Free Legal Web Barcamp

The Free Legal Web Barcamp is taking place on Saturday 18 October at the RSA in London.

We already have a good number of people participating, but more is better. If you’d like to have your say as to how the Free Legal Web might be developed, please do sign up. If you’re not able to attend, please comment on the blog.

What will we be discussing? The agenda will be up to you, but we’ll be trying to answer some of the following questions:

  • What type of service are we aiming to achieve?
  • Who can contribute what to the initial development project?
  • What data resources are available and what are the barriers to their re-use?
  • How can we best leverage those resources and add value?
  • How can we best encourage and facilitate authoritative content contributions?
  • How will we organise, manage and fund the project?

3 thoughts on “Free Legal Web Barcamp

  1. Hi Nick – just to pick your brains (it’s kinda relevant)
    :
    When it was announced that the Statute Law Database – http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk – would be free (was this due to a Guardian campaign?) the target for it being up to date was Autumn 2008. Has this been quietly sidelined? Is there a new date?

    “As enacted” legislation is just about useless to the average member of the public, take the current Statute Law Database version of the Employment Rights Act 1996:
    http://snurl.com/3zme0

    There are five years’ worth of amendments that still have to be added. For an Act that presently has a section 98ZH an old version is pretty useless. I would have thought that updated legislation was absolutely key to the Free Legal Web project. Do you have any info?

  2. The SLD is free for re-use. All you need is a Click-Use licence.

    The Update status is at
    http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/Revised.aspx

    They say the majority are fully up to date. But …

    Over half of all items of revised legislation on SLD already incorporate any effects on them contained in legislation made or enacted up to the present. For the remainder there are still effects outstanding.

    For a minority of the items of revised legislation on SLD there are effects in one or more of the years from 2003 to the current year that have not yet been applied.

    I don’t know what the timetable is for bringing every piece of legislation reasonably up to date.

  3. I picked a dozen 2000 Acts at random and only one was fully up-to-date. For them to say that over half of all Acts are fully revised is perhaps slightly misleading – it seems to be the less useful Acts, which weren’t revised anyway, which are up-to-date. It will be a great resource when it’s finished, though.

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