 So we thought for the last half hour, we just kind of have an open discussion and think about what kinds of issues came up today that we think might be kind of worthy of assuming later or what we think are kind of important topics that have come up today. So I think one of them that's come up is definitely CMR. John said that he might be able to help facilitate a discussion about it. I think one of them that came up is definitely CMR, that we can agree that the CMR is an issue here in Massachusetts. Actually, this is sort of a question for Linda, so I want to get her attention off me because she's tired. But because she had talked to, we had talked in a working group about going to the general court and talking to them about allocating money to self-authentication, but I'm wondering if we have to go to all of the branches separately now and advocate at each of them, okay. Or is just getting money from the general's court to be given to all the branches and all? And I'll never know the answer to that. No, that's the same question. Now that I have your answer, the question I had for you was we had been talking in the working group about the need to go and talk to the general court about getting money allocated to electronic resources, but do we actually have to go to all three branches and lobby each branch separately, or is it enough just to get money sent over from the general court? That's what you want to do. Okay. I mean, there are the two obvious sources of funding of the operating costs for which you go to the legislature and have a plan and can list them, and you have something, some specific, credible project you want to have funded. And then there's finally more, and I'm not sure, I know that the agencies can do this. I think if you're on the court side, you can certainly go to the Legislature for Capital Funding, and they have given the courts fair amount of capital money for IT projects, and you kind of, we don't want this together with IT. For the executive department agencies, they have the NT monoclonal funds, there's about $80 million a year, most of that time in committed. They're like, well, time for projects, but they're small amounts of money off of that for a year of the thing, so you have a couple different funding. And not just getting money, but also getting, you have to go to each branch separately and convince them this is an important thing to do. Well, you could go to them individually, or you could try to bring together the stakeholders in most communities in a room and say, here's the problem. I think you're particularly at this problem great today, but I was talking to my husband this morning, what is Kevin's name, and his people want to know from ever opening up across the town. Because I have no idea, and I don't think people, I think any idea that people care about this as a source of open data. So I think you need to, before you go to anybody, I think be helpful to articulate five points of what you're trying to achieve, and then some incremental steps you'd like to take. And try to get some support throughout all of those communities. And then there are kind of two types of people that you want to approach, and I think you want to get to the technology as obviously, because they would say this is easy, this is not an complicated technology problem. It's not an expensive technology problem, you throw up a page and tell the agencies what they're things online, you throw up a page and you direct, and people put their content up and then you just direct people to it. It's not that hard to do through best.gov, so it's not a big technology problem. But your voices are not being heard, is what I'm saying. You're not a cobalt as community to us. I don't go, people, I've literally never heard this articulated, and I think listen pretty well in the legal and technology community. So getting your stakeholders to go, why is this important? What's your vision for change? What's the problem? I think that'd be helpful. Come up with an alligator speech. Well, that's the whole point of this process. In fact, tomorrow one of the goals is to come up with a core set of principles that there appears to be general consensus around. That's something that Professor Lessig and I did on distribution of bulk government data, and that's more general than the law. But there were a set of eight principles that said, look, you should do it in the raw format and there shouldn't be a license on it. And there were some very concrete principles that's what we're trying to articulate with primary legal materials. First to define what we mean by that, and then what are the technical and the non-technical principles about how they should be distributed. I think when you're talking to a technologist, if you classify this as kind of an open data issue, you'll get it right away. But right now, our technologists, when they think about open data or thinking about data for a massive database of electronic people, are just going to be paralyzed here and helping people apply for transitional assistance. They're not thinking about this. Well, you know, that was the impetus for this effort is watching people like Vivek Kundra do data.gov, watching states beginning to embrace that, and that's what led to the idea of law.gov. In fact, it was explicitly taken from data.gov was the idea that this concept should apply to legal materials, which are special and are special in many ways because they have so many jurisdictions. They have different requirements, things like authenticity are different from the real world. And so it was directly inspired by the open data movement. And yes, you're right. Carol, it's really... Yeah, absolutely. Just to get people to think about it. Yeah. Well, it's especially flavoring in the room, thinking of the other important issues in Massachusetts. Well, we did have a side conversation just to find about this S.J.C. decision that we need to pull it up in 1974 and see if we can get it revised or reversed or whatever. So we can actually work with great branches of government. I think we're working pretty well around it in the sense that we've established some government entities like the ITAB, the Information Technology Advisor Board, doesn't have representation from the Board on all branches of government. It's just that no matter what that decision says, at the end of the day, you're gonna have separate branches and people are gonna want to control the information to some degree. But there are common technology platforms that are already paid for, that are really cheap to use, like NAS.gov could be used to achieve your goals without a lot of cost. That's another thing I should have mentioned is that people are really interested in civic engagement and in doing things that don't cost a lot. This is civic engagement at large, right? And how much would it cost to, if the agency's total content area hadn't put it on their website, that's the cheapest thing you can do with a website. The area of almost all type of websites is very easy to put the content up. I mean, just that stuff alone, doesn't cost a lot of money, provides lots of openness to government. There's civic engagement for you. And here we don't have any money. Just a simple step like that would make a lot of difference to me. Can I ask a political question about, is there a political champion who would embrace this in a way that the president and the back and others have done in Massachusetts? Well, I certainly won't speak to the administration, but I do know that Governor Patrick has really emphasized civic engagement and open government. He has been a total pioneer in that area of social media, for instance. So what you have spoken about today seems entirely consistent with the approach taken by this administration towards openness and government, civic engagement and using technology to connect with people instead of having to be separated from them. But I don't know who the natural political champion would be within the administration or within the various branches. But when I suggest that the stakeholders need to coalesce and draw up elevator speeches on leadership, not leadership, but they kind of aim your voice that people who have the tools who can make inexpensive changes for you, that's what hasn't happened today, let's say. So do we write open letters to the government? Do we write open letters to the government? Well, let me tell you what the accessibility community did because I think they made a real big, really big difference the way they did business several years ago. They contacted the chief information officer, Dan Mardill, he's now the chief information officer for the Commonwealth. They definitely contacted the government. They connected their issue with an issue that, you know, the issue, their issue is a civil rights issue so they were able to articulate it and language that the administration would respond to in that light. So I think hitting a couple different levels from 11, there are a couple people in the legislature who are really interested in technology. The House and the Senate, as you know, have the emerging, I think those are emerging technology committees have different names over different periods of time. So there are a relatively small number of technology leaders and there's a lot of understanding of an appropriate, you know, advocacy for corporate use of technology to govern ourselves and stuff. So I would advocate at multiple levels and not give up until you get what you want. So at the federal level, one of the strategies we're taking is hoping to build off of a consensus and participation by federal officials that when the report comes out we're in a position to request, for example, a White House called Conference in which many of the general councils and CIOs are brought in and essentially have a repeat of the kind of thing we did today, right? Many people talking about the subject but at a higher level. And so potential follow-up is this fall calling a one-day conference at Harvard in which, for example, the governor has to keynote it and a series of talks are given briefing on the core principles and on the situation and the different branches of government. So that's a possible follow-up. A lot of the workshop process is trying to establish enough legitimacy so that we can, in fact, go to people and say, gee, you should come in. So instead of, for example, the CIO in the White House who's a very good guy and very senior, but he's not the general council, right? And he's not the chief of staff of the White House. And so basically trying to walk up that food chain. And so having done today's workshop is very useful because you're then in a position to say, gee, a lot of people participated in a one-day workshop this summer. And now we're going to have another one that's going to be a larger audience and a more developed theme and more concrete evidence of the Massachusetts inventory is more formalized at that point. There might be a better briefing as to the status of the law in Massachusetts. And certainly my eyes were open when I saw some of the work that the folks are doing in the Trial Court Law Library in which you're harvesting from other government agencies because you're worried they're going to leak the data. I would think any state archivist or state CIO would look at that in their jaw drop. Groups that we should be engaging, I mean, not in terms of the government, but to partner with, like the BOG, and as far as association Boston Bar. Bar Association, Legal Services Corporation, people. There are associations of corporate reporters. There are associations of government, employees of various sorts. I know at the national level there's association of secretaries of state. I imagine there's an association of county officials. There's probably another one of city council members. There's no county government. There's no county government. Okay, well then. We're not in power at last. At the national level, are we presenting it all to the National Center for State Courts for, I don't have the heads of all the judicial branches. Is this going to be a formal presentation, is the call? We had, the National Center for State Courts was a strong participant in the Cornell Two-Day Technical Summit. So they're paying attention. And one of the things we've learned is that some people will participate early on during the workshop to get their views out and others want to know what the results are at the end of the process. And so beginning in September, we know there's going to be a year of briefings to groups like the National Center for the State Courts and particularly groups like the National Association of Supreme Court Justices. That's why I want to say, sometimes this message may go better on a national level that it's not us going and saying, SJC, you got to do this better. We can do that on an informal level, but I think hearing it is a national issue. They put down a better carpet for people to move on than us in front of it. Well, we're hoping to turn it into a national issue and things like the statement of principles. We're hoping we'll be widely signed by the major law schools. We're hoping to get attention from the Congress potentially on congressional hearings. We've already got requests from the Federal Trade Commission and the Senate for briefings on the report and kind of as those begin to come out, that's evidence that can be used in Massachusetts to point to the fact that it's not just you doing this, that it truly is something that a lot of people are considering. We've had several secretaries of state participating in the workshops and very close attention. And people like the Federal Trade Commission, the letter from the chairman said this is a core issue for the commission. They're into consumer protection business and they view this as a core part of their mission. I think there's a potential for getting that. I also wondered to what extent you could start small and build some success stories. For example, I used to serve on the Information Technology Advisory Committee for the town of Brooklyn and I have PhD in computer science and these things never occurred to me, right? I was just like, well, of course it's online and sometimes I would go and look and read the laws but the idea of making sure the regulations are, you know, the name of the URL doesn't change over time, things like that. I mean, Brooklyn is a fairly wealthy town that's very, you know, it's full of technology professionals. They care about these sort of things if they know, they care about them. And also on the other side, I mean, so you might try to find an ally and I think once you have a really strong success story in a town, you know, sort of medium-sized, but I say Brooklyn, that's the story that carried out to the bigger level. And in that vein, I will talk to the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which is a very good organization of, I think, town managers. I'm not quite sure who's the members of the book, but it's the association of, you know, all the municipalities get together and they decide on policy and they share ideas. You know, they're lobbying for the health insurance for town employees, things now. So, I mean, it's a very effective organization and I think it is very good to turn around an influencing state policy because that's what it has to do to survive. So, definitely talk to people there. And then sort of on the mirror side of that, I wonder if organizations like the Massachusetts Home Builders Association, which I largely think of lobbying and the other side of issues that I care about, but I mean, they're an extremely powerful lobbying organization and this must matter to them. Right? If you said, hey, wouldn't it be great if you guys could, you know, click one button and get all the regulations and be able to browse this and zoning it, they would say, yeah, you know, here's a million dollars, let's start the lobbying campaign. I think they would put some, you know, serious investment in getting that because that would be a huge interest. This issue is of great interest on both sides of the aisle and the Chamber of Commerce types. Eugene Meyer, the Federalist Society, participated in the Law.gov workshop. The Cato Institute is all over this. Right, it's in terms of local interest groups that actually know how to call members of the House and Senate and say, hey, let's get something on the agenda. Home Builders Association's contractors and these are powerful organizations that probably just live with it now and sort of live with the pain and don't realize that, you know, with some muscle that their world could be better if the costs go down and that their jobs become easier. Michelle, do you use the booklet that's called on the mass municipal profiles and the back of the book, they have a list of all the municipal organizations and it's very easy to notify them that you have a type of all the municipal organizations on this part of the slide. One of the most successful strategies is not advocacy, it's showing by doing and that's some place where perhaps Berkman or some of the other universities around here, you know, if there's an undergrad looking for something cool to do, go take that city council's municipal ordinances, go get all the back copies reformatted, make it look wonderful. And that's actually a semester project in many cases. It's not that hard to do. And that kind of stuff has just immense impact. It really does. It's much more than, gee, you should be doing this instead of, look, you know, here, this is wonderful. And so I would definitely encourage, you know, that's one great way to do advocacy is to try to get internship programs or other, get the clinics involved, you know, fighting the copyright restrictions is something that's a wonderful clinical type of project, you know. And the trade experience. What about letters to the editor, like the Boston Globe? Does that help anywhere along the process to have them? You know, I think when it's decision, long as you kind of think, down the line. When it's decision time, right, when it's, gee, there's a decision on the table and the governor needs to, you know, or there's a bill about to be introduced and that works very effectively. But I think now it really is, it is building the case and the constituency and the awareness of the issue that is most important. And a lot of that is just briefing. It's a matter of knocking on doors because I mean, I'm getting the same thing that you're getting, who knew? And I'm getting it from chief judges of U.S. district courts and I go see them and I say, did you know eight states, the search strong copy right over their state statutes and the judges draws and drop. You go, no, that's not possible. And that's where this national inventory is just so helpful because you can paint a detailed picture of what's going on and what's available and, you know, the fact that nothing has digital signatures in the state. You know, you can say digital signatures should exist but when you say there are none, right, if people will look at it and say, oh gosh, I think somebody would have liked something like that. Actually, I thought some states have. What's that? I thought some states have. Delaware is signing their administrative regulations. And does no high-web digital signatures on their cases as a disaster? Yeah, and again, we're looking for these success stories as well as the disasters. So that's one of the valuable things about this national inventory is we're able to point to places like Oklahoma that has their full archive online and they issue the final opinions directly from the court. And by combining the success stories with the problems and statistics, that helps us present the case much better to policy makers. And that lets you and Massachusetts point to other states that are doing it differently. I said, gee, we could be doing it just like these guys. I think another thing related to that curl from the Twitter stream this morning, there's people asking about the data on what the cost of doing this is, the early point that it's thought to be cheap, and then what the relative benefits are. And I think to be said, the one is writing to three levels of the state governments to be able to say, I know this is a cheap thing to do, but it's a competitive thing, it's a pro-competitive thing to do. And here are three studies that show the extent to which this is obviously an economically good thing. And if you're running a copyright or other things, kind of get in the way, the copyright thing just seems so colossally stupid, right? That there's no rational basis for that, especially if it's actually working as against semi-economic growth arguments. It's basic rationale for copyright. It doesn't exist there, it's already blown out of water. Absolutely. And it's hard to quantify some of this stuff because it's new enough that people haven't done those particular studies, but economics by analogy can be very powerful. I'll revert to Schaefer the Law Librarian of Congress when I went to her. She immediately picked up on the international trade issue, that it's important to make American law available online because that lets foreigners do business with us more effectively, right? It makes America more competitive. And it's not an aspect of the issue that I had thought of immediately. And that's one advantage of this workshop process is you begin to pick up all these little details and the hope is to weave them all together. I found very exciting on the open access benefits, the economic benefits, to be very eye-opening and seeing those stats before us. In terms of thinking at Shell, like kind of an arm to be doing a guide in Oregon in terms of like showing what you could do. Kyle, is there anybody, I'm just thinking of like track fed from Syracuse, which is like a different situation. They take federal data and they've matched up like primary law and data. Is there anybody doing that with like state law and information like matching up state law and open data that's available to like show connections? No, but it would make a wonderful little project. And I mean, I'd go pitch in that at MIT and Harvard, I'd go see Gil Hyde with the clerk and ask him who you should talk to and he's probably not gonna do it, but you know. It was also just a really dynamic go-to data community. And I found I went to that go-to thing kind of these schools a few months ago and there's like in this particular area, there's a huge community and every program I went to, there were just so many people just pinching to get their hands on data to do things. So it might be a group like we were talking about before in terms of collaborating with, to show what you could do. And you just need to find those people that are motivated to do that. I mean, you know, at Princeton, for example, I had a fellow shop does just an amazing job. And so when the White House was getting the federal register ready to go out the door and it was going out the door in eight days, they went there and felt and shop and said, hey, can you do an application in less than eight days that demonstrates how great this is when they have another order? Okay. Well, we'll be back at 10 a.m. tomorrow. We'll need to begin dealing with kind of the national issues and wrapping up the principles. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.