I'm excited to see the start of a new blog on legal informatics (and more), from Grant Vergottini.  Grant, a key participant and organizer of the California Law Hackathon, and his business partner, Bradlee Chang, developed the authoring system that California's legislature uses to write our state laws.  So he knows a thing or two about legislative data.

Grant's vision, which I share, is that at some point, legislation from around the world will be published in a standard format so that "you or your business can easily research the laws to which you are subject" due to the growth of an industry that "caters to the needs of the legal profession based on open worldwide standards."

There are a number of questions of how that vision will come to be.  I touched on some of these questions in my answer on Quora about the non-technical barriers to using version control for legislation, which stimulated a lively discussion.  I'm hopeful, with Grant's new blog, that we can have more of those discussions to work out both the non-technical (mostly political) and technical challenges in the way of open legislative data standards.