Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Comment submitted to Oregon.gov

Many Oregon government websites provide informational links to ORS.  For example:  The citizen portal to its Oregon.gov web page has a search tool.  Searching term  “ORS” gives this result.  Selecting  "Bills and Laws Oregon Revised Statutes” gives this result.

For the sake of example select Volume 1 at the link.  Then select Chapter 1 of Volume 1. That returns: "State policy for courts”. 

Welcome to the dead end old school world of plain text!  Ugh!  Dead end is what you get wring through all the text to find whatever it is that you are looking for.  But wait! It is the Information Age and the short cut is the search of a relational data base!

Instead of this wouldn’t a citizen rather see this?

But that is a .org site not a .gov site and the law is a very strict official thing that  used to be written by a quill pen on parchment to preserve it immutable that cannot be changed.  Before the it was written in stone and there only one copy.

This at the https://www.oregonlaws.org website:
Committed to Public Service
We will always provide free access to the current law. In addition, we provide special support for non-profit, educational, and government users. Through social entre­pre­neurship, we’re lowering the cost of legal services and increasing citizen access.This

Oregon.gov is committed to that also.  

Why can’t my state government deliver service to me related to the simple indexing of the fundamental law of our state like that delivered by a .org?

I used to give up on finding what ai want in ORS using the .gov site.  Then I found the .gov site.  The same situation exists at the Federal level and the local city level.  A commercial business indexed the text of rules and regs of my city, Bend Oregon. Now it is a service to the citizens of Bend.  It used to be all in text form.

Even these two best examples, one the civic contribution of a .org and the other a paid for commercial product is far behind the current extension of information organization and presentation.  But that level of organization and integration  that but is input for processing by artificial intelligence. 

Is this the best service that Oregon.gov can provide to us?  

After sending:

The comment form does not provide for embedded links.  I added that if they want to see them then give me an email address!

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