Comment Time for some Legal Upgrades (Score 1) 42
It's time for the government to implement some documentation upgrades.
With open-source collaborations, the code has to be easily accessible and clearly documented if you have any hope of bringing new contributors up to speed. Dense projects with bad documentation fail.
A member of the public that wants to research existing law and proposed changes has no effective tools on hand. This THOMAS thing is a joke compared to other documentation search systems.
I don't have to get a doctorate in computer science to read the Firefox source code, and I shouldn't have to get a doctorate in law to understand what the senate voted on this week.
As long as we're blowing tax money like a coke-fueled Vegas bender, we should develop a strategy for semantic markup of legal documents, and bring legal documention into the 21st century. Ideally:
a) Legal documents should be revised data, with diff revision histories instead of separate amendments. Try searching THOMAS for a document, and see how many amendments you get. Now go look at the revision history of any Wikipedia article.
b) Legal documents should be machine readable. If they're too complicated to search effectively, then they're not semantic enough. If google can index an internet's worth of websites, then the government should be able to build a searchable legal structure.
This isn't even discussing realtime data access like budget or spending reporting. It's all in a computer somewhere, why can't I see it? If google can show me the trends of a world-full of internet search requests, why can't I see a real-time report of money flow at all levels of the government? Why can't I see a list of all the assets the government owns?
I think when all's said and done, you'll find an awful lot of resistance from any given politician to any idea of over-the-shoulder oversight from the public. Bad documentation and eye-glazing legal syntax is their obscurity blanket.
With open-source collaborations, the code has to be easily accessible and clearly documented if you have any hope of bringing new contributors up to speed. Dense projects with bad documentation fail.
A member of the public that wants to research existing law and proposed changes has no effective tools on hand. This THOMAS thing is a joke compared to other documentation search systems.
I don't have to get a doctorate in computer science to read the Firefox source code, and I shouldn't have to get a doctorate in law to understand what the senate voted on this week.
As long as we're blowing tax money like a coke-fueled Vegas bender, we should develop a strategy for semantic markup of legal documents, and bring legal documention into the 21st century. Ideally:
a) Legal documents should be revised data, with diff revision histories instead of separate amendments. Try searching THOMAS for a document, and see how many amendments you get. Now go look at the revision history of any Wikipedia article.
b) Legal documents should be machine readable. If they're too complicated to search effectively, then they're not semantic enough. If google can index an internet's worth of websites, then the government should be able to build a searchable legal structure.
This isn't even discussing realtime data access like budget or spending reporting. It's all in a computer somewhere, why can't I see it? If google can show me the trends of a world-full of internet search requests, why can't I see a real-time report of money flow at all levels of the government? Why can't I see a list of all the assets the government owns?
I think when all's said and done, you'll find an awful lot of resistance from any given politician to any idea of over-the-shoulder oversight from the public. Bad documentation and eye-glazing legal syntax is their obscurity blanket.
