I received an e-mail the other day from somebody asking how he could contribute to the development of The State Decoded. As a rule, this is a sign that I’m doing something wrong. In the spirit of addressing that that, here are a list of relatively self-contained, interesting, diverse features that await addition to The State Decoded, that you or somebody you know might be interested in creating, for folks of all levels of technical knowledge and many fields of expertise.

Create the Functionality to Add Laws to a Portfolio

Site users ought to be able to keep track of laws that are of interest of them. Using jQuery’s localstorage.setItem / localStorage.removeItem , provide the functionality to let people add laws to a portfolio, and then create a page where people can see a list of the laws in their portfolio.

Issue #30

Support Memcached and/or ElastiCache

Provide an option in config.inc.php to provide configuration information to connect to the object cache of choice, and modify class.Law.inc.php to cache laws within the cache upon reading them or, if already cached, read them from there, rather than the database. (Presumably laws should be cached in Memcached upon being requested, rather than pre-loading Memcached full of all laws, since most legal codes aren’t liable to fit within a reasonable amount of server memory.)

Issue #263

Establish an Interface for Showing Diffs of a Law

With each new release of a legal code, we add a new edition (tracked in the “editions” table) and add all of those new laws to the “laws” table. Provide the functionality to let somebody look through the various versions of a law over time, or compare two versions to see how they’ve changed.

Issue #363

Add Word, PDF, and EPUB Export

Add new methods to class.ParserController.inc.php to create, at the time that a legal code is imported, Word, PDF, and EPUB versions of the legal code, and portions thereof. (Realistically, this should be three separate issues, since it’s three separate projects.) Ideally there’d be Word and PDF versions of every law, every structural unit (chapter, title, etc.), and the entire legal code, and then EPUB versions of every structural unit and of the entire legal code.

Issue #50

Provide an Option to Use the OpenDyslexic Font

Create a jQuery-based widget to let somebody enable or disable the use of the OpenDyslexic font, by setting a cookie, and then a jQuery-based widget to toggle the use of that typeface for the body font ( article#law ) if that cookie is set.

Issue #340

Sync Laws to GitHub

Some folks are pretty psyched about putting laws on GitHub, for various reasons. Create a method that will commit the plain text version of all laws in a given edition of the legal code to a specified GitHub repository, and add the necessary options to `config.inc.php` to enable that.

Issue #161

Provide Vagrant Configurations

There’s an effort underway to create a ready-to-go Vagrant configuration of the project, so that it’s trivial for somebody to set up an implementation of The State Decoded on their own system. This sub-project has its own repository, and a couple of issued logged in its own issue tracker.

Issue #284

Display Related Legal Self-Help Documents

I’ve made a first crack at interfacing with ProBonoNet’s API to gather up a list of all of their free self-help legal documents. This needs to be extended, to store this data in a way that’s available to The State Decoded, and then—here’s the hard part—when somebody looks at a law for which there’s a relevant self-help legal document available, we need to be able to identify that document and display text promoting it. We’ve got the UI elements in place for this, but we just lack the glue that allows us to say “this law about foreclosure is probably related to this guide about what to do if your home is being foreclosed on.” Solr may be a good way to make this match.

Issue #162

Edit, Write, or Propose Changes to Documentation

The State Decoded has some pretty decent documentation that’s under active development, but it would strongly benefit from review by people who aren’t contributors to the project. (People who already know a project in great detail aren’t in a great mindset to write about it in a way that beginners can understand.) The documentation is hosted on GitHub, so pull requests can be made directly, or, for folks who aren’t technical, suggestions or proposed changes can be made in the form of an issue report.

Documentation Repository

This isn’t everything that needs to be done, of course—these are just the interesting, relatively self-contained new features. You can see the complete list of outstanding issues on GitHub, or just the list of new features awaiting creation.