 Good morning everyone. Thank you again to John and to Cap for hosting us today and to Carl for organizing this fantastic event. This is my second law.gov workshop that I've had the pleasure to participate in and I'm delighted to be here today in support of this initiative and as Prita said point out I want to sort of reiterate the comment that we're very eager to hear the discussion here and develop suggestions that are useful to us particularly within from my perspective within the executive branch of government what we can do to support the access to legal information. So I'm going to be trying to be strict with the time including with myself which means I will be very brief in my introduction to focus a little bit on our perspective from the executive branch side and then I have the pleasure to be joined here today by Steven Schulze to my left who is the associate director of the Princeton Princeton Center for Information Technology and Policy and most notably one of the co-creators of the RECAP project along with Harlan Yu who's together here today the Firefox plug-in which many of you know about that tries to break the paywall of PACER if you will by putting up legal information online from PACER and making it freely available. To his left is David Mao in the newly created position right of deputy law librarian at the Library of Congress who focuses on the global legal research portfolio at the Library of Congress and to his left is Lawrence Tribe now senior counselor to for access to justice at the Department of Justice and on leave is Carl M. Loeb University professor and a renowned professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. So I'm very honored to be part of this panel and have the again the unfortunate job of simply being the timekeeper and having to reign in people who otherwise we could listen to them talk all day. So we're here very much because of course as head of the open government initiative my job is to support openness with regard to the workings of government and the information of government and that includes of course access to legal information very much so if not centrally. I'm very pleased to report that as part of the open government process whereby now 29 CFO Act agencies and another dozen besides have created open government plans a number of them and I hope more to follow suit are providing access to specifically legal information. So for example HUD as providing raw access to their ALGA opinions as a result of the open government process but we want to get more federal agencies involved in the process of making sure that the legal information they create is put up online in raw and accessible format. So to the extent to which their executive branch materials that we can identify that when we can make them more accessible and more available in XML raw formats we want to do so and to use this process to hopefully identify more potential such clients to be part of the law.gov movement. We have also of course been spearheading their two projects I want to single out in particular because they are ones where Carl Malamud and public resource.org and the law.gov movement have really played a central role in advising the accessibility of patent information which is of tremendous corpus of information that is of great use of what we sometimes term high-value information to helping not only create more accessible government but also to create entrepreneurial opportunities and greater innovation and the opportunity for people potentially to build businesses and build jobs around access to the corpus of patent literature the USPTO has recently made available just in the last couple of weeks in a public-private partnership with Google with public resources help I might add to try to make this important information available and to not let technical obstacles stand in the way in other words outdated government infrastructure to making necessary legal information that is essential to doing the research necessary to improve the patent system but again also to help people build businesses using that information and second and we'll hear a lot more about this today so I won't belabor this is the phenomenal project of making the federal register really the newspaper of our democracy one of the most important collections of legal information about the executive branch action available last year in xml format we'll hear from the federal register team today Stephen has also been involved with this work is making xml based download of the federal register available for free instead of for the fee of $17,000 is now making it available for free and so i'm glad that very mostly is here today to talk about that project and what's really important about this and this is to echo something that carl mentioned earlier and john talked about as well is that by liberating that data it then allowed third-party partners whether the folks at princeton or the folks at public resource or the folks from golf pols who are here today to talk about their work to then take that information and do something with it to create new versions of the federal register that are searchable by theme that are searchable by geography that are easier to read that are formatted better and to do the kinds of things that preta alluded to earlier in other words if you make this information available please try to create the hyperlinks well that's exactly what happened now with the federal register project again in partnership with narra and with the public printer mike wash is here as well today and so what's exciting is when we liberate this data it's then what people can do with it to actually create more value out of it to do the things that are sometimes unexpected that we don't can't predict as you mentioned what people will actually do so we're excited about these efforts as with the patent information as with the federal register data to think about how liberating legal information will help us to make it more accessible to people but also more intelligible to people to help those people who do for example research on citation networks to find patterns in information to again help us to organize legal information better and provide access to those who need it the most so it's very exciting to think about what we might do here both to strengthen the rule of law by making legal information more accessible to help people in the juice business who need to process their mangoes in safe and healthy ways but ultimately what I think this initiative really is about is about whether it's a specifically about legal information or about all government information it's about putting that information out there as the way of operating for any 21st century institution we have to understand that by making this information freely available whether it's court transcripts or you know water sanitation codes by making it available we empower people to use that information to create greater value out of it to make it more accessible but also again to potentially create jobs to create economic opportunity using that information and ultimately in turn to make these institutions work better so what you'll hear about this afternoon in greater detail is how now thanks to the liberation of the xml version of the federal register and the work of these third party institutions who then prototype new versions of the federal register we've been able to now reincorporate those improvements into how we as the government will deliver the federal register so how we will improve the institution how we will be able to essentially re-engineer the plane while flying it i like that expression to use this combination of transparency combined with citizen engagement combined with these kinds of partnerships that we might develop to actually make our institutions work better and empower people in the process so i am very happy to be here today in support of this effort and hope that we will get lots of suggestions not only about the information that we can identify and make accessible but that the partnerships that we might create in order to create greater value out of that information as we turn it of out there let it loose make it accessible to people to do the exciting things with it that we know that we need following the pathways in the case as we've heard about creating the hyperlinks but doing the things that we could never have imagined and won't be able to anticipate that will surprise us and excite us and make our democracy stronger and better and more exciting