[okfn-za] Openbylaws.org.za: SA's by-laws made easy to read and share

Tue Oct 15 08:28:19 UTC 2013

Hi Charles,

We first need to convince people that open is good and that PDF != open. It's hard to convince people to change to a new tool when they don't see value in making that change.

The European parliaments are building tools (such as at4am.org which Adi mentioned) to allow lawmakers to author legislation using open formats, but there's some way to go, both in education and in quality.

Simply getting hold of the original MS Word documents instead of the PDFs would be a start. PDF is really an awful format for sharing anything in (which I'm sure anyone on this list already knows).

Cheers
Greg

On 15 October 2013 at 10:08:34 AM, Charles (chuckra at gmail.com) wrote:

That’s amazing, Greg. I wonder if one could train city lawyers to do this from the beginning?

From: okfn-za-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:okfn-za-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Rufus Pollock
Sent: 15 October 2013 02:04
To: Greg Kempe
Cc: okfn-za at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [okfn-za] Openbylaws.org.za: SA's by-laws made easy to read and share

Fantastic Greg! Would you be up for drafting a short blog piece giving an intro to the idea and status for http://za.okfn.org/ ?

Rufus

On 14 October 2013 12:48, Greg Kempe <gregkempe at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a side project to help make South Africa's by-laws easier to read and share.

  http://openbylaws.org.za/

I have started with Cape Town and have 14 of about 35 by-laws available. I've take the PDF forms of the by-laws and transformed them into HTML. You can easily share links to sections, get an overview of the laws from the table of contents, and view inline term definitions.

In addition, the documents themselves are available in XML (using the Akoma Ntoso schema) under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

I'd love your input! Thoughts, suggestions, contributions welcome.

If you or someone you know often needs access to South Africa's by-laws, please get in touch and let me know what's missing.

Thanks,

Greg

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Rufus Pollock
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