 Well, thank you for spending a little bit of lunchtime with me. I know everybody's here for the talk and not the food. Before I begin, if anybody wants slides or has follow-up questions, you want to pass this around. Just throw your email address on there, and I'll send everything out after the fact. So where'd Laurie go? Laurie, oh, I do have a thing. Let's do this guy. Thank you for having me. I'd like to start with a quote about MIT. And as Laurie said, I'm a classical political philosophy dude. I suck at math and suck at science, or did until I started doing this. And it fascinates me how both are converging. And that's really the story we're going to talk about today, is where technology, where data, where people, where process are meeting to solve the problems of legislative data and law itself. So in 2011, the Guardian wrote, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led the world into the future for more than 150 years with scientific innovations. Its brainwaves keep the US a superpower. But what makes the university such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas? Well, in my experience, my brief experience with civic media here, it's people like Ethan, it's people like Laurie, it's people like Nicole, Andrew, I don't know if Andrew's around here. Oh, hey, Andrew, it's right here. And you guys, thank you for having me and being fabulous and being part of this MIT community. Where I come in is from the government side. Everything, if you remember nothing else today, it's that the problems we face as citizens, as researchers as journalists on the outside of government with technology and access, are equal to and opposite the problems faced by people in government who have to do this stuff, who have to produce the information, who have to post things on the web. And as we'll see, fixing the problems we have as citizens getting from denied to open is a process of helping both inside and outside of government. And this beautiful artwork here, I have to credit to Alexis Ohanian. This is a skewed version of his book cover without their permission. That's part of the story we're gonna talk about today, is we're getting from the denied to the open with law and legislation, and sometimes without people's permission. And we'll discuss what that actually means for democracy today. So before I get too far, I wanna tell you a little bit about us. We're the Open Gut Foundation, a scrappy non-partisan nonprofit working to bring the best tools and ideas from the tech world into government, where it's sorely needed. This is our GitHub page. If you wanna fork us, my developers would love that. That's where you can find all of our code for what we're talking about today. We were born actually from inside Congress, as Lori mentioned. I worked for Congressman Darrell Issa in the Oversight Committee in the U.S. House, and we were born actually from a hack. So when the stop online piracy started, that whole SOPA-PIPA fight about a year and a half ago, Darrell was the first guy in the house to raise his hand and say, you know, this shall not pass. But it was really late in the game. We were just as surprised as people on the outside. We didn't have the lobbyist money. We didn't have the support. We didn't have the time. So what did we do? We walked into a room to try to hack the legislative process open with open source software. That was our first tool called Madison, which is what instigated the Open Gut Foundation. So Madison, I'll talk about that a little bit at the end. It was essentially a crowdsource legislative tool. We used to diagnose problems with SOPA so to get all the expertise, much of which is in this room, into the process, and also deliver an alternative, the right way, collaboratively on the internet, accountably where everyone can win and participate. This is what Madison looked like at the time. You can see it's pretty stripped down simple, but it opened up the legislative data, giving people a way to annotate, comment, ask questions, discuss, do something with that information. This is legislative process on the internet. It's ugly, but it works. So the problems we're all facing in government are pretty maddening. Just yesterday, a certain other Cambridge-based university that also likes Crimson released a study, pretty sobering one, that says more than 75%, yeah, more than 75% of young Americans are disengaged, and they don't care to become engaged, but you guys are engaged, and you're engaged in a really high-tech way. With the hacker ethos alive and well, and you guys here can convene these two people. This is my co-founder, Congressman Issa, and Ethan talking at the Civic Media Night Conference last year. You guys are bringing together left and right, science and civics. That's what this discussion, and that's what these problems all revolve around. And you, more than most people, know it's at stake. For those of you who don't know, this is Aaron Schwartz. The legal issues that he was facing, they're real. This is an academic. The things we're gonna talk about today, the problems of access, of equal protection of the law, the ability to participate, are far more than academic. It's real life. People go to jail, or worse, for putting this information on the internet. So what? You guys know technology. Well, it's all about people. So the technology only serves what we're trying to do here as a society. It means nothing if it isn't helping everyday people secure their rights in this country, and protect themselves from the powerful, and hold government accountable. Whether the powerful is a corporation or government, all we're doing is strengthening citizens' rights, participate, access information, and secure equal protection. Now everybody knows America is supposed to deliver the freedom to participate, the freedom to share ideas, the freedom to speak freely, assemble, petition your government. All of that depends on information, and communicating it. You cannot act unless you know. And our founding fathers knew that. They knew that everybody had to have the ability to access what government was doing if they were gonna be able to participate in it, and hold it accountable. Now back in the day, the best that they had were horses, and parchment paper. That was access to the law. Or if you could find your congressman and pigeonhole at some public house, that was about the best you could do. James Madison was right. The only guardian of true liberty in the United States is the advancement and diffusion of knowledge. Now what does that mean today? It means taking the Constitution, or law and legislation, that essentially still exists in a format, not a whole lot better than this, if it exists on the internet at all, and get it to this. And that's the story that we're gonna talk about today. Because if you don't have access to it, you can't be a citizen. Now think about that for a second. You cannot be a full-fledged citizen unless you are enjoying unfettered restriction free access to the stuff of government, which is the words, and the people who enforce those words. Our founders, frankly, would be horrified if they looked at this room, this building, all the whiz-bang, awesome stuff going on in here, and then looked at what government is doing. That's just not good enough. Paper, PDFs, and copyright restrictions. That's what we're dealing with. Those are the problems that we're facing today in the context of the law. So I would propose to you that the law is the most important data set in any community. If you think about it, everything else flows from there. Now who works with civic data on a daily basis? Anybody? Reporter, you're a reporter. What do you access for government information? Not a lot, okay. Does anybody work with spending information, transit information? How would you find some spending information today? Cambridge Brothers is a big PDF file, which is only, right, it's printed paper scanned in, so you're still back as a part of it. So it's a little bit better, but it's still not there. So there's a technology aspect to that, and then there's a process aspect to that. There's also a people aspect to that. Now unfortunately, we cannot fork the human soul and change the human condition. So we'll be talking about, or I'll be talking about the tech and the process side of it. Let's begin with how people are doing it today. You're a citizen. You wanna know the leash laws. What do you do? You. What would you do? Yeah, if you wanted to find out what the dog leash laws were, what would you do? Probably Google it, right? It's almost everybody's first step in first research assistant. 100 lawyers. Yeah, it's very different. 100 lying lawyers. 100 lying lawyers. You probably Google it if you're a citizen. And as we all know, if it doesn't show up on the first page, it ain't there sometimes. Any developers in the house? Developers, coders, you're a developer. How do you access the legal, how would you access the information? So if you're a developer or a citizen, you're a citizen developer and elected official. By the way, who just said he gets paid too much? I think this might be the first time in history. If you go to the law, this is the Massachusetts, the laws of our state. No APIs, no bulk download, can't access it. What if you're a lawyer or a legal support person? You're trying to do your job and serve clients. You've gotta go through all this paper and you're not actually able to serve as many people as you are. Those are our first users, by the way. Our people who just wanna serve more clients who can't afford legal assistance, they wanna be able to send a link. That's crazy, a link to the law that's applicable. They can't do that today. If you're a state lawmaker, the first thing that you do when a new issue comes up is you see what everybody else has been doing. You wanna see, hey, I'm in Massachusetts, what did they do in Maryland? What did they do in California? You can't do that because all the laws aren't in the same format and often aren't in the same place. If you're a city official, looking to figure out if your enforcement is working, you wanna be able to see, hey, where's the hotspots? Who is breaking the law where and where do we need work? You can't do that today. If you're an academic researcher, by the way, this is MIT students back in 1957 doing research, very different than today. You can't find it online. Same thing with journalists. Same thing with business owners. Business owners, entrepreneurs. They're hit with far more law than most of us are. Everything you see in this picture has a technical code. Grab your chair. That thing you are sitting on is covered by dozens and dozens and dozens of technical codes. Where do you find those? Most of them are not on the internet or if they are, they're copyrighted and you could be put in jail or worse for trying to access them just to do your job. So all the problems we've been discussing here as far as accessing the law and legislation involve discoverability problems, jargon, expertise, you don't know what the words say, cost and time and money, design problems, data formatting, it seems daunting, right? There's a lot of stuff that's wrong here with the way that government information, particularly law and legislation is accessible today. But we got it. We can do this. Everybody in this room has a skill that's applicable to solving this problem. So what I'm gonna turn to next is how this stuff is actually made. So this is where the government side of my background comes into play a little bit. Understanding how this stuff is actually produced by the folks inside of municipal, state and federal governments is absolutely vital to figuring out how to solve it. All right, Schoolhouse Rocks, who remembers this stuff? How is a bill made? Well, what is the bill? What is the law? It's actually not what you would think. Most of us think the law or legislation is this, right? You've got a section, you've got words on a page. This is, I think these are one of the gambling ordinances. I know it's been a hot topic up here recently. This is it. It's actually not this. This is just a snapshot of whatever the law happens to be right now. Every word on this page, every sentence is actually a mosaic. It's the sum total of all of the changes made to that law since the state started or since the country started or since the Magna Carta was signed. Whatever the first document is, that original program, each word is the sum total of all of these little pictures. All right, so now that we know what the law actually is, it is the sum total of all the little changes, all the little forks made over history to what is the source code of the community. So that's the sort of template that I like to use to explain it to myself. This is the source code. Just like any program needs that to run, any community needs the law or it can't function. So how is it made? Where does it start? It starts with a problem. Now the problem I'd like to use today is gambling, right? The problem, let's say you don't have convenient enough casino options. You can't go to Foxwoods, can't go to wherever. My grandmother used to go to Foxwoods all the time. So Massachusetts had a real world problem. There are not enough casinos in Massachusetts. The first thing that you do when there is that real world problem is you gotta figure out where the law is applicable. Where in that massive hundreds of pages of PDFs is gambling referred to? I just did a quick search on the page. This is only one of four, but these are many, many, many, many places. So you have to identify where those are. This is what it looks like in the Mosaic sense. Now if you remember, the people who are doing this have the same crappy technology and tools that we do. So they have to do that massive process often by hand and they need a hell of a lot of help. Boston can't do it by itself. America can't do it by itself. So they hire who? They hire outside vendors who do this for a living. Vendors like American Legal, Lexis Nexus, Westlaw are hired by almost every, or at least in my experience every, state, city, county, federal government to simply help them produce the law to know where that one word has been referenced over time, how that one word has evolved over time to marshal all of that information that a legislator would need to write a bill to fix that problem. Then the legislators do their thing. We're all familiar with how that happens. And then it goes back to the people who produce the law. So it goes back to the clerks and it goes back to the vendors. This is a simple compiler, but that's exactly what they're doing. They are compiling all of those little changes to the law that happens in a bill and getting it into the right format so that it fits in this. It's translating a bill to the code. That's called codification. Hit Keynote, there we go. So they compile it into the law itself. And how are they doing that? Well, they're doing it with the same tools as I've said over and over that we're faced with on the outside. They're doing it in PDFs. They're doing it in Word. They're doing it on crappy, outdated technology with procurement rules all on top of it. Fixing this requires this. And this is the hardest thing I've found and we've found in our experience to actually own and mean is you gotta have a little sympathy for the devil. Government sucks. The law sucks online today. The ability to access it sucks. You gotta have sympathy for the people who are doing it. They're citizens too. And they wanna do their jobs better. In most cases, we're assuming the best. So fixing it requires a little bit of sympathy for the devil. They're doing it in paper. They're doing it with an army of lawyers. This is Atticus Finch. They're actually doing it with a lot of them. In Chicago alone, there are 17 lawyers from vendors who keep the code updated and publish it four times a year. You need those people to do all that work. And it's expensive. States and cities are paying hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year to keep this document updated. It's essentially a track changes operation. You need all that people to do it. Well, you need most of them. You need that old domain expertise. You need to know how to translate a bill into code, into the law. That takes money, that takes time. And that's where we come in. So now I get to talk about the technology. The State Decoded. Has anybody heard of the State Decoded? Checked it out. What do you know about it? Oh crap, there we go. The State Decoded is just a way to put your code online. It's a really nice pathway for doing so. Great people put together. There we go. Super easy to use. The State Decoded, ta-da. So all of the problems that we were talking about before, the tech and the process, not the people, we're trying to address here. Now this started, this whole open source project, started in Virginia with a genius civic hacker named Waldo Jacob. He was frustrated, just like we were, at his inability to get the laws for his own state. So he said, screw it, I'm doing it. Embrace that hacker ethos and started building this for Virginia. The Knight Foundation, who generously funds us, generously funds the Civic Media Center and also funded Waldo. Took it up to a level where we could come in and start scaling it. So Waldo did Virginia. Now we're taking it to citizen states around the country. So this is the beautiful front end and the end result for accessing the law. Where does it start? So how does this actually happen? Well, we start with the code. Could be in a PDF, could be in a text file, could be in an RTF. You have to start with the data that they're giving us. Middle steps, PDFs, RTFs, TXT files. Then we parse that into XML. Boom, decoded law. Crazy things like the ability to send a link, the ability to search, the ability to plug into an API and bulk downloads, the ability to update almost instantaneously. All of the things that we know we need to be full citizens today, given all the technology and the tools we have, that's what we're working on here. And it's starting to spread a little bit. Starting in Virginia, Sunshine Statutes is Florida, Maryland, Baltimore, San Francisco, Philly, Chicago. These are the ones in process. We've got about 15,000 left to go because our goal is to get the entire corpus of law in the United States into the same open data format on the internet without any restrictions that you can do anything you want with. So that's producing open law in legislation in the 21st century. I wanted to give you a quick overview of the production problems, which you may or may not have been familiar with, because that explains why it sucks so much on the outside and give you a little bit of a look at the technology that we're using to change that. And we're changing it from the outside. Sometimes governments like San Francisco hire us to do that. Sometimes they say, we'll give you the data, we don't know what the hell you're gonna do with it, but it's public information, go for it. Sometimes it's scraped with all the legal implications that that has. That's what we're doing today. So I'd like to, I guess, open it up for questions. See where we go next. All right, yeah, I'm Ian Contra, I'm curious. Very interesting, I'm sure it's a good idea. I'm a little uncomfortable with the language that law is the source code of society. I don't know, I mean, I think I'm a little worried about the idea that once there's transparency, then that sort of then that equals access or that equals sort of everyone then has a similar ability to take advantage of the law. I mean, I think copyright is a perfect example of how suing, you know, rich Hollywood studios, suing college students is completely unfair, dynamic. And even though the college student is right, to win the case would cost a quarter of a million dollars or whatever. And I was thinking of your slide there where it's the woman in the legal aid office, you know, trying to explain the law. I mean, you can send a link to that guy and be like, well, you know, it doesn't make any sense. And so I guess I'm curious, and maybe it's beyond your purview and you can't do everything I realized, but I'm curious to what extent there's thinking about that connection between law and community action or the things that community needs. And I also, I disagree with the idea that, you know, the casino law starts with a problem of not accessing casino, I don't know. I mean, it's a little too short a history there of what's, and even really lacks, it sounds a little naive in terms of what a casino does to a community too, right? I mean, that's the other thing is that, so I guess that's my question is to what extent is this project thinking about how to actually enable people who aren't expensive law firms and aren't well-connected lobbyists and legislators to be able to make use of this stuff, you know? And it seems to me that there's some of these laws are gonna be real helpful to some people. And a lot of them, they're just, they're not about us. They're not about our daily life. And so is that kind of, I think it was a kind of social API, right? It's not computer to computer, but it's like, how do you connect the law to what society actually needs? And I think that's part of the frustration of government, not just that it's not searchable, but that even if it is, it doesn't really seem to be tackling the problems around us. So I'm wondering, do you think about that at all, or is there, or are you integrating with some other kinds of groups to do that? Absolutely. First off, next time I use a better example, what I was trying to get across there is that, how does it start, right? No one introduces a bill for no reason. No one tries to change the law for no reason. They need something to start it, and it's something in real life. Yeah, but people would say, so that's obviously good too. They say, well, why do we have a law saying don't kill people? Well, people, before there were laws, people knew it was a bad idea to kill people, it seems to me, and that's true of a lot of laws. It seems to me that a lot of sort of, it always occurs to me that the politicians are almost the last ones to get, that there's a sort of, tends to be a sea change in society and culture, and then it catches up. And then it's the battle of who's got power in society and copyrights per person. So what's the example of that distortion of how the corporations over what people would actually think is fair for copyright? So anyway, yeah. To your question about what are you doing to get this to the people that need it, that's about where we spend half of our time. So getting all of the data up to a place where you can actually do something with it and figure out how it matters to you, how it matters to you, what you're using it for, what a business is using for, what a legislator is using it for. Those are the use cases that I spelled out there. And at risk of drowning on too long, I didn't go into the ways that that connect on the other side. That's the research we're doing now. And those are the users that we're connecting to and building around with. So our workflow is sort of responsive. So we get it up to a level. We get it out into the hands of users. It's kind of the lean startup methodology, I guess. And then see what comes back and build around that. And as I said, the first users in most of the cities that we've released this in are the people that just need volume. They need technology to make their jobs more efficient so that they can serve more people or serve the same number of clients with less time and headaches. I have no idea where that's gonna go. That's the bleeding edge. I mean, we're covered in blood there. Just because up to today, you have not been able to do that. No one was walking around with this saying, what part of this do you like? What part of this do you need? Now we can do that on the internet in a way that you can actually measure it and track and then respond and build around. If we have this conversation this time next year, that's what I wanna be talking about. You? Yeah, we needed a question about how are you gonna represent and visualize the loud and how do you think about that? And what about that? All the annotations bring work something like that or command system or social interactions? Visualization is super powerful and it's something that is built in in a very small sense. We just have sort of word cloud type visualizations built in. As we get more and more legal codes up, the possibilities for visualizations and comparisons get a lot bigger. That's the use case for a legislator on the state and municipal level. What are the guys next door doing? How did that work? What's the state next door doing? How did that work? That's what can be powered by this. We're not there yet. And as far as the production side, so half of us I started off saying why we were born with this Madison tool, Madison is gonna sit on top of this and allow you to actually draft legislation or edit, create legislation on top of the legal code to make that whole process more seamless. So we're cutting out a lot of the steps here just with the state decoded to get the law from zero to 60 or updated. Well, then how do you, the next step is the process by which that is made. Madison 2.0 is under development right now. You can check it out on our GitHub page. We're gonna do Maryland in January, the state of Maryland. And then we're doing the federal government at the end of January, early February. But we have our 1.1 versions up now if you wanna check them out. It's marilland.opengovfoundation.org and madison.opengovfoundation.org. It's stripped down bare bones, but you'll get a sense of it. So the fair to say that after the federal and state level that this is in the U.S. school and we're getting that legislative release for people that they're exploring, I think particularly at the federal level for the Care Act or so is absolutely not correct. I can't imagine the person being engaged with those laws as someone outside of government doing the things that those laws, just because they're plain taxed or something like that. Definitely, in terms of U.S. laws, I can see that that would be a problem. Because otherwise, you don't have the power to just see what other people are doing and what they're doing with the law. So being able to search that really clearly and to turn it over, this is helpful. But for this, at the top level of government, who do you think is in the most use of the law? The most use of the law, Madison or state to code? You know what, who's your audience, I guess, so they're gonna be doing user testing with it, who are gonna be testing it? Broadly, we define our user testing as a group on the inside of government mirrored by a group on the outside. So in the federal example, let's say staff assistants or legislative councils or legislative directors, people who actually have to write the bills, who have to listen to constituent feedback, who have to listen to lobbyists, who have to listen to the news, all boiling that down into what they actually drop in a box and vote on, that's outrageously inefficient. And that was what we started to hack with Madison, but it's bringing all of that input in to make it more useful and satisfying to both people on the phone line, so to speak, or on the webpage. We built Madison so we could get folks like you to share what is wrong with SOPA in a way that we could actually make use of. So people were tweeting at us, people were sending emails, people were calling. All of that is divorced from the actual bill itself, the actual work that we're doing, and the people that are doing that work have their nose on the bill, not on the line with the constituent. So it's bringing that input, tagging it on the bill. That makes the whole process far more satisfactory to those on the outside. So something I didn't talk about yet is our user research, it's not just laptops, how do you, you know, UI UX research, it's how do you present this? How do you introduce this to people? What do they actually want? They're not satisfied with what they get today, but what they're not satisfied is they feel when they call that that means nothing, or that you send an email and no one reads it. Okay, those are technology things we can solve. If you're a congressman and you're reading down comments on a bill or a staff member is and you open it, you can send that constituent an automatic read receipt, which nine times out of 10 is all that person wants just to know that it was read by somebody. Those are, so that's where the technology problem sort of starts to get up to the people problem and we're never gonna solve the people problem unless the good lord comes down again and says, woof, open everything. But what can we strip away on the technology side to make that work? It's half the goal. Half the goal. So part of that is about okay, so if we make this billable, or master the principle of Open API is not as simple as it's got to be. So here's an example of a transit play. So as more and more cities start to open transit data, you have lots of private developers making apps, bringing paid, you access that data in different formats. And many times the best apps and the being paid apps. It's a very small sort of daily life example that's asked a much larger question, which is I wanna push you to think a little bit more about the possibility of, if you don't put certain safeguards in place, but so for example, as people build web services and open them and allow people to build on top of them, that's why we have the AGP out. So we're saying, well, we're making things open, but in many cases what ends up happening is the best implementation comes along as a private service that's paid and right there you start cutting out, it's classed, right? So by opening data, we're paradoxically making it more available to people who already have more resources. And so the question is, are there, are there social or technical or legal constraints that we might put on our open systems that would ensure that they remain open and accessible to as many people as possible? How are you having that debated? That's a fantastic question. Are we having that debate? I would, you know, our partners in crime and sort of our foundation, I don't think we are, in that, you know, I'll pull up here, our disclaimer, let's see, this is, we got at the bottom. All content is of course owned by its authors, the municipal code charter and all rules on this website are owned by the citizens of San Francisco and consequently they are not governed by copyright, so do whatever you want with it. The information on this website does not constitute legal device. It's all open, do whatever you want with it, whether that's paid or unpaid. It's a thorny question. We try to go as far as we can to ensure that this is open and available to everybody. That's why there's an application layer on top of that data stream that we're trying to make more and more and more and more useful. And that's where I think where Walder started this was to get at that exact question. You know, if you've ever tried to act when government says your city, your state, your federal government, hey, bulk data, we've opened data, here you go. It doesn't mean anything, it's useless without an application layer, and what they give you is a government website with all of the problems of design and process that we've discussed. How does that get better? Part of it is what we're doing, part of it is what you're doing, but I think part of it is coming from paid services. You know, that's a big debate that's starting to rage within the open government community. I'm sure you've heard some of it. It sort of feels weird to sell some of this stuff or to be in a free world and then actually want to go make a business out of it. That's how innovation happens in a lot of ways. How can we benefit from that without closing people off? That's secondarily why we're embracing open-source software so that when some good idea comes into us or we come up with a good idea, it's available to everybody to build off and modify. I know that probably hasn't answered your question totally, but I don't think you can ensure that there's nobody walling off access completely at some point down the production pipeline or the access pipeline. This is available under conditions that what's done with it is in a paid service. So I'm not saying you should do that, I'm just saying it's a debate worth having. Yeah, it is a debate worth having. And it's a debate that's very much underway right now. Yeah, but there's such a broader question. One sort of narrative for the rise of open government with the pressure from groups like the foundation and others, other would be technologies that could make this an open-source solution for possible. And I don't most can either of those in any sense in the work of the New San Francisco to play into both. I just wanted to bring up another narrative which I'm seeing mostly in the UK right now, but I'd be interested to know if you've seen in San Francisco in the US, which is openness essentially coming as a result of the client. So two municipal governments, one, Barnett in London, famously last year published the graph of doom in which they potentially projected how they were not going to be able to provide any services other than urgent adult care and childcare after at least 2015. And as a result, Barnett having been a big advocate of outsourcing of government services, I started talking about open government in a very radical way. So, well, because we have no money, then we need to get people involved. And just last week I noticed that Solihull, which is in the Weissman once in England, talked about switching to a social council model, which is what it called, which again was a kind of radical openness getting citizens involved. So again, it was coming from this position of weakness. So because we have no money and because government is essentially in decline, that's why we should be open. I'm just curious as to whether you see much evidence of that in the US and whether openness coming from this perceived position of weakness kind of affects the openness that we get. I think you are seeing that in the US. It's the world that government lives in today and government people live in today. When I was talking about sympathy for the devil, I can swear up and down that the folks who are doing this, which they had a little bit more money to do it better, they don't. They're having to do more with less. And they don't know what more to be doing with that less or that less money, if that makes sense. That's where we come in, frankly. That's why this exists. That's why this is a thing. If our success for us is kicking the keys over to San Francisco, kicking the keys to the federal government, kicking the keys, Madison goes to the House of Representatives. That's what they should be doing, but they can't. Okay, there are two ways to address that, right? Oh, let's suck it up for a little bit longer or can we hack something ourselves and then just put it out there and maybe give it to government, maybe sell it to government, maybe give it to citizens or sell it to citizens. I don't think it negatively impacts the success of those endeavors. I actually think it helps them. If someone comes to you and say I can't solve this myself, it's a very humbling experience and to have government or elected officials actually go to you and say, I don't know a whole lot about online piracy. Can you help me write this bill? I don't know a lot about the ITC or international copyright law. I know some, I know enough to get a framework of what I wanna do down and work with those vendors to figure out where it's addressed in the US code, but I don't know the right solution. That's why you held in the analog world hearings with witnesses to bring in all that knowledge and that expertise to help government do its job. That's not good enough anymore because you have four people at a witness table. With the internet, you can extend that witness table infinitely in both directions. And I think that more people are at the outset willing to come and sit at that infinite witness table, whether it's through Madison or State Decoded or any other tool. If government or their elected officials take that humbling, and I hope not humiliating, first step of raising their hand and saying, I can't do this and I don't know. People who, I mean, thanks for the, I'm working with the World Wide Web Console which is enhancing or trying to leave the web to its potential, but this is really a spot where it does not yet happen the way it could be. But wouldn't it be useful to link it to actual cases like to situation where you had questions of whether the law is applicable or not? Because what you actually want is that people can access, let's say a database or your application and then, for example, they ask you about, do I have to leave the dog or not? I would probably ask someone who has a dog because I assume that he already informed himself about what's right and what's wrong. So, but that's two clicks away from where I want to get it. And while you want to enhance the law as a citizen of the state, you want to know if this law is still, I mean, appropriate to my current situation of it's made some 100 years ago and nobody asks the system. So, no. Actually, no one's following that. You can't get it wrong. At least why is it? Because that's what you want to know when you let your people, your court and everything, you want to make them enhance the law. But unless you don't know, you cannot choose from the right people. So this is something that I clearly see in you. Is what? Like creating openness, transparency. Yeah, I think what you're thinking about is sort of the next step. Because you're talking about, first of all, a lot of these things in their own, the words that they're written in aren't available. But you're saying, how many people find all the different things that these are linked to and the situations, you know, there'll be some way to react to that information. But I think that getting it up there, it's not even, it's not even, I mean, I was, I was thinking too about you. I'm just really interested in that, the source code, and how you're rightful if you want to follow it. And how you incorporate, you know, whether that letter extends to all the common law, that is the cases that interpret the laws. I mean, I realize that, again, that's often the future. You're dealing with something that's not even up there at all in a lot of states. But that would be sort of similar, you know, beyond the letter of the law, where does it fly? And how has it been applied? And is it one of those laws that people just don't pay any attention to? Like, I like this idea of an index, maybe, if people could add their current situation, or their case, to what is written in the law, you can create a landscape of, let's say, the thousand articles that are being used mostly during all day life, and then maybe how two or three more articles are linked to each other. And then you can see, okay, this is something that is really useful for people. So we have to work on that. And then maybe there's something that won't be used like in a hundred years. So an index will be the right thing for the first thing. These are court decisions here. This is Virginia, this is Waldo's, sort of the first and the most mature. Is that in the code using San Francisco? Does it have a future where you can put in a waiver to mention the court decisions? It does, we haven't put the data in yet. But yeah, that's next for us in all of those instances. We're facing the issue of scale with a hardy band of developers, and as far as getting all of the data formats, and just getting the actual data. They're not allowed. It's sometimes a work of weeks, months, all that stuff, yeah. But you're right, the court decisions are applicable. It's built to hold legislation, right? It's built to hold regulation. All of that is revolving around, whether it's changing or interpreting, this, the actual law itself. Well, yeah, and the beauty of the framework though, and the growing future list, is if you just get that data and get it to the right format the first time, then you unlock the possibilities, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to get it the second time and the third time, and that's the kicking of the keys over to government, eventually, where they say, wow, this is ridiculously useful and way better than what we have. We don't have to spend a million dollars on Lexus Nexus every year, maybe we only have to spend 50, and the rest of it we can do ourselves or with civil society help. Exactly. They're just as frustrating as you are. Speaking of something you work for, did that work for you? Yeah, well, that was the point I was trying to make, is that the stuff we face is mirrored on the inside. Yeah. In every case. Now, as far as changing it to your original question, I'm sorry, I didn't get your name, Felix. To your question about the inline sort of editability or responding to it as you're using it, that's here. So to not blow people's minds, a comment on the bottom is a lot more familiar and comfortable to most of the folks that we're dealing with on the inside than Madison is. The notion you can edit everything, comment on everything, track changes on everything, and then make it all go away because you're not actually changing that underlying text is very hard to get across unless you see it. So we start with the comments. And we've already got one that's being changed. You're the first people outside of the government to see this and it's a draft piece of legislation out of San Francisco. So somebody came onto the San Francisco website to look up sanfranciscocode.org just to find what the rules on bikes were. And they found something that legislators missed. It was out of date, but it was buried in the housing code. If you own an apartment or own a house in San Francisco with a parking spot, you are only allowed under current law to park a motor vehicle there. You can't park your bike in your parking space. That's crazy. And someone said something to that effect, like this is dumb, this is stupid. Can't we do something about this? That's very easy once it's identified, but no one has the ability to sort through all that crap. One of the things I wanna do with this first lighthouse program of cities is just do a dumb law cleanup. And that's something anybody can do, right? We've been on the internet. All the dumb laws in Boston, many of which can be apocryphal. Like, oh, you can't shoot a whale from a driving car in Michigan. Well, there are things like that. And they're not supposed to be in there. And people actually can get ticketed or worse if you break those laws. And oftentimes, the first time you find out about it is when you get the cuffs or the ticket. Okay, when you're looking that stuff up, it's a very, very small step. And a familiar one to say, what the heck, can we do something about this? And what we're finding is that when you just do that flag it, flag of it, people will do something about it. Yeah, technology can do that. It's very, that's a very, exactly, that's the plan. So that was in, that was, you've struck upon the way. You know, the technology part actually here is not that hard. It's the process part, which is really, really, really hard and sticky. You're saying, don't give petroleum storage facilities that are located within half a mile of something or the second population density. Further complicating this, they weren't just trying to pass a law. It was a labor-based assessment. It was a practice of why there's a culture thing. Now, once you had access to the environmental activists who were doing this, they could walk you through this, with what it would mean. So I knew online what to talk. I explained that in some sort of, under some of the work you were explaining, or Google Maps explains about it to my friends, how do you begin to find that? The second kind of feeling factor was that, this ended up being a battle between the governor and the legislature. So we got into the whole, how a bill becomes a law. And I realized, I was really ignorant about how, why not in vetoes, and pocket vetoes, and whatever else the governor can do, there's some end and big risk for it. And in turn, a part of the bill, and I still don't know what that means, except like, it isn't an advocate, but it is a veto for something. Are you doing any part about how you explode that sort of, of course, the discovery problem of, this is really about ethanol cranes, this is what the law is. And secondly, the sort of meta, the meta process of how a bill becomes a law, describing what's next for this legislation to occur. Well, there's a lot of sticky wickets there, to put it lightly. Throughout what you just described though, there are a number of things that are technology and process that can be made more efficient, more discoverable, more useful. The advocacy part, whether it's right or wrong to send an ethanol train this here, or whether it's right or wrong for the governor to be able to do whatever he wants and all that jazz, that's the people side of it. But how can we arm those people, whether it's citizens, environmental activists, the governor of the state legislators, everybody, reporters like you, how can we arm them to be talking about that, the environmental regulation, whether or not it fits Massachusetts and the state's needs today, instead of arguing about how stupid it is that the governor can find something in a bill that I can't as a reporter, or the army of lawyers is on one side and I don't have one. That's really what I think we can achieve is leveling that playing field. So Waldo has a great term, where he talks about the state decoded. It's got all the niceties of modern website design and the expensive tools that lawyers use. That's really what this is. It's giving you the same ability to search, discover and actually find out what the hell the problem is that the governor does or that LexisNexis does or that those environmental activists who spend all day on a little section have. The Madison side of it and the annotation side of it is gathering all of that feedback in a useful format. So an environmental group is saying, call your congressman and tell him, vote no on the ethanol train through my neighborhood act. That's made ridiculously useful if they can just go onto the bill itself and say, I like this or I don't or fix this or ignore that, this is good. What you're describing there, like Obamacare is like the thing I always use in my head. I would have given a kidney to have tools like this on that bill because the dirty secret is that both parties agreed on the vast majority of the bill. I use 70% thereabouts, that's what congressman Issa would always reference. About 70% of it you could agree on, but you couldn't figure out what the hell that 70% was and break that out in like past bipartisan healthcare reform. That would be amazing. There's no way to do it. Maybe, that's one of the regulations that's coming in later. One more question. Oh, one more question. Could you two? Okay, two. Two more questions. Mm-hmm. Something that area of software engineers who are like once we have all this open we can start refactoring the law. I'm like, I wasn't in the IRS and stuff like that. There's program that's going to be seen here. So I'm just kind of curious what the reception's been or what happens when you have people in the same room coming from these different sides of the spectrum. It's all over the place. There's a lot of opposition, as you can imagine. And it's not, there's a little bit of a lack of utility. I don't understand what the heck this does. Almost everybody that we encounter, you just show them a webpage and type in dog laws on san franciscoco.org. Get thousands of references or all of the references to those terms versus the Lexis Nexus where you get a tenth of that versus the city websites PDFs where you get maybe a hundredth of that. They're like, oh God, this is better, let's do it. There are entrenched people, as we all know too well, who are against this just in principle. They don't want to make it easy for you to discover the law. They make a lot of money out of you not discovering the law. We assume the best in all people and all institutions, at least at the outset, until we're proven again and again otherwise. But there is a lot of that. And so that hasn't stopped us though. I would say we do get feedback positive and negative all the time. We do get opposition all the time. But so what, we're doing it anyway. Right on. I think it's staffed with the local projects and the state projects we're doing. They're looking at a local code on housing code or something else. And they're also looking at housing incentives that have been put into some other law or something in the state level, federal level. And the work we're doing to expose a lot of insight and intelligence in the process of view or on any of those issues. I could see how this could become a collaborative document, the same way you could have it, although they're quite likely to end up buster cussing. They're the same thing about the Google Docs code. That's not that much to count. So there's two small questions. First is, spent a lot of time parsing large XML documents. And they are the main makers of large XML documents. Maybe even the makers of large XML documents over and above government. And I'm not convinced that XML can ever be a schoolbook. It's fine. Everyone uses XML as what it is. It's dumb and you make the layer of intelligence above it. But I almost wonder if there's something at the nexus between what you're doing, what Google is doing, and what Wolfram Alba is doing. And the way that data is stored and how CD comes to mind for a piece of blogs and just alternatives to XML that could make the way to store the data a little bit more intelligent or at least a little easier. APIs are fine when you make the APIs fine. But in the end, the way that data lives at its lowest level can make a difference to how the APIs structure and how the program works. And I think it's why textbooks prevents people from so long, and it's why law is what it is. Absolutely, thank you. The follow up point was that obviously the end conclusion is we want to Google for Sol's questions. How does line item we don't want Wolfram Alba to be answered? Well, obviously it works this way. Here's all the documents, laws, and other things that relate to it that aren't necessarily just the products of law, but are like a larger system of organizing municipal data. You're right, XML is not the answer. That is very much a middle step or a way point. It was the data format when Waldo started that was easiest just to get open. It's not perfect. There's XML and there's JSON going on a little bit here, which is, it's an improvement. There's gotta be a better way. No one has actually done this before, though. No one has sat down and said, gee, we actually have the ability today to have all of the laws in the same data format, all in the same database. What is the ideal way to do that? We would love help from Google. We would love help from Wolfram Alba, and I don't just mean us, I mean the whole community. That's what they do. They don't do the people side. They don't do the PDF to whatever. They've actually told us, if you find that answer, tell us, we'd love to know. They have their, in a lot of ways, their best minds are working on rocket ships and Google Glasses and talking computers. I don't know what it is. They're not working on this. We would love to get everything to that level. If it's at XML, maybe we can make it attractive and say, gee, we've got, I would say, the most valuable data set in the United States here. Can we do something with it? Can we make it better? Something to watch over the next year, to this point, is Waldo J. Quiff, again, is stepping away from the state to code it as we're starting to scale it and grow it. He's setting up an open data institute in the U.S. This is one of those exact things, questions that hasn't been possible to ask yet, but it is, it's starting to emerge. I mean, I don't know what the answer is, though. I would connect with him and stay in touch. Like I said, we got seven. We're gonna have another 10 or so over the next month. That's a lot, that's a big corpus of data all in the same format that hasn't been there before. What do you do with it? I don't know. How do we get a new city in, by the way? How do we get a new city in? Wow. We sometimes just do it and go to them and say, hey, look what we did. Sometimes we have like a city of San Francisco who looked at Baltimore. So Baltimore was the first city to get this done and we did it in collaboration. We pitched San Francisco months and months and months ago, they were very busy. So Baltimore was first and then San Francisco called Baltimore and said, that's awesome, how do we do it? And that's another way in. Chicago, we just did it and put it up there and hoped no one yelled at us. Actually, they embraced us. That's not systematic and that's not scalable. That's what we want to get all 15,000, acquire them, we'll leave it at that and just do it all in one big push or tranche or whatever you want to call it so that we can build that full library. Doing it one by one is for us not scalable but for you guys it is. So Boston isn't done, Massachusetts isn't done. We can help somebody here do that, Cambridge isn't done. But we can't do it all ourselves. I wish we could. Anybody have a billion dollars they want to give us so we can map it all along? Well thank you, Laurie. Thank you for all your questions. Discussing this is a challenge as you can see because there are so many moving pieces and I appreciate you bearing with me and asking good questions to help us get this story better. If there's an email list, if you want to get in touch with me or with our developers, come up, grab me. We're at found open Gov on Twitter and have a great rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you.