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The Story of Laws.Africa |
2020-02-24 11:18:00 +0200 |
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Laws.Africa digitises African legislation for public use. We do this by building open source technology that significantly lowers the cost of maintaining and consolidating a legislation database. Our editorial platform produces legislation in a world-class, machine-friendly XML format called Akoma Ntoso XML. This unlocks the value of legislation as a fundamental building block in the legal innovation ecosystem.
Laws.Africa is a South African non-profit organisation. We believe that the traditional approach to promoting free access to the law requires a fundamental shift. Putting documents online does not enable value creation and is not enough. Too much time and money is wasted on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of producing a legislation consolidation. So we build open source technology that makes this process simpler, faster, cheaper and unlocks the value of machine-friendly legislation. You can read more about our principles and goals on our website.
African governments have, in almost all cases (Kenya being the exemplar exception), outsourced the responsibility of maintaining and producing consolidated, up-to-date collections of national legislation to the private sector. This means that access to the letter of the law -- a fundamental aspect of any functioning democracy -- is restricted to those who can afford to pay for it.
Not only does this undermine the rule of law and access to justice, but it also limits innovation. Legal industry innovators that require the text of the law must either perform the laborious task of sourcing and consolidating it, or pay others who have done so.
This is undifferentiated heavy lifting:
- It’s undifferentiated because anyone and everyone who needs up-to-date, consolidated laws must first go through this process. Doing so doesn’t help innovators differentiate themselves from their competition, since they all need to do the same work.
- It’s heavy lifting because the process requires expertise, is laborious and time-consuming, and is thus expensive.
The Indigo Platform is our world-class, open source, cloud-based legislation management platform. It simplifies the process of managing, consolidating and publishing high-quality legislation.
Indigo enables a new approach to free access to law in Africa:
- It enables national governments to maintain their own legislation collections;
- It underlies our Legislation Commons, a Creative-Commons licensed collection of African legislation;
- It produces machine-friendly Akoma Ntoso XML to enable legislation reuse, unlocking innovation;
- It significantly reduces the time and cost of converting legislation into Akoma Ntoso: a complex Act with hundreds of sections can be converted in one to two hours.
Indigo automatically outputs legislation in multiple formats. By separating legislation content and structure from presentation, it is able to automatically adapt and present legislation in a way that is most appropriate for the end user:
- machine-friendly Akoma Ntoso XML enables machine learning, data analysis, app development, and is an excellent digital archival format.
- mobile-friendly webpages for cheap, fast access from mobile devices to support the majority of African users which access the internet on their phones.
- print-ready PDF for desk-based research and physical archival.
- ePub for digital readers and tablets
We use Akoma Ntoso XML, the premier open format for legislative information. Akoma Ntoso is in use by, among others, Kenya Law, the United Nations, the EU Parliament, UK National Archives and the Brazilian and Italian Senates.
Akoma Ntoso is a markup format that richly captures the content and structure of legislation. It allows a machine to model the chapters, parts, sections, subsections, defined terms, tables and other elements of an Act or other legislative work. This improves automation and reduces editorial time and costs. For example, it automates the generation of Tables of Contents, hyperlinking of references within and between documents, and the production of outputs in diverse formats.
Akoma Ntoso allows machines, for the first time, to work with legislation as more than just a formatted Word document or PDF.
For example, apps can present only specific sections or subsections of an Act, directly in the context of where the user needs them. Novel interfaces can help users explore how legislation and case law interact with each other, following references and citations. Screen readers can help blind users to navigate and read legislation easily and accurately.
Interactivity can help readers understand legislation. For example, our OpenByLaws.org.za project shows popup definitions of defined terms, making it easier for readers to make sense of what they are reading.
Legal research is also supported. Our Namibian Legislation Glossary uses Akoma Ntoso to update itself automatically. It pulls together all the defined terms from Namibian statutes in our Legislation Commons and presents them in a way that's easy to read and understand. This helps users and researchers to explore how different terms are used in Namibian statutes, from 1840 to 2020.
Founded in late 2018, Laws.Africa has achieved much in its first 18 months, thanks to the Indigo platform and machine-friendly legislation. We have converted 385 Namibian Acts into Akoma Ntoso and have detailed records of a further 1198 amendments and commencements. 275 by-laws from 14 South Africa municipalities are now available to citizens to read, for free. We’re working on Nigerian national legislation and are collaborating with Kenya Law on improving how they use Akoma Ntoso.
- The open source Indigo platform is available on GitHub at github.com/laws-africa/indigo
- Information on the Laws.Africa Legislation Commons is available at laws.africa/commons
- By-laws for 6 South African municiplaties (and growing!) are freely available at openbylaws.org.za
- Full national Namibian Legislation is available at Namiblii.org