Authentication of legal materials - how hard can it be?

Wow. Two minutes after I post about UELMA I get asked "how hard can it be?". A flavor of the issues that must be addressed can be found here.

UELMA and authentication

I see that three US states have introduced UELMA (Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act) bills.

That is great but the hard work begins once these bills make it and government agencies (executive, judicial, legislative) grapple with the realities of the "how".

The good news is that it is doable but it involves - in my opinion - looking at the problem from the perspective of provenance aware storage combined with point-in-time, permanent URLs. That necessitates looking at the problem from an end-to-end "enterprise architecture" view of Legislative Informatics. No bolt-on at the end of your law-making process will be good enough to stand up to judicial tests of authenticity in my opinion.

LWB goes to great lengths to preserve provenance and provide point-in-time citation precisely to enable legislation like UELMA to be complied with.

Brilliant, obviously

Leonard Cohen

The future of user interfaces

Interesting article from Mark Shuttleworth on HUD.

Today's games developers are a great leading indicator for where user interfaces of all forms are headed. The kids growing up with all todays amazing game technologies will one day put on suits and/or beards and go into business. When they do, they will bring models for HMI with them that are very different from the Text heavy, Form-Oriented, Bar Charted models of their parents.

Facts and opinions

Inside every spoken "fact" lies one or more unspoken opinions.

A new form of "Engrossing"

Law making revolves around a process called engrossing and so when it came to naming the Propylon band...Well the name "Tyson and the Engrossers" fitted the bill nicely. The Tyson here is Tyson Deines. A legislative business analyst with Propylon but also former full time musician/singer/song-writer.

Some videos from the Propylon XMas party here : Tyson and the Engrossers

The Engrossers are:

- Tyson Deines : Drums, Vocals, Guitar
- Bill Hastings : guitar
- Sean McGrath : guitar, harmonica
- Beth Rice : Base, Vocals
- Matt Smith : keyboard
- Warren Smith : vocals
- Alex Smith : vocals

GIS in the future of law/rule-making

Last year, I had the pleasure of presenting the closing keynote at the GIS Pro conference. The videos have been posted:

Main Talk Part 1

Main Talk Part 2

Main Talk Part 3

Main Talk Part 4

Also, lightning talk here.