Law and Software

Que tengo miedo perderte, perderte despues.

Here it is. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, complete with hyperlinks and hoverlinks.

Wednesday, the Gang of Eight Senate Bill S744 “The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” was published. A PDF, 800+ pages long, full of all the cross-references that make the immigration statute so hard to study, and the reason for my flatlining back in December to produce the Law and Software Online Edition of the Immigration and Nationality Act. And I don’t have much time for hiding content in a dense and awkward format that few will read. Enter the Law and Software Edition of the Immigration Reform Bill –  BSEOIMA Mucho.

Wednesday afternoon and all of Thursday went into the production of a first draft of the online HTML version of the new Senate Bill. It went out through listservs and twitter Friday morning. Sitemaps were uploaded to Google and Bing Thursday evening. Not yet processed of course. The search engines are about identifying content and ignoring markup. Flatlining and these online editions are all about markup – mining the data for very rich links.

The hearing was adjourned until Monday because of Boston. Which gave me the chance to flatline and mine 1500 links in the document on Saturday. Formatting is not perfect, and I still need to think about how to handle citations to proposed sections in the Act (that of course don’t exist yet). But it’s ready for prime time. All dressed up with no invite to the party.

Here are a few random sections:

Border Security, the Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy

The Dream Act

$50M in Grants for organizations that help the dreamers

Merit Based Immigration (the Points system)

Unlawful employment. Pitfalls for employers

Criminal Street Gangs

L Visa Fraud

The JOLT Act – Jobs Originated Through Launching Travel. Come south and visit us Canadians

The INVEST plan. Bring us your rich and business savvy