Good Government

New York City Council Member Ben Kallos uses GitHub to collect public commentary on much of his technology-related legislation. Kallos finds crowdsourcing as an empowering tool that creates a different sense of democracy, he told Government Technology.

Open-government advocates and local officials in five major U.S. cities announced the formation of a new coalition, the Free Law Founders, on Wednesday, launching a partnership to create new tools, data standards and processes for state and local governments to make public information and data better accessible to the public.

The FLF, led by New York City Councilmember Ben Kallos, San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell and OpenGov Foundation Executive Director Seamus Kraft, also includes officials in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston.

“Laws and legislative information are often overlooked as open data, and I believe laws and legislative information are one of, if not the, most important data sets government keep,” Farrell, who led the charge to make San Francisco the nation’s first “open legislation” city, said in a statement. “As legislators we should do everything in our power to ensure laws, codes, and policies are free and easily accessible to our residents.”

Kallos, who chairs his city’s Governmental Operations Committee, said it’s important for local governments to make their respective law and regulatory codes plus legislation more accessible to the public. “Millennia ago, Hammurabi codified law and displayed it publicly for the people to see,” Kallos said in the FLF’s announcement. “Today, public means free and online, not behind a license or paywall.”

A City Council committee voted unanimously on Tuesday to pass bills that would require the city to publish its laws and its official newspaper online.

Currently, the city contracts the New York City Legal Publishing Corporation to publish the City Charter, the Administrative Code, and Rules online. But the contractor is not required to update the laws regularly. The new bill would require the city’s law department to publish the laws online, internally or through a contractor, and update them at least once every four weeks.

“In this age of complex legal requirements in so many areas of our life it is more important than ever for the law to be accessible to everybody. In the age of Hammurabi that meant putting it in cuneiform. Today it means putting it online,” Ben Kallos, the chair of the Council committee on government operations, said.