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The following is a collection of bite-sized civic hacking project ideas, aimed at improving access to justice. Most of the ideas are focused on the creation of single/limited-purpose apps for either: (1) legal professionals and para-professionals serving low-income clients; or (2) the public at large.
The supporting information for ideas below varies in detail, and none of the ideas are fleshed out to the level of detail you would expect for true functional specifications, but there should be enough to get you started. This repository's administrator can help provide guidance should you want to work on any of these, including putting you in contact with potential users or providing background information on data and logic sources. This list is maintained by the MA public defender agency (CPCS), hence the Massachusetts focus.
Note: This is an evolving list. Check back often, and feel free to add your own suggestions. This wiki is open for edits.
These projects should be mobile friendly as they are most useful to attorneys as a quick-reference while in court.
- Indigency Calculator (claimed)
- CORI Cruncher
- Collateral Consequences
- Duration Calculator
- Adult Sentencing Calculator (claimed)
- Juvenile Sentencing Calculator
The following ideas are aimed at legal professionals and are the types of projects a non-programer could undertake using the QnA Markup language. For example, an attorney could use QnA to create an interactive decision tree to walk pro se litigants through common tasks or document creation (e.g., the creation of a 93A demand letter or the creation of their own personal practice guides).
- Do they need a warrant?
- How to expunge ones record
- Rules of Evidence
- Do I need a memo? (R13)
- ...
- Demographic Need Mapper
#####Existing Projects w/ Suggested Improvements
- QnA Markup. QnA is a markup language for people with little or no programming experience. It was designed with attorneys in mind and transforms blocks of text into interactive question and answer sessions (QnAs). These QnAs can be used as stand-alone expert systems or in the aid of rule-based document construction. In addition to working generally on the project by addressing a logged issue, one could:
- Incorporate citation (below) into the QnA WYSIWYG document editor (code, example), an implementation of ckeditor.
- Fork sharelatex and create the ability to parse submitted data in the same way as the QnA HTML and Markdown parsers. This would allow people to create LaTeX docs with QnAs.
- Citation "A fast, stand-alone legal citation extractor."
- Improve coverage by adding new authorities (e.g., the Mass. General Laws).