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Ungathered Thoughts

GovHack 2015: Legolas

(see also: GovHack 2015: My writeup)

Law is commonly represented as a rigid "thing" that happens to us, and changes reduced to simple catchphrases that don't mean the same things that laws say. We become polarised and we are disengaged from taking part in how laws are built.

Making law a conversation which all citizens can engage in might just enable the kinds of behaviour that open source has demonstrated; open source empowers users to contribute to fix bugs, and open laws can enable citizens to build a better society.

Laws are a code, and our GovHack project for 2015 seeks to bring citizens onboard as stakeholders.

How it works (the concept)

Legislation is imported into an environment which supports free and nuanced discussion. This platform aims to provide -

From there, we support various uses of the platform according to different needs -

Legolas is a proposal to support legislative documentation with tools for online engagement of the community - discussion relating to specific legislative "elements", history as legislation evolves over time, search and crowd-sourced supplementary documentation, and whatever other APIs, extensions, hooks and elements may prove useful over time.

How the prototype works (under the hood)