Project Concept

The following is excerpted from Email to Bryan Wilson (KC Legal Hackers) from Dazza Greenwood (Massachusetts Legal Hackers)

...[I'm frequently asked] recommendations for [law and computation] focused degree granting and other educational programs ...so I've been developing a list of such programs around the world to be published on GitHub by Legal Hackers!

The "legal hack", should you choose to collaborate upon it would be to a) share research on any such programs you may know of (to fill out the list) and b) publish a distributed version of the authoritative list in a fork of the project repo housed within an "official" KC Legal Hackers GitHub organization. That's kinda all there is to it.

The "how to" is interesting in a geeky way. As an open source, open standards and open data oriented project the quality control and reliability is literally based on the integrity and competence of legal hackers - which I know to be of highest caliber and fitness for a mission of this type.

Specifically, current plan is for the version 1.0 list to be a pure markdown file in the root of the master branch of the project repo (most likely just the readme). Each collaborating legal hackers chapter would nominate 2 members, at least one being a person listed as the contact on the legalhackers.org chapters page, and both of whom would be added to the project "GitHub team" with write access to the project repo.

The initial idea for low overhead and no drama is to follow a very few very simple and very essential practices:

a) All content published on the list is covered by the same Creative Commons license (including documented license for any form based contributions, content offered by pull request from external parties or otherwise.

b) The list is updated on a release version basis (i.e. release version 0.2, release version 1.0, release version 1.4, etc) so that contributed/proposed updates are targeted to a numbered release version of the list and are not merged one by one to the live authoritative list.

c) The Git protocol (adopted for the most part in the free github service) enables flexible and powerful ways to sync, push and pull content in various ways among repositories that are formed from a common root.

This hack is part of setting up a distributed publishing service for legal hackers, and this is a project that came out of the summer summit in Brooklyn. The road map for 2017 is to integrate content publishing flows from github to a couple of Medium digital magazines and maybe to learning modules on edX and a special Kindle authors REST service and account for Legal Hackers (eg for CLE and other book like content).

For now, just a list in markdown of legal and tech educational programs in a Legal Hackers github repo that we fork to organize contributions. Want to collaborate?

Here is some more info on current thinking:

Use of branches will be key to keeping versions and different approaches clean so they can be considered for inclusion in the official list as part of a published release in the master branch.

To make this simple, labels for issues and releases will be named with the relevant release version number. An issue that says we should get the President to introduce the list as part of a marketing g launch could be tied to version 12 estimated for release in the year 2025. The then current draft version of the markdown list for each future release will exist in a branch that is named with the relevant release number.

I am assuming the listed named leads of each participating chapter take ultimate responsibility for maintaining their local repo, at least maintaining security to prevent hacked GitHub accounts posting data to the list and policing the accuracy and fairness of the process for posting or editing content from their chapter. If things go weird, an email or call to the listed lead for any chapter should suffice to fix it in some simple and quick way (based on experience with quite of a few of the chapter leads, a contact of this nature (unfortunate though the cause) would likely result in improved quality and even higher performance workflows). Because ... hey, it's Legal Hackers!!

Lastly - distributed does not have to mean monolithic. Coupled with locally customizable options like ignore files and other functionality it is possible for some chapters to publish parts of a list that are solely for local consumption or that the overall group may not want included on the official collaboratively supported list. So, as example only - Mass Legal Hackers could wish to add a computational social science program list but that may be too far afield for inclusion on the shared big list and that would be no problem to publish in the fork in the Mass Legal Hackers GitHub org but not reflected if a network pull happens to harvest updates and contributions from the network to the big shared list or if a big network push happens to update all participating nodes with new release content it can be configured to avoid deleting or changing the custom local continent such as a computational social science list.

Sent on my Trusty Apple iPhone!