open source systems in justice

Open Source Systems in Justice

Dr. Matthias Stürmer, /ch/open and Ernst & Young

NATO Advanced Research Workshop „Creating Awareness for Using Open Source Systems in the Public Sector in Afghanistan“

September 15th – 17th, 2012 in Kabul, Afghanistan

NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 2

Short Bio of Matthias Stürmer

Studied business administration and computer science at University of Bern until 2005, topic of licenciate thesis was open source community building

Finished doctoral dissertation at the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation at ETH Zürich in 2009 focused on open source communities and firm involvement

Worked at Swiss software company Liip creating agile Internet solutions based on open source technologies

Senior Consultant at Ernst & Young since 2010 specialised on open source, open government, and social media

Matthias Stürmer is Board Member of Swiss Open System User Group /ch/open Secretary of Parliamentarian Group for Digital Sustainability Working group leader Office Interoperability of OSB Aliance Responsible of www.opensource.ch Co-founder of open data initiative opendata.ch

Since 2011 member of the city parliament of Bern.

Dr. Matthias StürmerSenior Advisor

Ernst & YoungBelpstrasse 233001 BernSwitzerland

[email protected]: +41 58 286 61 97Mobile: +41 58 289 61 97


Agenda

Open Source Project OpenJustitia of the Federal Supreme Courtof Switzerland

1.About OpenJustitia

2. Modules of OpenJustitia

3. Community structure and governance


The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland

Highest court in Switzerland based in Lausanne and Lucerne

Around 7500 judgements annually in German, French, and Italian

Follows open standards (2001) and open source (2009) strategy:Use, publish, and maintain open source software

400 thin client users (judges, staff etc.) on Sun OpenSolaris

Since 2002 StarOffice, since 2010 OpenOffice, everything on ODF


About OpenJustitia

Internal court decision administration system for management of all documents related to a court judgement

Archive consists of 165'000 court decisions since 1954, 332'000 stored documents, 55'000 documents semantically indexed

OpenJustitia can be customized for other courts: Configuration of individual meta data in each of the modules

Several other Swiss courts and legal software firms have joined the OpenJustitia community


Open source stack of OpenJustitia

All source code in Java J2EE, running on Apache Tomcat

Open source DMS Alfresco for document management

Apache Lucene for indexing and search engine

PostgreSQL for data storage (index, legal norms etc.)

Java macros for LibreOffice integration on the client

External interfaces for Java/JDBC (for metadata) and XML (for import/export of judgements, legal norms, thesaurus...)


History of OpenJustitia

1. The Federal Supreme Court is the the final place for decisions. Thus a 100% precise and reliant search system of previous court decisions is necessary.

2. In 2005 no court software met the Swiss Federal Court's requirements for managing court decisions

3. Internal software development team programmed the Federal Court's individual administration system

4. Federal Court decided to 'open source' its own software following its open source goals within the IT strategy

5. Minor technical and governance preparations were necessary to initiate the open source project OpenJustitia

6. Political troubles because of lobbyism of a private company

7. Release of the source code on September 1, 2011 below GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3)

8. First meeting of the OpenJustitia community in October 2012


Reasons to release as open source

Why did the Federal Court initiate OpenJustitia?

1. Benefitting the most of tax payer's money● Switzerland has dozens of national, cantonal, and regional

courts that all have similar technical needs for administrating court judgements.

● Federal open source strategy as well as the Federal E-Government strategy both recommend collaborative software development at institutional level in order to save costs.

2. Improve court management software● On the long term and through a healthy community OpenJustitia

will become more stable, secure and feature-rich.


Agenda


1. About OpenJustitia

2.Modules of OpenJustitia

3. Community structure and governance


Modular structure of OpenJustitia

OpenJustitia consists of six seperate modules: OpenJustitia Doc: management of documents incl. versioning and

access restrictions, powerful search engine of legal documents

OpenJustitia LDoc: local search of legal documents integrated in complete OpenJustitia system

OpenJustitia Norm: automatic and semi-automatic recognition and linking of legal norms within court judgements

OpenJustitia Anom: semi-automatic anonymisation of judgements integrated in OpenOffice/LibreOffice

OpenJustitia Bib: powerful search engine for legal literature

OpenJustitia Spider: integration of external legal data sources including extraction of meta data


Text view with links in OpenJustitia Doc


Search form OpenJustitia Doc


Meta data in OpenJustitia Doc


Anonymization in OpenJustitia Anom


Indexing in OpenJustitia Norm


Search in OpenJustitia Bib


Local search in OpenJustitia LDoc


Other sources with OpenJustitia Spider


Agenda


1. About OpenJustitia

2. Modules of OpenJustitia

3.Community structure and governance


Website www.openjustitia.org


Open source community guidelines

From the Federal Court, only 6 pages

Common understanding on what isOpenJustitia and who can how inwhich body participate.

Content of the community guidelines: Introduction (background, goals etc.) Principles of the OpenJustitia community Intended members of the community Bodies of the OpenJustitia community Rules and procedures

Source: http://www.openjustitia.org/DE/01_OpenJustitia_Regeln_V1.2_d.pdf


Community principles of OpenJustitia

Basic principles and values the Federal Court intends to adhere to within the OpenJustitia community and expects the same of any other community member:

1. Equality: Every one (court, company etc.) is treated the same

2. Transparency: Communication happens as open as possible

3. Meritocracy: For the moment Federal Court is in control. But if others contribute more, then they may also gain influence on the projects future development.


Intended members of the community

Federal Court: initiator and thus main knowledge carrier at the moment

Courts: all Swiss courts, but also foreign courts feasible

Other public institutions: using all or parts of OpenJustitia

Open source providers: software firms that offer services for OpenJustitia

Other firms: companies that may benefit of the software, e.g. legal firms

Universities: law schools for indexing and researching legal texts


Bodies of the OpenJustitia community

Members: free membership for any legal entity (public institution, company, association etc.) that uses OpenJustitia or provides services for it

Coordination committee: executives of entities that use OpenJustitia in mission-critical environment; Federal Court directs the committee and has two seats of a maximum of 5 seats

Technology committee: software developers or architects with in-depth knowledge of the source code; is responsible for all technical aspects


Rules and procedures

Annual assembly: OpenJustitia community members meet at least once a year to receive annual report and to do elections.

Exclusion: If a community member doesn't follow the guidelines, the coordination committee can exclude the member.

Introductory support: Federal Court offers support of 5 days to the 5 five first members


Community membership

Formal participation through writtendeclaration of enrollment

Member accepts following requirements:

1. Interest in healthy progress of OpenJustitia

2. Participation at the general assembly

3. Accepts governance guidelines

4. Written withdrawal at resignation

5. Exclusion through majority vote of thecoordination committee if governanceguidelines are breached

Source: http://www.openjustitia.org/DE/02_OpenJustitia_Beitrittserklaerung_V1.2_d.pdf


Outlook OpenJustitia

Growing member base: today several firms and public institutions have become OpenJustitia members

First member meeting in October 2012: initiation of technical and leading boards, decision on how to progress

Technical improvements: integrate OpenJustitia in public website, optimization of automatic recognition, enhance documentation, integration of business process software for court decisions, possibly Italian and English translation


Discussion

What software do judges at Afghan courts use?

What kind of improvements at the IT level are necessary?

What text editing programs are in use?

Is there a need to search for previous decisions?

Is there a need to anonymize names in rulings?

In what languages are court decisions written?


Discussion

Questions, comments, ideas, wishes?

Dr. Matthias StürmerSenior Advisor Ernst & Young

[email protected]: +41 58 286 61 97

Mobile: +41 58 289 61 97


Ernst & Young open source brochure

Open source has one major weakness: marketing and PR

Top management vendor-neutral brochure from Ernst & Young: Why and how professionals use open source software

Content:● Benefits, risks and good practices● Professional application of

open source software● Legal aspects of open source● Background information on

open source software

Download as PDF onErnst & Young website

http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Open_Source_Software_in_business_critical_environments/$FILE/Open_Source_Software_EN.pdf

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