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California bill to release the state’s building codes online for free

February 12, 2013 / Leave a comment

Carl Malamud posted the following to BoingBoing today:

Assemblyman Brian Nestande of California has introduced Assembly Bill 292, which would open source the California Code of Regulations (including the Building Codes!!). The summary reads:

“This bill would provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall bear an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes.”

Public.Resource.Org has bulk data for the CCR and the public safety codes (known as Title 24) online, but this would all be way easier if we didn’t have to double-key the building codes every 3 years and jump on the West CD-ROM every 2 months to extract the data. This move would lead to tremendous innovation, just like we’ve seen when the Federal Register went open source in bulk.

The bill sponsor, Assemblyman Nestande, has a long background in public policy and IP. He was campaign manager for Sonny Bono’s successful 1994 congressional campaign.

[HT BoingBoing!]

New Database: “See Who’s Lobbying the California Legislature”

September 1, 2011 / Leave a comment

Via INFOdocket

From California Watch:

California interest groups have filed nearly 7,000 reports in the first half of 2011 disclosing what bills and issues they have lobbied in state government. We’ve taken those forms and created a one-of-a-kind database that allows you to search who is lobbying any bill before the Legislature.

Simply type a bill number into the system and get a list of all the interests that declared an intent to lobby that bill on their Form 635s [PDF].

There are a few important caveats to keep in mind.

In order to extract the individual bills from the filings, California Watch relied on human data entry workers — a necessity, given the varied, unstructured nature of the filings. Anytime human beings perform large-scale data entry, some errors are inevitable. We took a statistically significant sample of our data entry results and found that between 2 and 7 percent of the records in the database likely had some kind of problem caused by human error: mostly typos and omissions.

We fixed the most obvious issues, but the point remains: Don’t look at these results as gospel. Each result returned by our database also includes a link to the original reports, so if something looks out of place, by all means verify it.

Read Additional Caveats and Access the Database Here

See Also: More California Watch Online Databases

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