Virginia is the first US state to publish its legislation online in a clean and understandable manner via 'The State Decoded'.
RICHMOND, VA - Virginia is the first US state to publish its legislation online in a clean and understandable manner via 'The State Decoded'.
The State Decoded is a platform that displays state codes, court decisions, and information from legislative tracking services to make it all more understandable to normal humans. With, amongst others, a clean-cut typography, embedded definitions of legal terms and a robust API, the project aims to make US laws a centerpiece of media coverage.
The very first State Decoded site went into public beta on March 13: Virginia Decoded. This site was the initial one that snowballed into the State Decoded project, and proved to be a good testing ground for the software and, indeed, the concept.
Virginia provides its code as SGML, which made it relatively easy to extract the laws and store them in the State Decoded. Many states do not provide bulk downloads at all, so extracting their laws requires the laborious work of screen-scraping. Virginia is ahead in that regard. The State Decoded team is looking to replicate the process used for the Virginia Decoded website in other states: "we’ll find partners in states throughout the nation and, whenever possible, work with the state agency that oversees the state’s laws to craft a site that is the best fit for that state and its code. It will be a laborious process, but that’s what it takes to create a good, long-lasting network of state-level open government websites."
Source: www.statedecoded.com
