Check out The Madison Project. It is a project from the Open Gov Foundation, as a way to collaborate on documents — in this case draft laws & policies — to allow groups of people to interact & input their perspectives. This type of platform clearly could have uses outside of creating legislation — there is huge opportunity to use collaborative document software in other areas of law & legal tasks.
Everything the Open Gov Foundation is doing is open-source, so there is even more worth in considering where else collaboration software could be useful in new legal service designs.
First, what if government documents were opened to everyone for discussion, collaboration and improvement? And second, what if elected officials listened to and learned from that public collaboration, treating all users equally? Our answer is Madison. Born from an all-night hackathon, the beta version was first deployed by Congressman @DarrellIssa to crowdsource the #OPEN Act, an Internet-protecting alternative to SOPA and PIPA. And it worked, representing the first time a Member of Congress had crowdsourced a bill and actually introduced user-generated improvements to the legislative process.
Madison has grown up since then, becoming open source software free for anyone to use while opening policy documents previously off-limits to individuals and the Internet community. With more development work and your help, Madison can become a free turnkey solution so that anyone can both unlock the policy documents they want and advance the truly open, accountable government they deserve.
