The LexPublica Blog

Today we’re very excited to announce our first alpha release. It might not seem earth-shattering to you at the moment, but to us it marks a giant leap forward for LexPublica. That’s because our first small group of participants is now able to start drafting the first contract – what’s new today lays the groundwork for what’s to come. We hope the more you learn about the project the more interested you’ll be to participate, so I’ll walk you through it.

You’ll first notice that our website is now live. Zak’s been coding like mad to have the site serve two initial major functions. The drafting area is where participants will work on crafting new contracts (more on our workflow plans to come in future blog posts). The first group of participants—consisting of two lawyers, a law student and me, plus Martin and Zak—are here in Vancouver, and our collaboration will take place in the drafting area. In time, people from all over North America will collaborate via our site.

The drafting area is public, so you can watch progress happen over time, from outlining to drafting to reviewing to editing. None of the drafts is intended for use by the public, of course. After a draft has been reviewed and edited so that it’s clear, accurate and concise, it will be published on the main site, covered under a Creative Commons licence for all to use.

The second function debuting today is the issue management system. Participants will manage all tasks, comments, feature requests, questions, etc., related to the development of a contract with the issue tracker. Once a contract is released, the issue tracker will continue to be used as participants manage suggested changes and feature requests.

It’ll be a few weeks before our first contract is ready, and once it’s released we hope you’ll have a clearer idea of what our project is, how it works, and how you might want to get involved.

Want to know more? Check out our new FAQ or leave us a comment.