Apache OpenOffice

As a big user of OpenOffice, Xerces, Ant and SVN - to name 4, I'm very happy to see OpenOffice move to Apache Foundation.

The end of the 2011 Legislative Session in Kansas

Today, the House and the Senate adjourned sine die. We have a lot of very exciting plans for KLISS going forward and work on those starts now. I will be blogging the journey as it unfolds...

Another step beyond page/line-based citation

I see Illinois Supreme Court has introduced a public domain paragraph-based citation mechanism for their cases.

Those unfamiliar with legal materials may be thinking "Public domain? How could it be otherwise?" Well, believe it or not, page (and line numbers) have, for some considerable time, been contested intellectual property. See star pagination for example.

Authentication and versions...of legal material

From an interview with Margaret Maes on the Library of Congress's Digital Preservation website

"Part of authentication is having the right versions – and all of the versions – of something that you might need if you are a researcher and you are really trying to nail down a point," Maes said. As a law develops from a proposal to a final version, there are often elements of meaning or intent that somebody can use when trying to prove a point about a piece of legislation. In the legal discipline, the more people pay attention to versions, the more important it becomes to preserve them.

Amen to that. That is why we will be ingesting complete temporal databases of complete legislative biennia as SIPs in the KEEP archive.

Congress and workflow

Interesting post on the role or otherwise of workflow engines using Congress as an example.

In my opinion, the reason that “workflow” is such a bad fit for Congress (or any other law making body) is that that process of making law takes place according to a set of constitutive rules, not a set of imperative rules (after John Searle).

I.e. Congress does its work in a competitive, game-like environment where “plays” in the game are deemed admissable or inadmissable based on a set of constitutive rules. Congress does not follow a set of imperative rules of the form (do this; then do this; if this happens, then do this…). Workflow engines can work fine in the latter environment but are very problematic in the former. Especially when you consider that the constitutive rules under which Congress operates can themselves be modified by Congress. In this sense the “game” underlying congress is very similar to (Nomic).

The LWB system has to deal with these realties of legislative workflows. The white paper covers some of this and is available : here.

TV sets going the way of the dodo?

So the TVs are disappearing? Well, it all depends on how you define "TV". If by "TV" you mean a box that limits you to X "stations" and connected into some Eighties-class shielded copper cable thing, then yes, absolutely.

If you mean internet terminal with support for legacy "TV" stations and cabling, then no, they are not going away....Every time I walk into BestBuy a bunch of Internet-enabled flatscreen TVs are walking out.

The concept of a Television set is morphing at the moment, just as the concept of a Telephone morphed with the introduction of cellular and now VoIP.

Towards multi-modal law

The recording and expressing of law needs to very quickly come to grips with the "new"[1] phenomenon of the internet and digital media. The judicial branch is probably going to be the place where it happens first. See illustrated judgements for some examples.

Law started out as a largely oral phenomenon but became very textual over time. With some notable exceptions (e.g. oral arguments, various forms of declaration), the written record of the thing *is* the thing itself in the world of law. I.e. acts of congress live in the paper they are committed to. The paper is not a second-hand, best-efforts transcript of what was really said out loud by Congress. From a legal perspective, it *is* what Congress said. What Congress said out loud may be useful background information (a view held by some legal theorists, but not all) but the law itself lives in the four corners of the paper it is written on.

Now along comes the Internet. Dynamic web pages. Audio streams. Video streams. Interactive Maps...How much longer can the notion that law-is-mostly-words hold? As the law-making process becomes more and more digital, we will see more and more photos, interactive graphs, dynamic maps, spreadsheets etc. being passed into law.

We are headed towards a multi-modal view of law. A world in which law is not merely written words and not merely audio/video of spoken words. It is a new thing in the world. It is beyond words (so to speak).

A profound change cometh.

[1] At law time-scales, the internet is very new. Recording of law after all, goes back to at least 1700 BC