I hope to take part again and support the LegalTech hackathon in Zürich on September 17 - 18, which Opendata.ch has partnered with last year already to support R&D projects with datasets related to law and legal data. This is an area that is central to open data activism, both from the perspective of understanding the licenses and regulation enabling openness, as well as the day-to-day interests of a community that tests the status quo, critically examining the mechanisms and barriers to the free exchange of information between individuals and institutions. Last year among the data resources highlighted were:
- Open data portals including opendata.swiss, on which you can find law-related open government datasets such as the Official Compilation of Federal Legislation.
- Community wikis for legal data links, law projects, and crowdsourcing events.
- lexferenda, a company founded to experiment with new ways of analyzing, contextualising and visualising law data. We are data scientists, developers and law professionals who strive to develop the next generation of law applications. Our main goal is to present law related data in the most accessible way and create tools helping professionals to access and organize this data, making their work more efficient and thorough. To help you make the craziest ideas happen, we provide you with full API access to our legal databases.
- entscheidsuche.ch is a new association of legal professionals who are providing a dataset of 226512 Swiss cases (about 10 GB uncompressed) from several cantons. These are the first results of a young project which aims to collect all sentences published by Swiss courts on websites as a first step. In a second step the decisions should be made searchable for the public. File formats and completeness of the individual cases are highly variable, and we encourage legal hackers to take a stab at making sense of this data, which will be shared with interested teams at the hackathon.
Lawyers are key to success and changemaking in the modern world, and so I am enthusiastic about attempts to use data sources to build A.I. lawyers, build transparent trust models on the blockchain, and improve the quality of open government data for understanding legislation and court decisions. For more information visit the home page:
https://swisslegal.tech/en/hackathon/
In the run-up to the event I will paste some projects I’m trying to support and ideas with potential. If you have any more to share, please use this thread or reach out via chat or social media… and apply to participate!
Hard to believe it’s almost exactly five years since the 
