[open-government] Fwd: [MI] Municipal Code Online & Open

Wed Jul 17 06:51:33 UTC 2013

FYI: I think this is pretty cool.

Daniel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Rebecca Williams*
Date: Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Subject: [MI] Municipal Code Online & Open
To: muni-innovation at googlegroups.com

Muni Innovators,

I shot this around the Code for America Brigade listserv, but wanted to
make sure the cities in the Peer Network got wind of this too.

Washington D.C. recently posted their municipal code online in an open
and legally
accessible <http://macwright.org/2013/02/22/access-ownership.html> format,
and it is currently being hosted with beautiful open source
software<https://github.com/openlawdc/>that could be reused in your
city today. The precipice of this great
opening-up was that Tom Macwright was trying to make a bike app that linked
to local bicycle laws, but the code was not available
openly<http://macwright.org/2013/02/20/you-cannot-have-the-code.html>to
add to the app. By and through: the purchasing of the DC Code,
extraction, a DC Code
Hackathon<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/15/what-happens-when-you-open-the-dc-code/>,
and subsequent buy-in by the city to make the code openly available online
(that's the key), the DC Code is now available at
DCCode.org<http://dccode.org/browser/>
.

Since:

   1. Carl Malamud, famous legal data liberator (and integral to getting
   the DC Code online<http://boingboing.net/2013/03/27/municipal-codes-of-dc-free-fo.html>)
   has hosted extracted city code
online<https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/city/>,
   for developers to scrape and create sites like DCCode.org (or whatever they
   want) with.
   2. A group in Tunisia has adapted the source code for a draft of their
   constitution <http://mtimet.github.io/dostour/>, and changed it to
   right-to-left :) !
   3. I've got word that Baltimore should have their code up shortly
   [tomorrow :)] using that same open source software; so that's DC ->
   Tunisia -> Baltimore.

San Francisco and other CfA affiliated cities have expressed interest in
reimplementing this in their cities, as well as some LegalHacker
communities.

Having municipal code online and open legally and in format is helpful to
citizens, lawyers, developers–anyone interested easily accessing the letter
of the law for a DCCode.org or a bike app or *many things*.

It's important to note, that DC has been such a wild success story because
the city saw the great work being done and opened up the
code<http://macwright.org/2013/04/04/the-open-code.html>to facilitate
the upkeep of this site.

It would be great to see this keep going.

Rebecca Williams
Policy Analyst | Sunlight Foundation <http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/>
(c) 413-387-8268 | @internetrebecca <http://www.twitter.com/internetrebecca>

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