====== Open Privacy Legislation ======

The web holds enormous potential to make legislation openly available as a public resource. Not just so you can read pieces of legislation online, but also to analyse, annotate, combine and reference using new tools. The [[http://www.openingparliament.org/declaration|Declaration of Parliamentary Openness]] was released in 2012. It lays out a set of best practices for national parliaments to make their information open. 

Taking data protection and privacy legislation as a case study, we assessed a range of government websites and rated them according to a few of the criteria from the Declaration. We rated countries on a 1-4 scale based on the following criteria; is there a URI for the original act (1 point), the most current version of the act (1), is there a permissive license (1), and is the URI 'neat' (1)?

We mapped this data: **[[http://cdb.io/19dvTYx|live demo]]**

[[http://cdb.io/19dvTYx|{{:project:legal:open_privacy_legislation_cartodb.png?200|}}]]

This project started as a [[event:2013-09|LegalHack@OKCon 2013]] challenge.

=== 18 Stars of Open Legislation? ===

John Sheridan also came up with a set of additional criteria, a little like Tim Berners-Lee's Five Stars of Linked Data, which set out some additional technical best practices for publishing legislation;

Basic:

  * there is a URI for each legislative act
  * the URI resolves on the web to open legislation

Standard:

  * the URI Set is persistent with guarantees about availability
  * Occam's razor has been applied (no cruft in the URI). 

Advanced:

  * URI set contains abstract identifiers and document identifiers
  * URI set supports multiple manifestations (XML, PDF)
  * URI resolution supports content negotiation (e.g. browser can request content as plain text rather 
than html)
  * traditional citation scheme can be mapped to new style URIs with no additional information
  * the URIs are human readable / reader friendly
  * the URIs are hackable
  * there are batch and list views available as well as identifiers for documents
  * URIs support provision level addressing
  * URIs support point in time addressing
  * URIs support jurisdiction variations
  * URIs support known future states (prospective versions)
  * URIs support possible future states (proposed versions)
  * URIs support a variety of aliases and searches to aid use
  * URIs are formally described with a IETF URI Template specification

===== Data =====

  * [[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlqMaTMcz6UzdHBzT05GcWpaSk92dGZIV1NLY3U0VkE&usp=sharing|Online spreadsheet]]

===== Team =====

  * Reuben Binns (@rdbinns)
  
{{tag>status:demo legal needs:dev needs:design needs:data needs:expert}}