NCSL conference in Chicago, August 7-9

It is NCSL time of year again. Its hard to believe a year has gone by since the last annual NCSL event in San Antonio, Texas.

This year its Chicago. I hope its cooler than Texas was....Probably not.

We will be exhibiting @ booth 813, talking about eDemocracy, eLegislation, 21st century law-making, Legislative Transformation.

If you are going, please stop by and say hi.

MicroXML

Today's MicroXML brings back memories of
sml-dev and Common XML. Hopefully, MicroXML will succeed where these two efforts I was involved in, did not.

Ohio State Legislature

We are now working with the Ohio State Legislature on an LWB implementation. Similar in scope to the Kansas State Legislature's KLISS system that was the backdrop to the series of posts titled What is a Legislature?

The Ohio system has a very strong focus on machine readable data formats and Web feeds which is a very exciting aspect of the project.

Authenticity and the Law

I find myself disagreeing with Sunlight Foundation. Worrying about authenticity is not a "red herring". It is profoundly important and critical if we are to move to paperless legislative processes and "born digital" law corpora.

It really is not all that complicated once you take a pragmatic approach to it. Sadly, there is much confusion and mis-information around digital signatures and crypto and the very meaning of the term "authenticity"...

There is no technological silver bullet here. What Congress needs is a Legislative Enterprise Architecture that is designed from the get-go to enable authentication not just of XML but of all promulgated artifacts. Doing that has a lot more to do with provenance than anything else and provenance is something you embed at the heart of your Legislative Enterprise Architecture.

Rational..but uncoordinated

Subway structures for example. Fascinating. Many interesting real world systems we try to model with software are rational-but-uncoordinated.

Apache OpenOffice

Good to see a new release of OpenOffice from Apache.

International Open Government Data Conference

Submitted a paper to International Open Government Data Conference