Open source software for legislation drafting: What we are working on and why we need your feedback

Alice Vasilescu, Community Manager for LegIT, external consultant European Commission, on behalf of the LegIT Team

Our mission to make legislation drafting more efficient has been challenging but we are happy to share with you our progress.

In the beginning, there was an ISA Action 1.13 - Legislation Editing Open Software, for short LEOS. The action, led by Secretariat-General and Directorate-General for Informatics at the European Commission, was created to deliver a software tool to help people draft legal texts. This is where the story of LEOS starts.

LEOS is designed to help those involved in drafting legislation, which is usually part of a complex process, by facilitating efficient online collaboration. Comments, suggestions, version control, co-edition, everything is there. Regarding the structure, that is where we aim to be as restrictive as possible and this is not because we are conservative, but because this helps the drafters follow the rules and avoid mistakes.

In 2016, this action ended but not before delivering the study on existing solutions and various proofs of concepts which reassured us that we are on the right track.  We also invested time on researching the best open standards and tools so that we could deliver open source for our community. And we keep doing this every time we need to add new features.

From LEOS to LegIT

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Under LegIT, we are working on improving our LEOS prototype. We chose to have a pragmatic approach and start with a prototype for one of the legislative procedures, the Ordinary Legislative Procedure of the European Union. If you want to find out more about this procedure, please read the European Parliament's article.

In 2017, we started piloting this prototype allowing drafters of the EU law to assess the implemented features and give us feedback. Drafters from the Council of European Union also examined the prototype to see which features they needed. As this is just a prototype, we needed to do some changes to be able to integrate it with the Council system, but the good news is our code is extensible. In other words, it would not work out of the box for any EU national legislation process, but it can be extended to do so.  

Your feedback matters!

Does your organisation edit or publish legal texts? Do you struggle with structuring, formatting, sharing or processing legislation? If so, please contact us. Read more about our work, or simply send us an email at DIGIT-LEOS-FEEDBACK@ec.europa.eu. The more users we have, the better we can design our solution.

We are a technical team that is proud to have six different nationalities, working in the Agile way and sharing a passion for exploring different technologies and tools. This way we always aim to deliver a better result for our community. We know that it is a very complex topic, but the quote that keeps us going forward is “Difficult is done at once, the impossible takes a little longer” (the words are attributed to French political leader Charles Alexandre de Calonne, US Armed Forces and others).

To end our story for now, we want to invite you to check out our latest release. Follow us on Joinup as new features are coming soon, such as improved version comparison, advanced search and replace, improved co-edition, etc.

We hope to hear from you soon!

The LegIT Team

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