I am pleased to advise that the Debian-Lex mailing list is now created.
You are NOT YET subscribed to this mailing list, because I have manually
added you to the BCC line of this email. To subscribe, please visit
http://lists.debian.org/debian-lex/. There is also a link to the list
and its archive at our Web site http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-lex/.
Those who have so far expressed interest include two Italians, a Canadian,
three Australians, a Frenchman, a Netherlander, two Americans, an Indian
and a Briton. This provides us with a broad base of common law and
civil law systems. I admit my own ignorance of many of the concerns of
those working in legal systems that are not based on the common law.
Debian-Lex is project to create a subset of Debian that will provide a
pre-configured operating system designed specifically for use in legal
practice. Our aim is that Debian-Lex will not only sit on lawyers'
desktops, but also be found in their accounts departments, on their
office servers, and be used in court registries.
We have several sister projects. These include Debian-Med (for doctors),
Debian-Jr (for children) and Debian-Edu (for students). The former
Debian Project Leader, B'dale Garbee, had an idea that "flavors" (or for
those Anglophiles among us, "flavours") of Debian should be created that
are subsets of packages and supporting files from the "Debian Universe"
of packages, offering a custom sub- or meta-distribution targeted at a
special audience.
This concept is still new, and is currently being discussed by the Debian
Usability Research project at http://deb-usability.alioth.debian.org/.
But what it will mean for us is that Debian-Lex will be characterised by
these features:
(a) Our packages will contain "package tags" to identify them as being
part of the Debian-Lex sub-distribution, and also to indicate their
purpose within that distribution: is this package a desktop package
or a server package? Is it for lawyers, legal office administrators,
courts, etc? More details of the package tag system will be
posted and discussed in a later message.
(b) Although overlapping somewhat with the package tags system, the task
system also allows us to tag our packages with a header indicating
that they are part of Debian-Lex. Whether this has been obsoleted
by the tags system is something that we will have to discuss. See
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s2.3.8 for
what the policy manual says about tasks.
Apart from sorting out policy issues such as these, one of our main tasks
will be to isolate the packages (whether already part of Debian or not)
that we believe should be included in Debian-Lex, and to get to work on
packaging these. I realise that many of those who have volunteered to
be involved are not Debian developers, but this should not stop you from
helping to package software, as I or another developer on this list can
sponsor the package for release into Debian.
Something else that I think that it is important for those involved in
legal practice (particularly as lawyers, aka. attorneys, solicitors,
counsel, barristers, whatever they are called in your part of the world)
is to be able to access information about their clients and their files
or matters from within various applications. You want, for example, for
your trust accounting software to use the same information as the
software that you use to print out labels for your files.
Integrating various packages to interoperate and share data should be
one of our first discussion topics I think. I do have a draft database
schema which I will post to the list in a future message. I think that
we might need to develop a system similar to defoma, which manages fonts
for applications (http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/defoma.html)
or GDA which provides an architecture to allow uniform access to
different kinds of data sources for GNOME (http://www.gnome-db.org/).
Where our client and file/matter data should really be located is a
matter for discussion: should it be stored in XML, and is LegalXML
(http://www.legalxml.org) something we can use? Should it be stored
in an LDAP server? My own preference is to store it in a PostgreSQL
database. In any case, we will need to have an SQL interface to it
which our defoma-like package will have to provide.
For those of us who are less technical, maybe we should start to write
a HOWTO on the use of free software within the legal office. I wrote an
article about this two years ago which is to be found here
(http://www.linuxconsultants.com.au/help/legaloffice.html) although it
is not a HOWTO, just an overview article for non-technical readers.
Some other ideas about tasks we need to look are at our Web page. If
you would like to add any content to the page (or would like to
translate it), let me know and I'll tell you how. Also, please don't
forget to subscribe to our mailing list; you are NOT subscribed yet!
Go to: http://lists.debian.org/debian-lex/.
I look forward to working with you all!
--
JEREMY MALCOLM <Jeremy@Malcolm.id.au> Personal: http://www.malcolm.id.au
Providing online networks of Australian lawyers (http://www.ilaw.com.au)
and Linux experts (http://www.linuxconsultants.com.au) for instant help!
Disclaimer: http://www.terminus.net.au/disclaimer.html. GPG key: finger.
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