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November 26, 2018 02:36 am

Washington DC Made GitHub Its Official Digital Source For Laws

"Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia's legal code and corrected it using GitHub," writes D.C. based "civic hacker" Joshua Tauberer, adding "My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code."The District does something with its legal code that no other jurisdiction in the world does (to my knowledge): it publishes the law on GitHub.... This isn't a copy of the DC law. It is an authoritative source. It is where the DC Council stores the digital versions of enacted laws, and this source feeds directly into the Council's DC Code website.... This is a milestone in the advancement of open government and open legal publishing. No one should expect that editing the law on GitHub is going to become the new normal, however. My edit wasnâ(TM)t substantive. This sort of "technical correction," as lawyers would call it, didnâ(TM)t need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. I also happen to have expertise in this particular law, GitHub, XML, and the Councilâ(TM)s new publishing process created by the Open Law Library.... GitHub's pull-request feature isn't going to replace public hearings, expert testimony, negotiations between stakeholders, votes by elected representatives, etc.âS -- âSand it shouldn't. Yet Open Law Library's new legal publishing process is groundbreaking. The Open Law Library is changing how we change the law... Open Law Library's mission as a nonprofit is to make all laws as open and accessible as possible. The library's strategy is to achieve openness by making openness pay off for governments: it uses open, machine-readable laws to build software tools that make codification faster and more accurate. The cool thing about this is that governments can benefit from using Open Law Library's software even if open data isn't their highest priority, but in the background they'll still be publishing their laws in an open and accessible format -- everybody wins. Today, instead of authoring the DC Code in Word documents stored on a hard drive in a locked room in a basement, the Code is now stored in XML format in a place everyone can see -- on the Web." The article notes that 18 more states have now enacted "Uniform Electronic Legal Material Acts" -- and taht several other jurisdictions are already publishing their legal codes with official bulk XML downloads. "The US federal government began publishing XML downloads for the Code of Federal Regulations in 2009 and the United States Code in 2013." But the District of Columbia "appears to be the first jurisdiction to combine the two by putting its legal code on GitHub and accepting a change from a member of the public."

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