishing systems. Central to the complexity, in my opinion, is that legislatures/parliaments resist analysis and decomposition. By that I mean that the standard methods of systems analysis and design pre-suppose that the analysis phase can result in the crisp expression of the "business rules" or the "workflows" that govern any particular domain. In the standard model, one does not begin implementing business rules/workflows until one understands what they are. This sounds abundantly sensible doesn't it?

Not so in legislatures/parliaments. I'm sure most readers will find that statement surprising. How hard can the rules be? In Civics class they talk about bills being introduced and debated and modified and voted on and passed into law. Seems like a pretty straight-forward workflow to me? Why not just walk around, ask everyone what they do in support of that workflow and then write it all down. Voila! One set of "as-is" business rules!

I would like to split the reasons why workflow is not that simple in legislatures/parliaments into the following seven areas (in no particular order), each of which is discussed below:

• 1. The workflow rules are cherished
  
• 2. The workflow rules can have non-rule lineage
  
• 3. The workflow rules are malleable
  
• 4. Every workflow rules has an exception which is itself, included in the rules
  
• 5. The workflow rules are instruments of differentiation
  
• 6. The workflow rules include the ability to suspend all rules
  
• 7. The workflow rules are an instrument in the art of politics

1. The workflow rules are cherished

Legislatures/Parliaments are generally grand old institutions. It goes with the territory that there is a lot of tradition and a lot of history behind how they operate. Unfortunately, the distinction between operating "rules" and operating "traditions" is easily lost in the mists of time.

Here is a pot-pourri of rules from my own experiences to give you a flavor of what I am talking about:

• The Finance Bill is always Bill number 7.
  
• Chairmanship of committee X lie with the Senate on odd numbered years.
  
• Amendments are worded differently if the Bill is at report stage.
  
• Votes of finance bills only can be considered after the 90th session day.
  
• Only one bill may be named in a motion to introduce.
  
• Bills cannot be directly referred to sub-committees.
  
• A sub-committee can continue to exist after its parent committee has been dissolved.
  

During analysis phases I have come across many rules such as these. It has been my experience that rules in legislatures/parliaments only have one thing truly in common. Namely, that they are cherished equally by staff and Members alike. Asking the dreaded question "why?" to any of the rules above and you are likely to get a reaction of the "because!" variety. Digging deeper, a variety of outcomes are possible:

• It may be that nobody can remember why the rule is the way it is but all agree that it is the way it is and probably cannot be changed just to help an IT project.
  
• It may be that there is a statutory reason (but the statute can change at any time).
  
• It may be that there is an explicit chamber rule (but the rules can change at any time).
  
• It may be that there is a precedent the explains the rule.

Practical upshot: Digging deeper into any of these rationales may result in "bottoming out" the rule but it may also result in another layer of detail that itself, needs further bottoming out. That bottoming process may or may not end.

2. The workflow rules can have non-rule lineage

In some cases, it is possible to bottom out the "why" of a rule only to find that it is something of an accident of history. A common example is rules that exist in order to work around problems in document processing over the years. Over time, the rationale for the rule gets lost and the rule ends up having the same status as other rules in the minds of the actors concerned. i.e. the rule becomes cherished. Some examples from my own experience:

• Rule: The markup code "@XYZ" is used to trigger double-spaced printing of bill drafts. (This, upon investigation, turned out to be a bug in a computer system from the Seventies. The system had no code "@XYZ" but somebody discovered that it had the useful side-effect of double spacing the bill drafts. The rule was subsequently added into the bill drafting guide, right alongside "real" rules for statute citation and quorum rules for conference committees.)
  
• Rule: All internal cross-references must take the form ABC (This upon investigation, turned out to be a rule created to work around a Word Perfect macro bug which would miss certain cross-references in the reports it was generating unless they were constructed just so.)
  
• Rule: The House is limited to 20 committees. (This turned out to be because of a fixed size lookup table for committee names in a mainframe application which set a maximum committee count to 20 on the House side and 20 on the Senate side.)

Practical upshot: Accidental workflow rules are still rules.

3. The workflow rules are malleable

The rule-sets of legislatures/parliaments invariably include the rule(s) that govern changing of the rules themselves. From an IT perspective, the presence of a rule that allows the rules to be changed has profound implications. It means – in one fell swoop – that any attempt at codifying the rules directly into a programming language is doomed to fail. Anybody who approaches a legislature/parliament attempting to map business rules to business logic to computer code, in the classic model, is going to get into trouble.

Practical upshot: the rules are not written in stone so they cannot be coded in stone either. In the IT vernacular, the "rules engine" for expressing and executing the rules of a legislature/parliament needs to be Turing complete. No approach based on, say, mapping finite state machine state transitions to middle-tier function calls is going to cut the mustard.

It could be argued that the rules might not change very often. One might point, for example, the 43 standing rules of the U.S. Senate. Whilst it is true that the rules of the U.S. Senate do not change very often there is a vast (and I do mean vast) set of precedents which are, in effect, rules. Precedents result whenever something happens on the floor that requires adjudication by the Parliamentarian. The amount of precedent grows over time. Every sitting day is an opportunity for new precedent – new rules – to be formed.

4. Every workflow rule has an exception

Remember how, it math class, your teacher exploded your brain by telling you that between every to numbers on the number line, lies another number? Business rules in legislatures/parliaments are very similar in my opinion. There may be a rule for what happens in situation X and a rule for what happens in situation Y but when Z occurs – a combination of situations X and Y – a new rule is born. This process can be repeated ad infinitum.

Practical upshot: The rules of a legislature/parliament are like a fractal. Between each pair of rules lies the potential for a literally infinite family of sub-rules. In this sense, the rules are somewhat like the corpus of law itself. Primarly law becomes denser and denser – more fractal like – as more and more refinement is added to the rules. Similarly caselaw interprets statute and once created, the caselaw itself becomes law (in the common law tradition at any rate). Then new caselaw can come along clarifying interpretation for cases that fall between existing caselaw and existing statute. This process can be repeated ad infinitum.

5. The workflow rules are instruments of differentiation

Speaking of fractals...organizational boundaries are fractal-like too. Consider a new legislature/parliament formed out of an existing one. Say, the New England States or the African countries that emerged from French/English/Dutch colonies...They may start as replicas of their parent institution but soon the differences start to appear. The new institutions differentiate themselves from their parents by injecting differences in how they operate. Over time, the injection of difference percolates the new institution. The chambers inject differences so that House procedure differs from Senate procedure. Appropriations committees do things differently than redistricting committees. The Senate creates a new form of Resolution, not used in the House. The House changes the way it numbers its rules so that they are visibly different from the Senate rules...etc. etc.

Practical upshot: Rules serve to differentiate as well as control the behavior of institutions. The human organizational need for differentiation essentially guarantees that rules will change even if there is no specific technical reason for the change.

6. The workflow rules include the ability to suspend all rules

This one needs little explanation. In an earlier post I mentioned Nomic. Suffice it to say that building computer systems that are capable of interpreting and checking and executing a set of rules is made significantly more complex if the rules can be disabled at any point.

7. The workflow rules are an instrument in the art of politics

This one also needs little explanation. Politics is, in my opinion, best understood in terms of game theory. Equilibria become more complex when the rules can be modified in a way that impacts the outcome matrix.

Conclusion

I hope the above has convinced you that getting to the bottom of the business rules of a legislature/parliament is no easy matter. It is not a question of effort. Doubling the number of resources trying to bottom out the rules will not help you. Doubling the time available to do it will not help you.

The workflows of legislatures/parliaments are, in my opinion, complex in the formal, mathematical sense of complex. That is to say, the feedback loop created by the self-referential nature of the rules combines with the other factors listed above to create a fascinating phenomenon in which homeostasis (i.e. stable parliamentary process and procedure) emerges as a sort of emergent property of the system as a whole.

Conclusion

The key, in my opinion, is to not let the surface complexity overwhelm you. After all, the very definition of an emergent property is one that arises out of a multiplicity of relatively simple operations that includes a feedback loop. The complexity can be tamed! However, taming it requires looking at the right level of abstraction. A full frontal assault based on decomposing the rules is about as likely to yield actionable understanding as decomposing the ants in an ant hill.

Over the years I have seen many fall into the trap of attempting to bottom out all the rules in a legislature/parliament. I tried it myself on more than one occasion. It is seductive. It would be great it if were possible, but it is not possible in my opinion.

What to do? The critical thing is to change the focus of the hunt. The hunt is not to find individual rules. The hunt is to find the relatively simple operations from which all rules are made.

That is what KLISS is based on. The application substrate it sits on has a workflow model based on this emergent model of workflows.

That is where we will go next.

Law and eDemocracy : watch that space...

The bad old days when simply publishing PDF copies of the fundamental texts that underly democracy and calling it "eDemocracy" or "eLegislation" or "transparency" or "participation" are thankfully numbered.

For a great pointer in the direction of what the future can hold when a democracy steps boldly into the electronic world, see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/.

To paraphrase Churchill, we are not at the end of the bad old days. Not even the beginning of the end. But we have definitely seen the end of the beginning :-)

This is going to be a fascinating few era for anyone who lives in a democracy - not just those involved in IT. Churchill also said that Democracy was the worst form of Government ever invented - apart from all the others.

I would love to be able to invite him to come back to Earth in a few years time and give us his opinion because I believe its about to get better again.

In my opinion, the Internet is about to have a more profound impact on the practice of democracy than television, the telephone and the printing press combined.

On vacation...

I'm taking a 2 week, "e-cold turkey" break. More posts on KLISS when I return...

The end of print for law?

Bob Berring muses on the future of print for law and references the Book of Kells and Newgrange...

In the magnificent long room in my Alma Mater, Trinity College Dublin, the book of Kells is on display and shockingly legible. By that I mean that it is a lot more legible than the text in the Wordstar files on the CP/M-based 8 inch floppies in my basement. Even if I could read them (which I can't) they wouldn't be "real" in the sense that the real files were on other floppies that were used to create replicas. In the digital world, no document is ever "real" in the way that the Book of Kells is real. Everything is a best-efforts replica of something which is itself a replica...all the way down to what you saw on the screen at the moment of content creation, inter-mediated by an operating system, then a software application, then a display device driver...This is deeply worrying stuff if you are trying to write down content for the ages : be it sacred texts or legal texts. I spend a goodly amount of my time these days thinking about this in the context of law, law.gov, data.gov and of course, the KLISS project.

It is fitting I think, to ponder this stuff and how it relates to law, in the Irish countryside because the Irish played an instrumental role in the creation of copyright law many, many moons ago. Cooldrumman, the location of the battle, is close to my house in Sligo, Ireland.

KLISS, law and eDemocracy

I am roughly half way through my high level description of KLISS and the Legislative Enterprise Architecture that underpins it. It is the eve of the 4th of July independence day celebrations as I write this. It seems like an appropriate moment to step back from the detail a little and look at the bigger picture.

As a specialist in legal informatics, I cannot help but think of this historic time in terms of America's foundational documents, without which, the great enterprise known as "democracy and the rule of law" would simply not be possible. Missing my homeland of Ireland as I do from time-to-time; sitting in my home in Lawrence, Kansas; I cannot help but be drawn to the involvement of some generally forgotten Irish people in the events of 1776.

The Dunlap Broadside, the first printed copies of the declaration of independence, were produced by an Irishman John Dunlap in 1776. Of the eight foreign-born signatories of the declaration, three where Irish: James Smith, George Taylor and Matthew Thorntorn.

I cannot help but marvel at the fact that 27 of the original 200 or so copies still exist. So too, of course, does the *real* declaration in the form of the engrossed parchment prepared by Timothy Matlack. It was itself copied from the drafts produced by the founding fathers on, (probably) hemp paper of some description.

If you have been following along in this KLISS series you will probably be sensing where I am going with this. The drafts, the engrossed version, the promulgated copies...establishing the relationships between these artifacts is critical to establishing the laws/regulations of the land. It is critical because there can be - and there often is - ambiguity and room for disagreement as to what the law actually means. Law is a very complicated business after all. As a society, we can find ways to deal with that complexity as long as there is no ambiguity as to what the law actually says in terms of the text of the language itself. Once we have that, at least we are all arguing (or zealously advocating) different takes on the same thing. If we start arguing for different takes on different things, chaos reigns.

In the case of the declaration, thankfully, we are in good shape. The Dunlap broadsides are unambiguously copies, not the original. The hemp drafts of Thomas Jefferson are "just" drafts (fantastically important for historical research but not the real thing from a legal perspective). The real thing is the engrossed parchment prepared by Timothy Matlack, and signed by each of the founding fathers. That is why, for example, debates about the accuracy of the Jefferson memorial can be resolved. The placement of commas can be compared with the for-reference, original : the parchment. As for whether or not Jefferson intended "inalienable" rather than "unalienable", the intent is something we can and should be able to argue over in a civil society as long as we can look at the engrossed version and see one or the other unambiguously present.

The ancient Romans seemed to understand the importance of non-ambiguity of legal text well. Although they had early forms of paper, knew how to write on animal skin and knew how to make clay tablets, they chose to "engross" their foundational legal text : the Twelve tables by engraving them on ivory. Something that would withstand fire better than paper. Is harder to tamper with than a clay tablet, smudge resistant...

Removing ambiguities as to the for-reference original text of law is vital for another reason. Law, although it is not expressed mathematically or interpreted via formal logic, is very much based on mathematical concepts: induction, deduction, the law of the excluded middle, contravalence etc. In particular, it shares with mathematics the concept of axioms : foundational, self evident truths from which further truths can be derived and against which assertions of truth can be tested.

Historical documents show that both Jefferson and Adams were familiar with Euclid's Axioms, as was Abraham Lincoln. The Euclidian overtones in phrases like "We hold these truths to be self-evident" (Declaration of Independence) and "...dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." (Gettysburg address) are striking indeed.

It is very easy to arrive at bad results in mathematics if your starting assumptions – the axioms – are wrong. So too in Law. Law builds on itself just as mathematics builds on itself. It is accretive. Thanks to legal principles like stare decisis interpretation of the law is itself accretive because caselaw builds on caselaw...any ambiguities that creep into the vast self-supported edifice of law is bad for the rule of law. (I hold that to be self-evident:-)

Looking back at the history of law and the history of democracy, I think we have reached an inflection point. Something *big* is about to happen I suspect. I am not sure what shape it will take but here are the drivers as I see them:

• The volume of law – including all the material used in adjudicating on and practicing law - is growing exponentially.
  
• In practice, because of the sheer volume (and some other reasons) the copies of law used in the practice of law and cited in court are often "owned" by commercial third parties who amass all the material into private repositories.
  
• Even if the text of legal materials is not owned/claimed by a commercial entity, the citation mechanisms can be. E.g. page numbers of case law publications or consolidations/re-statements of specific areas of law.
  

Now into this world, over the last two decades or so, comes the Internet and the Web in particular. It has so much to offer the world of law (and the world of democracy) that tensions between the "old world" and the new are mounting fast.

A quiet revolution is taking shape. Citizens are now armed with their knowledge of instantaneous publishing via Blogging or Google docs or Facebook. They are armed with knowledge of instantaneous search via Google or Bing. They are armed with knowledge of instantaneous revision with revision history via Wikipedia. They are armed with knowledge of hyperlinks for instantaneous follow-up of citations. They expect video to be instantly available on Youtube or blip.tv...When these citizens look at how laws/regulations are made today and how formal meetings are conducted today and how content that should be free (i.e. the laws/regulations of the land) is either hidden behind paywalls or only available in hard copy or buried deep inside large PDFs or 2 weeks out of date...

Something has got to give. Especially if you tell these citizens that they must abide by all these laws/regulations. Also, because they live in a participative democracy, they can get involved in shaping those laws and are entitled to free an unfettered access to the process of making law...The gulf between the feature-set of the Web-world for this sort of activity i.e. participation & publishing versus the existing "feature-set" of the status quo for law/regulation-making is so striking.

It seems to me that the world of law is somewhat like the worlds of news or music or of TV. For many years they fought against the Internet but have now finally started to embrace it. The Internet is an amazing force. So far the number of areas of human endeavor that have resisted its advances successfully stands at 0 and counting. I believe that the world of law/regulation-making is next up for a significant, world changing transition to the Web. It certainly is not as sexy as the world of music or sports news or TV shows but in a democracy, I cannot think of any one thing that is more important. I cannot think of anything that should be more free than the law and the ability to participate in its creation.

Although I am overwhelmingly positive in my outlook on what the Web will do for law and for democracy, there are some negatives. My primary concern is in the area of reference copies of the law. That concern I hope is evident from my opening remarks in this post. The reference copy of law is no longer etched onto ivory or engrossed onto animal skin. The sheer volume of law make that impossible anyway. In recent decades acid free paper and non-fugitive inks and master-copies kept in safes in the offices of Secretaries' of State, have substituted.

Nowadays, many law-producing entities such as legislatures/parliaments, agencies, courts are moving away from having heads of state sign or initial vellum sheets towards treating electronic legal artifacts as authentic. This, quite frankly, scares me as I believe I know enough about technology to know all the possible ways in which digital data can be compromised between producer and consumer and can degrade over time. (I talked about some of them earlier in this KLISS series.)

The folks who are making this transition to digital are are well intentioned and are seeking to take advantage of the Web to better serve their citizens. I'm all for that obviously. However, I do worry that the language of information technology creates incorrect assumptions in the minds of those not versed in the details of how digital machines actually work. A digital signature is really nothing like a real signature. An e-mail really is not like snail-mail at all because nothing ever gets sent. Everything is a copy – with all the issues that copies brings...The word "authentic" is so much more slippery in a digital world.

Having sounded that note of caution, let me end by saying I truly believe we live in profound times from the perspective of democracy. The Web can - and will - fundamentally change how we think about participative democracy and the process of making laws and regulations. We now have all the individual pieces of technology (I have mentioned most of them already in this KLISS series) we need. No new breakthrough algorithms or devices are required. We just need to assemble everything coherently. It is now a matter of design - not a matter of research.

We are on a fascinating road to a different world, we will get there via some disruptive technologies and disruptive memes. Not everyone will be best pleased but if the history of the internet tells us anything it is that resistance - once all the stars are aligned - is futile. Better to be part of it rather than fight against it. Better to help shape it and drive it forward than simply react to it.

In KLISS, I have been lucky enough to contribute to an initiative that strives to fully embrace technology for the betterment of democracy and the transparent making of law that it depends on.

I look forward to doing my bit going forward to ensure that the compelling vision of KLISS is realized and sharing the design and our experiences with anybody who is interested in it.

Next up: The KLISS workflow model

The Point-in-time issue. A stock exchange example

In a recent post, I talked about the importance of temporal decoupling and point-in-time stamping of data in our increasingly lightening-fast-yet-fundamentally-asynchronous world...

In that context, this post about the recent stock market flash crash is interesting.

Data models, data organization and why the search for the "correct" model is doomed

I have received some e-mails about my assertion that there is no such thing as the "correct" way to model anything in a computer system. I.e. no "pure" model that does not gain its correctness status via mere engineering concerns such as fitness-for-purpose.

My argument boils down to this:

- to model anything in software you need a human

- that human needs to carve up reality in some way in order to create a model. I.e. name things, classify things, link things to other things, distinguish causes and effects, distinguish entities from actions, declare some aspects of reality "unimportant", create a model boundary etc.

- no two humans carve up reality in exactly the same way as we are all unique creatures whose view of the world is influenced by our language, culture, experiences etc.

- therefore, no two models are likely to be exactly the same

- even if they appeared to be the same, there is no way to be sure because human language is lossy. I.e. there is no way to be sure that the model I have in my head is what I have communicated through language. As Wittgenstein said, some things cannot be said - they can only be shown. In Zen terms, our words are just fingers pointing at the moon.

The best book I have read on this subject - highly recommended - is Bill Kent's Data and Reality.

Kent looks at the world from a relational database perspective. A couple of articles from my scribenatorial past might be of interest..They look at the world from a - surprise - XML perspective:

• How to model a Bishop
  
• Zen and the art of Motorcycle Manuals
  

Next up: KLISS, Law and eDemocracy.