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Solving the challenge of the 21 st century Statute Book

Carol Tullo Jersey 2013. Solving the challenge of the 21 st century Statute Book. 2-3m. Some statistics. 2.3 million unique users per month 5 million page views per week 15, 000 changes to legislation each year 129,000 outstanding effects to be made (April 2013)

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Solving the challenge of the 21 st century Statute Book

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  1. Carol Tullo Jersey 2013 Solving the challenge of the 21st century Statute Book

  2. 2-3m

  3. Some statistics 2.3 million unique users per month 5 million page views per week 15, 000 changes to legislation each year 129,000 outstanding effects to be made (April 2013) 60% of traffic via search engines

  4. Some context Open data https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter Open licensing OGL identifier Open Source

  5. Understanding legislation • What does it mean for readers to understand legislation better? • How accurately do they understand? • How quickly do they understand? • Do readers understand better what they prefer? • Does better understanding lead to better compliance?

  6. Usability study – 3 stage approach • Stage 1 – Online survey • Stage 2 – In depth telephone interviews • Stage 3 – User testing sessions This research was • conducted by Bunnyfoot Ltd on behalf of The National Archives and the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel • undertaken between August 2012 and February 2013 • funded by The National Archives

  7. Views on what makes legislation easy or hard to read What would make it clearer • A plain Englishsummary at the beginning that set out the purpose of the legislation • Notes under every section saying when it came into force I think [the language used in legislation] is more difficult than it should be Phone interviewee - Judge

  8. What are personas? Personas are tools to help keep a user-centred focus when developing products and services. What are personas not? • Personas are not marketing segments or a description of all your audiences. Personas are tools for making decisions about usability when requirements and characteristics overlap across audiences What is their function? • Personas are a highly effective way of distilling essential information about the target audience • They are detailed descriptions of ‘archetyped’ people who interact with the service and content you deliver • They are used as tools to drive development and encourage cross-communication between different stakeholders – rather than talking abstractly about the ‘user’, we will begin to talk about ‘Jane’ and her goals in a way that provides effective and focused input • They help to play the role of those people and list the types of activities that they might want to perform, as well as their motivations and aims when interacting with legislation. This is why they aid decisions about style, presentation and design

  9. Personas PRIMARY PERSONA Mark Green: Environmental Enforcement Officer, Birmingham City Council Regular user. Needs to quote legislation. Uses a handful of Acts regularly. No access to subscription services. Web savvy. Jane Booker: Law Librarian Regular user. Likely to use all the features legislation.gov.uk offers. Expert web researcher and confident researcher of legal documents. Time pressured to respond to queries. Uses subscription services and other sources. “I think [the language used in legislation] is more difficult than it should be” “I need to quote legislation as part of my job and so it is essential that the legislation I access is up-to-date. I approach [reading legislation] with a heavy heart” Heather Cole: Member of public seeking to defend her rights. First time user, does want to view legislation, but needs support and advice too. Needs to understand what she is seeing. Web savvy. Rt Hon Sidney Turner: Uses Parliament Intranet and library service for information. Needs to understand the text in order to speak in the chamber and at committee and to represent constituents. “I want to prove to my local council that they are not providing the services they are obligated to provide, but legislation can be hard to understand - it’s convoluted, technical and ‘jargony’” “The statue book is like an elephant with patches all over it”

  10. Good law The Good Law initiative is an appeal to everyone interested in the making and publishing of law to come together with a shared objective of making legislation work well for the users of today and tomorrow. • Good law is law that is • necessary • clear • coherent • effective • accessible www.gov.uk/good-law “....We want .... to create confidence among users that legislation is for them...”

  11. Findings: Stage 1 - Online survey

  12. Findings: What we set out to find • comparing different drafting styles • characteristics of readers BUT What we did not expect....

  13. Principal finding Readers, of all categories, generally have little understanding of • what legislation is • how it works • how it is structured Their “mental model” of legislation is not very good

  14. Findings continued • Users really struggled to find their way around legislation (hard copy and online) • Users did not understand common terms, e.g. “commencement” or “prescribed” • Users were puzzled by cross-references, e.g. references to “subsection (1)” or “Schedule x makes provision about...” • Users did not know what “in force” meant • Users tended to open legislation online by clicking on a particular section and did not look at neighbouring provisions • Users were frustrated where provisions were divided between primary and secondary legislation and did not know what “S.I.” meant

  15. What next? • Expert Participation • Use the technology • Identifiers • Feedback loop • Big Data • Government’s role

  16. Expert Participation • Magnify the in-house activities • Publicly available, official, free, open and up to date, revised primary and secondary legislation • Shared goal and partnership • Memorandum of Understanding with participating organisations • New processes and tools enable collaboration to create and maintain new revised versions of legislation • We provide tools and training • We remain the guardians and arbiters of editorial practice and quality

  17. The new process Review Review Markup Effects Review Research Update

  18. Secure publishing platform • Cross jurisdiction, cross department platform for legislation and associated documents • Links Departments, The National Archives, Parliaments and the contractor • Captures more information direct so we can improve the online service publishing.legislation.gse.gov.uk

  19. Identifing legislative acts • Agreed and maintained unique identifiers for legislative acts are important • Identifiers are the basic building block for interoperability of legislative information between jurisdictions and are also needed to share data between information systems more widely • At the European level we need identifiers to relate national implementing measures to European Directives, as well as relating legislation between member states • eg If I know I comply with “The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011” in the UK, which regulations in France do I also comply with?

  20. European Legislation Identifier • On 24 Sept 2012, the EU Council of Ministers adopted conclusions on the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) • ELI is a voluntary scheme for member states. It encourages countries to commit to establishing and maintaining unique identifiers for their national legislation • Given the wide variety of legislative systems, conventions and traditions, a rigid identifier system could not work • eg, until 1963 UK Acts of Parliament were numbered based on the regnal year, rather than the calendar year • ELI is a practical and flexible system for naming legislation documents and for sharing metadata • Implemented by the UK, being implemented by Publications Office, France, Ireland, Luxembourg and others

  21. Council conclusions regarding ELI

  22. Three pillars of ELI • Identifiers – recommended HTTP URIs • Member states free to determine the specification of their URI Set • ELI URIs are described using a URI Template • There are common suggested components for constructing an ELI template • Metadata – recommended vocabulary • Core common metadata elements • Based on the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records model of “work”, “expression” and “manifestation” • Need to contend with language, extent and point in time variations • Publishing – recommended serialisation • Recommendation to embed ELI metadata using RDFa as pragmatic adoption route for existing national systems

  23. A question of taste • No hard and fast rules for constructing an ELI. A good ELI scheme is a question of taste • Basic: • there is an ELI for each legislative act • the ELI resolves on the web to open legislation • the ELI Set is persistent with some guarentees about availability • Standard: • traditional forms of citation can be mapped to new style ELIs with no additional information • ELIs are human readable and reader friendly • ELIs are “hackable” (you can tweak the URLs using common sense) • Occam's razor has been applied (necessary and sufficient information only in the ELI URI)

  24. A question of taste • Advanced: • ELI set contains abstract identifiers and document identifiers • ELI set supports multiple manifestations (eg XML, PDF) • ELI resolution supports content negotiation • There are batch and list views available as well as identifiers for documents • ELI set supports provision level addressing • ELI set supports point in time addressing • ELI set supports jurisdiction variations • ELI set supports known future states (prospective versions) • ELI set supports possible future states (proposed versions) • ELI set supports a variety of aliases and searches to aid use • ELIs are formerly described with a IETF URI Template specification

  25. Working together • Taskforce established in December by the EU Council Working Party e-Law (e-Law) to progress ELI • Chaired by Luxembourg, with substantial contributions from the UK, France and the Publications Office of the European Commission • Taskforce is proposing further work in five areas: • Assets – vocabulary development and documentation • Implementation – an ELI registry, exploring use of ELI with the National Implementing Measures database • Adoption – helping member states define their own ELI • Standards – engaging with related standards activities such as URN:Lex and OASIS / Akoma Ntoso • Dissemination – sharing work with others at conferences and events

  26. Carol Tullo Controller and Queen’s Printer Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Director, Office of Public Sector Information Director, Information Policy and Services The National Archives – Ministry of Justice carol.tullo@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk

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