FreeLegalWeb

In London on 18 October 24 enthusiastic souls gave up their Saturday to share their ideas on how we might achieve our seemingly impossible task.

My intro attempted to define the project: in essence, better, joined-up, value-added access to the law via a) direct access to the law itself and b) expertly authored commentary; and to identify the main obstacles: which for me boil down to two: addressability of law sources and incentivising and “certifying” sufficiently expert contributions.

John Sheridan of OPSI then described what the government could do to support a project such as ours and the prospective merging of OPSI legislation and the SLD which will rationalise access. Joe Ury pointed to tools that could be applied to gain better access to BAILII resources and also clarified the murky issue of copyright in High Court judgments which stands in the way of fully open access to them.

Several barristers, solicitors and students contributed experiences and ideas, particularly as to incentivising others to contribute authoritative content.

Members of the TSO team contracted to OPSI gave us information on the OPSI programming interface being developed and several others of a technical bent described how lightweight technologies might be applied – in particular, several associated with the mySociety information democracy project who have already done great work with projects related to the cause such as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

In the afternoon four discussion groups considered different aspects of the project in more detail:

John Sheridan led a group that considered the target audience, using as a starting point OPSI research on use of the OPSI legislation site. OPSI has profiled four typical classes of user: lawyers, public sector manager, informed layman and the “anti-user” whose attempt to address their problem via the site is entirely inappropriate.

Jeni Tennison of TSO worked with a group to refine OPSI’s proposed permanent URI scheme for legislation which will allow direct addressing of legislation down to the smallest fragment and which will also enable point-in-time queries.

Francis Davey led a group which came up with an ingenious proposed “eco-system” employing several modules: a Google Knol-type environment for authoring contributions (which would be owned by the author and could be syndicated back onto their own site), an authentication module; a Yahoo answers-type module; a legislation/case annotation module; and an API which would resolve references and provide a rich interface to the wider web. All these modules could be based on existing open source tools and shared legal information resources.

Harry Metcalfe’s group extended this discussion, considering several use case scenarios and how the service might meet their needs: practitioner, law librarian and informed user (all within scope) and ill-informed user (without). For example, the mother of a disabled child who had done some initial research and had sufficient direction to pursue her problem would find value; the ill-informed “pub” question would likely draw a blank. The group also discussed how potential authors might self-certify by subscribing to the rules of the “brand”.

At the closing session we agreed on key next steps. Apart from organisational issues, foremost amongst these is to address the question of funding.

We agreed those interested in getting their hands dirty would meet again mid-January.

[Participants please point out any inaccuracies in the above.]