Daily Archives: October 15, 2009

Law.Gov: America’s Operating System, Open Source

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Carl Malamud (public.resource.org) just posted on Radar O’Reilly about Law.Gov: America’s Operating System.  Carl writes:

Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we’re going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. More details on the effort are available on our Law.Gov page.

To kickstart this amazing effort, Carl and his co-conveners will be hosting a series of workshops.  After these workshops, he plans to submit a report to the law makers in DC, and Carl also welcomes others to contribute reports, findings, etc.  Collaboration between the legal and open source world should shed new light and hopefully help answer how to best serve and provide this content.

The Law.gov site features supportive responses from both Andrew McLaughlin (Deputy CTO) and Senator Lieberman.   Also available on the Law.gov site is Carl’s call to action at the Gov 2.0 Summit (September 2009) hosted by Tim O’Reilly.

The co-conveners include legal and technology all-stars (such as Pamela Samuelson, Jonathan Zittrain, Larry Lessig, Tim Wu, Ed Felten, Tim O’Reilly and John Podesta, to name just a few).    This should be an interesting and exciting year.

GPO VIP Visit at SLS today

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Our special guest today in the law library was the Honorable Robert (Bob) Tapella, Public Printer of the U.S and CEO of the GPO.  

We chatted about all things GPO, from cheering the recent launch of an XML Federal Register to learning about the eventual phasing out of GPO Access  (it’s being succeeded by the very impressive FDSys) to why Bob likes to pronouce it F-D Sys and not Fed Sys to discussing the Federal Depository Library Program and, of course, PACER.    

We learned that the GPO does not want to be in the web portal business; instead, they want to make government documents widely available to the public and keep them archived in perpetuity.   The Federal Register XML project is a fine example of this mission and their new initiatives.

Joining us for lunch were a number of Stanford Law  folks and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. 

After lunch, Bob Tapella stopped by our Advanced Legal Research class.  On Monday, one of our students had an excellent question regarding overlapping government websites.  And, lucky for our student, Bob Tapella was able to join us for an expert answer.   I’m not sure we can bring in the head of every agency that our students raise questions about, but we can try!

GPO Visit to Stanford

Left to right:  CEO of GPO Bob Tapella; Stanford Law Library Director Paul Lomio; Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org; Roland Vogl, Executive Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology; Library Deputy Director Erika Wayne; E-Resources and Serials Librarian Brian Provenzale