 All right, so thank you all so much for having me and for letting me wrap things up in terms of presentations. So I'm actually different than maybe everyone here, certainly all the presenters from earlier today, in that I don't work with a big set of data. We're not worried about aggregating a bunch of annotations that are all across, you know, 40 million different documents. I'm actually thinking about very small numbers of documents, but how to get people to, lots of people to engage with them. So my name is Michael Weinberg, and I work for an organization called Public Knowledge. We're an advocacy organization in Washington that focuses on technology policy issues. And so what that means is that we're the people who spend a lot of time in Congress just sort of like trying to explain to them how the internet and how technology works and how not to mess it up most of the time. And in practice that means we deal with a lot of highly technical primary documents called bills. They're proposed laws and trying to explain to, in addition to trying to explain to Congress what's going on with them, also trying to explain to the public what's going on with them, and trying to get the public to kind of weigh in on it. And, you know, we've all heard, you know, law is code, code is law, but actually law in the sense of bills really is code in the sense that it's a highly technical, highly structured language. Very rarely do you see a bill that just sort of says, from this day forward, all ducks must wear shoes or something like that. It's usually actually a very kind of technical instructions on editing existing statutes. So when we do this, we actually don't use annotation today. And so what I'm hoping to do very quickly is to show you how we deal with translating these documents and trying to bring them to people in the hopes that there are better ways out there and people have good ideas on how to do it. So let me just sort of give you a sense of where we are with this right now. And hopefully some glaringly obvious ways to do it better will jump out at you and you will then come and find me. So like I said, you know, bills, we've all seen through bills, bills are complicated, they're very structured. And if you look closely at bills, they really do contain these instructions. So here it says, you know, section 1201 A1B of Title 17 of the United States Code is amended by striking this and adding that. And if you just read this, it's hopefully you're a rational person completely meaningless to you because you have no idea what section 1201 A1B of Title 17 says today and what it would mean if it changed it. And more importantly, even if we said, okay, now I'm going to show you what it would look like after we do this. So here's the existing part of the law and then we're gonna cross out all of this stuff. And then we're going to put the new stuff into the old law. That isn't necessarily very much more useful to you because while you may, there are lots of people who have a very real and detailed and meaningful understanding of the law at sort of that first level of abstraction sense and the sense of these are the rules and this is how it works. I'm having the understanding of what the law means in that very technical sense is usually reserved to what the lawyers deal with it, which is a healthy way to see the world. But it means that when we're thinking of the people who we want to reach with this information and who want to reach us, we don't necessarily think of the best way to do it is to annotate the actual statute or annotate the actual bill because the sliver of people who are interested enough in reading the bill, they're gonna read the statutory language but don't know it well enough they wanna see the annotations haven't traditionally struck us as a big enough subset of people to spend time actually developing that attribute, those annotations. And so what do we do, this is actually a bill if any of you have been following the cell phone unlocking battle that's going on in Congress right now this is one of the proposed bills. So one of the ways that we try and translate it for people is they're a bunch of competing bills they have a bunch of competing clauses that are some are better, some are worse and so we just sort of remit a chart instead. And so this chart is useful for some things but it doesn't give you that deep level of annotation but at the same time it's helpful for a lot of people and when we present these charts we always link to blog posts that explain it and to the statute themselves we don't traditionally annotate the statute or annotate the bill. And I wanna give you a couple other examples of things that we interact with. So obviously we interact with bills all the time with laws that people, members of Congress and their staff email us and say what do you think about this or that have been proposed but also we deal with things like speeches and presentations, other primary documents right now the register of copyrights who is the woman who runs the copyright office is making a push to completely rethink the copyright law. The last time the copyright law was completely redone was 1976, you may have noticed a lot of things have changed since then and maybe it's worth doing it. And so she in a combination in a speech that she gave and then in testimony in front of Congress she laid out kind of the case, the initial case for doing this and taking the next couple of years to just rewrite the copyright act. And so we could have actually gone through and annotated the speech or annotated the testimony but again it's long and there's a lot of information and so what we did instead was we did a blog post where we sort of broke it out and gave you the prose version of what could be thought of as annotations. And then also because there was testimony we broke out a bunch of videos and things like that and said here's a 20 second video, here's a 30 second video, if you wanna watch the whole thing here's a link but here are some clips to give you a sense of what's going on. And we do this actually for our own things as well. As I said, we do a lot of sort of internet stuff and so after SOPA and PIPA were stopped we got a lot of questions that said, well great, congratulations for being against something but what are you guys for? I'm thinking they were like being very clever because that had never occurred to us before and we said, oh well actually I'm glad you asked and so we put up this website called the internet blueprint and the internet blueprint has six different laws that could be passed today that would make the internet a better place usually with regard to copyright but these are actual laws, these are honest to God fully drafted bills that could be introduced and passed tomorrow and we wanna make sure that people understand them. Now one option would have been to annotate them for people but that's not the way that we went and what we did is as you see up here the first thing we did is there was kind of a short summary of the bill that sort of gives you the whatever 50 word version of what's going on and then if you click through the explanation you actually get a longer again prose explanation of what the bill actually does and then if you decide to go into that third level of understanding then yeah you can read the bill and you can see exactly what's going on. Now all of these are techniques that we have developed over time to translate through these technical core documents to people who wanna get involved but it tends to be more one way than two way. We get a lot of feedback in all sorts of ways we get people who send us emails, we get tweets, we get people who write blog posts people who just stop us and talk to us about these things but we haven't traditionally seen kind of a collaborative response and opening up a bill for annotation. Congress has made a couple of attempts to do this, a couple of members and I think it's been an interesting process but so far the real value of it is giving organizations and individuals who have kind of that kind of specialized writing knowledge who understand how statutes and bills need to be structured to really weigh in with their changes and in that way it's actually not that different from the traditional way that bills in an idealized world and actually more often than not than bills are structured and so what we're interested in going forward is finding a way to open it up a little bit and see if annotation both as an educational tool and as a tool of understanding is something that can work and that can work in a way that if you're an organization with 15 or 20 people who are doing a lot of things can be done in an efficient manner and so that's one of the reasons that I'm here today is thinking about how to do that because I'm convinced that there's a way to do it but I'm not quite sure what that way is and so we talk about again, you're still in this sort of world of highly technical specific language. How do you, if you don't necessarily have a community of people, software code is a really interesting community because there's both a sizable community of people who understand code and who are inclined to engage about it online in a way that you don't see historically, traditionally, with statutes and laws and so going forward, we're really interested in thinking of ways to build that space for people to do it and to really get involved. So that's sort of what we're, that's our goal, it's a long-term goal, it's an abstract goal but I really appreciate being invited here today because there's been a lot of learning on my part and seeing how other communities tackle similar problems or actually tackle problems that appear to have nothing to do with this problem but are actually very tightly related and so with that I say if you have ideas and you're interested in tackling this, please let me know because we're always looking for more ways to both translate what is happening in Washington to people and also give people a way that is useful and productive to them to tell Washington what they want to change and I think there's a way to do that with annotation but we haven't quite figured it out yet but thank you very much.