LinkedLegislation Blog

Last week, Amazon Web Services notified me that something went wrong with the hardware hosting our California Codes site (calaw.tabulaw.com). Bad timing, given our preparation for a California Law Hackathon. I built this originally as a side project and didn't have a back-up (note to future self), so I had... [Read More]

Plans for the California laws hackathon are moving forward, with some sponsorships secured, thanks to Philip Ung (@philrung) at Common Cause (@CommonCauseCA). Generally updates are added at https://code.google.com/p/calaw/wiki More details soon...Also wanted to note that my California laws site (calaw.tabulaw.com) is down, due to an Amazon Web Services interruption.  I will restore it... [Read More]

[Edit: Sign up to join us here (Facebook event)]It's true, California's laws now come with an unofficial RESTful API. This is a great boost for California Law Hackathon plans: now programmers can dive right in and develop innovative ways of presenting and navigating the data in their favorite format- JSON, XML, RDF among others.  If you want... [Read More]

This Sunday, August 7 at 1pm PST, we are having a virtual + in-person planning meeting for the hackathon, with a twitter hashtag #CaLawHack.I've set up a collaborative editor at https://rasa.tabulaw.com/p/calaw so we can jot notes for the planning meeting itself.Look for more details on govfresh.com, where Luke Fretwell has... [Read More]

So it's not quite Wikileaks, and it's actually officially sanctioned by California's Legislative Counsel. But an email I recently received on Sunlight Foundation's OpenStates listserv could be the first step to fully opening up California's legislation to the public. In the world of legislative transparency, this counts as exciting stuff.I've... [Read More]