Carl Malamud is an information hero to many people. He created EDGAR, FedFlix (digitizing U.S. government film and video), and many other services that can be found on his Public.resource.org page. The Los Angeles Times recently named him a government transparency crusader.

Now, Mr. Malamud is involved a new project, Law.gov.

He explains what it’s all about in a new O’Reilly Radar blog post. He even mentions a role for librarians in the post.

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.

[Snip]

The idea for Law.Gov seems to be getting a good reception in Washington, D.C. Senator Lieberman, writing on behalf of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the committee responsible for the E-Government Act, has already accepted our request to submit our report to the Committee. Additional formal requests to submit the completed report are outstanding.

[Snip]

Law.Gov is a big challenge for the legal world, and some of the best thinkers in that world have joined us as co-conveners…[Our emphasis] There are challenges for librarians as well, such as compiling a full listing of all materials that should be in the repository.

[Snip]

The factor that made this coalesce was the recent Government 2.0 Summit put on by Tim O’Reilly. I gave a talk at that summit about the need to put primary legal materials on-line, and it was gratifying to hear the Deputy CTO of the United States, in his closing keynote, highlight that as one of the issues which he thought the White House should help make real through their “moral authority and convening power.”

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: O’Reilly Radar

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 and is filed under Digital Repositories, Government Documents and Political Information, Information Industry, Information Policy, Legal, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.