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Welcome to the DC Code 'Challenge'

(aka annotated issue tracker with things to do)

New here? Articles:

• http://macwright.org/2013/02/20/you-cannot-have-the-code.html
• http://macwright.org/2013/02/13/the-code-compiled.html
• http://macwright.org/2013/02/11/the-code-written.html
• http://macwright.org/2013/02/14/the-law-is-public-domain.html
• http://macwright.org/2013/02/22/access-ownership.html
• http://macwright.org/2013/04/04/the-open-code.html
• http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/18132/dcs-laws-arent-yours/
• http://boingboing.net/2013/03/27/municipal-codes-of-dc-free-fo.html
• http://dcist.com/2013/03/sitting_in_front_of_me.php
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/dc-code-hackathon_n_3039271.html
• http://razor.occams.info/blog/2013/04/04/dc-opens-its-code-embracing-principles-of-open-laws/

Prerequisites

Technical tasks will be much easier if you have a free GitHub account. If you fix an issue that has a ticket attached to it, like this one, please close it with a note so that we know when and how it got done.

Most of what tmcw has written so far to process the text is in node.js, so having that installed and having a basic understanding of JavaScript is important.

The non-processing work (the websites, like browser) are static sites. They are hosted on GitHub Pages and deployed just by committing to the gh-pages branch of the according repo: http://dccode.org/browser/ is http://github.com/openlawdc/browser - and so on.

For the State Decoded task, it's mostly PHP/MySQL and Linux server setup tasks.

State Decoded

Requires: PHP/MySQL

Clone The State Decoded and improve it. Set up a DC Code instance of it. Spec out and start building read/write. Bill Hunt has a half-finished dccode branch that imports the code - complete that.

Parser Improvements

Requires: Javascript/Node

• Improve the parser for the unofficial code https://github.com/openlawdc/dc-decoded - lots of bugs & improvements here, fairly low-hanging. List of issues.
• Improve the browsers https://github.com/openlawdc

PDF Version Improvements

Requires: Javascript + LaTeX or Markdown knowledge

• Improve and finish the (early beta of PDF export of the code](https://archive.org/details/unofficial_washington_dc_code_one) https://github.com/openlawdc/formats
• Same for markdown. How about the code in Jekyll?

The Architecture

• dc-decoded parses the zip of .doc documents into JSON
• simple turns those into simple HTML with node
• browser makes a nice d3-powered interface from them
• formats turns those into Markdown and PDF

and

• the dccode branch of statedecoded imports the text

Less Technical Tasks

• Figure out how to do in-house maintenance of the code: ask the Council (codification counsel)
• Read the Lexis contract and find flaws / places to improve it
• Spec out data from other 'sources of law' like the Municipal Register & Court systems.

1 June 2013 Hackathon