Michael Grass

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced on Thursday that it was awarding the Washington, D.C.-basedOpenGov Foundation with a two-year $750,000 grant to continue its efforts to help governments build better digital homes for their legal codes and get the public to more effectively engage in the lawmaking process through the ongoing development of OpenGov’sAmerica Decoded and Madison projects.

“Informing and engaging communities will be a click away through the digital democracy platform that this Knight Foundation grant will help us build,” said New York City Council Member Ben Kallos, who with Kraft is a founding co-chair of Free Law Founders. “The Free Law Founders challenged the world to build a digital democracy platform for drafting, legislating, codifying and verifying the law, and The OpenGov Foundation - with the support of Knight Foundation – is answering that challenge."

The legislation was co-sponsored by New York City Council members Brad Lander, who chairs the Rules, Privileges and Elections Committee, and Ben Kallos, who chairs the Governmental Affairs Committee.

Kallos, is also a member of the Free Law Founders, a coalition of local government officials and open-government advocates around the country who have recently joined forces to push for open-data reform on the city and state level and are working on common data standards and open-source tools for local governments.

“The agility of code is pushing government to be more responsive,”Kallos told GovExec State & Local earlier this summer.

Open-government advocates and local officials in five major U.S. cities announced the formation of a new coalition, the Free Law Founders, on Wednesday, launching a partnership to create new tools, data standards and processes for state and local governments to make public information and data better accessible to the public.

The FLF, led by New York City Councilmember Ben Kallos, San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell and OpenGov Foundation Executive Director Seamus Kraft, also includes officials in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston.

“Laws and legislative information are often overlooked as open data, and I believe laws and legislative information are one of, if not the, most important data sets government keep,” Farrell, who led the charge to make San Francisco the nation’s first “open legislation” city, said in a statement. “As legislators we should do everything in our power to ensure laws, codes, and policies are free and easily accessible to our residents.”

Kallos, who chairs his city’s Governmental Operations Committee, said it’s important for local governments to make their respective law and regulatory codes plus legislation more accessible to the public. “Millennia ago, Hammurabi codified law and displayed it publicly for the people to see,” Kallos said in the FLF’s announcement. “Today, public means free and online, not behind a license or paywall.”

New York City Councilmember Ben Kallos, who chairs his city’s Governmental Operations Committee and has been an open-data leader in the nation’s largest city, said in an interview that any open-data project that makes the lives of local government officials and employees easier shouldn’t be a tough sell.

Officials “just want to see something that works,” Kallos said. “It’s easier to put it on the Internet and let other people do the heavy lifting to make government information more accessible and usable.” He has been actively pushing an open-data and transparency legislative package in the New York City Council.