notes from SF Open Legislation Hack Night, 2013.08.07

gistfile1.txt

what's the easiest way to be able to observe areas of change - and proposed change - of machine readable code?

way to model and capture legislative behavior and change management on bodies of legislation as a service.

respect for line numbers, section numbers, section references, range references

don't just model legislation as a living document, but capture the actual bills for amending said legislation

also capture change process for the bills
(basically like working in a feature branch)

how is code organized into sections?
how is it referenced?
how useful are the major divisions? do they have formal scope? how is it devided where to put new chapters?

Title / Chapter / Section / Subsection / Paragraph / Clause

Is this appropriate atomization? Severability: which parts fundamentally go together?

Is this a meaningful taxonomy? Are there important differences between what happens where? A variance in power, enforceability, political willingness for /resistance to change?

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as a citizen, business owner, or lawyer, how would you put a "watch" trigger for changes that might be of interest? by affected section? by keyword? by bill sponsor? by court case with briefs citing those sections?

==> a way to map code, bills, and briefs onto an ontology by regulatory area.

(how does, eg, lexis index and search this now?)

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how does common law work with city code? (I imagine it varies by state :) )
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* annotation over time. if we wanted to embed annotation and crowdsourced cross references to text, how would you surface it so that you could see a discussion on a previous version? faded out / atmospheric perspective?

annotation might be relevant for different lengths fo time: eg on a bill vs in code

would briefs and judgements be cross referenced in code? if it's a judgement affecting the interpretation of a section of code, how should that be refelcted?

weighting in judgement annotations? weighting for bills that are passed doesn't really matter from a legal point of view (though interesting from a political strategy and historical point of view) - but the citation centrality of judgements does tend to affect interpretation in common law.

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what types of things do people consult city code for?
who uses city code?
what major types of legislation does the city produce?
acts, resolutions, budgets, code amendments

what is the scope of city code?

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what other jurisdictions have taxing or legislative authority over where a citizen lives and works?
==> how can we make this more transparent and accessible to non-wonks?

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how are atoms of code referred to during their lifecycle?
when in the workflow are identifiers generated? do they change? what is the primary key? are they reused?
what's the format? numeric? a pattern? plaintext? if text, can we get authoritative slugs?

every atom should have a uri

law://sf.ca.us/code/1/32/432.xml