KLISS wins NASCIO eGovernment award

I am delighted to announce that KLISS has won the NASCIO 2012 State IT award under the eGovernment category. The full list is here: http://www.nascio.org/awards/2012awards/ The link to the KLISS introductory video (90 seconds) appears to be broken on the above page at the moment so use this one if you are interested in an overview of KLISS.

Yes, the law is a fractal

Andrew Stumpff on the law as a fractal. I particularly like the explanation of Mannings "Law of Conservation of Ambiguity". a profound insight....and then there is this: "But despite a lawyer’s hopes, the rule-writer cannot provide every answer in advance. That a regulation may fail to address all the questions practitioners might have is not a flaw in the regulation, or a mistake by the regulation-writer. It is a feature of reality; part of the fabric of the universe." A fabric of the universe indeed. See Larry Tesler's Law of the Conservation of Complexity in which my ITWorld article from a few years ago is quoted re business process complexity. There is a lot of conversation going on at the moment about how similar laws and source code are in may respects. Clay Shirky's recent TED Talk for example. This is all fine and valid but for me, the most powerful similarity is the correspondence between unit tests and caselaw as a means to deal with the specificity problem Andrew Stumpff writes about in this paper. Simply put, when a question arises about what is "correct" in software, we write a unit test to test a specific case. The unit test corpus gets bigger and bigger over time, serving as a regression test suit for future questions of correctness. In law, this is called precedent. Fundamentally the same thing.

Indiana Legislature

We have started work with the Indiana Legislature on yet another very exciting Legislative project.

From Microcomp to XML

Interesting reading about the GPOs move to an internal XML system. I have a soft spot for MicroComp. In particular the very fine typographic control if afforded over layout of tables and as I've said before, separating presentation and content is easier said than done. Especially in legal materials. All in all however, XML is obviously the way to go for an organization like GPO but there are a significant number of important subtleties related to legispruduce that they will need to be careful with. Especially when it comes to the amendatory cycle of bills.

Yup. Its complicated.

Sean Blanchfield on Software Complexity. Well worth a read.

Netbeans and NASCIO Awards

Geertjan from Oracle on LWB's use of Netbeans in NASCIO award nominated LWB systems this year in Kansas and North Dakota.

Kansas IT Application Finalist in Open Government

Kansas IT Application Finalist in Open Government

Chuffed.