The city of San Francisco is set to be hacked tonight. Legally, of course. It’s all part of the Operation Decode San Francisco effort, which will unwrap and simplify the city’s dense, labyrinthine laws and re-package them in a fresh, easy-to-use and searchable format.

The crew behind this, OpenGov, originally cut its teeth on KeepTheWebOpen.org. Founded by Rep. Darrell Issa and others to combat SOPA/PIPA, and running on a $5,000 piece of software called the Madison Project, the site also offered up an alternative bill: Issa’s Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN). Characterized as the first technological crowd-sourcing of legislation, the bill is still stuck in committee, but the site was certainly one of the many tentacles that helped suffocate SOPA/PIPA. 

“In any government environment, the bill process involves the editing of an existing law or parts of existing laws,” Seamus Kraft, co-creator of the Madison Project with Chris Birk, told me. “The bill itself might look like four pages, but it’s actually going back to potentially hundreds of places in the existing law and code. It might say, ‘Section 4, line 3 we strike clause X, and insert Y.’ Well, that’s like running track changes on existing law. So, the first step is getting good data to citizens who are trying to know the law. At the city, state or federal levels, the next step is passing laws to update the law or change it, which is powered by Madison.”

After that success, Kraft (an Issa staffer) and Birk, who worked for InSourceCode out of Indianapolis, spun the Madison Project off into other realms and made it open source. They launched the Decode states and cities project, which they first beta-tested in Maryland, then in Baltimore. MarylandCode.org presented a user-friendly, searchable mechanism for the Maryland Code of Law. BaltimoreCode.org did the same for the city, with Baltimore’s chief technology officer Chris Tonjes stating that it would create a “more robust civic dialog and ultimately a more transparent government.” 

The immediate hope with these beta Decoded sites is that they will appeal to individuals and organizations that regularly interact with the law. Lawyers and public interest groups are prime targets. However, the developers would like to make the sites attractive to all sorts of individuals who want to better understand city laws, and involve themselves in the debate process. The Decoded sites will first educate constituents, whereupon the Madison technology will takeover, allowing citizens to critique bills line-by-line with track changes. 

Asked how long it will take to distil San Francisco’s legal and administrative code into a user-friendly website, Kraft said they could possibly run the Baltimore script over the San Francisco text and have it work quickly the first time. However, it will probably take more than the hackathon’s planned three hours to “unlawyer the text,” as he calls it. 

“It took us about six weeks from the time we got Maryland’s raw data to the time we published the code,” said Kraft. “It took about half that time for Baltimore. We haven’t released Chicago or Philadelphia yet, but they’re ready to go, and they each took a week. So, we’re narrowing down the processes.”

Hell, if these guys keep cracking this data at faster and faster clips, and framing it more effectively for the layperson, people might actually learn something about how their various governments work. With any luck, citizens will take this opportunity to get involved. And, just maybe, it will be easier to for average citizens to compete with corporate lobbyists.