OAM24062S Collab Legislative Drafting Study RFI Questions.pdf

Questions Response Can the government provide a list of technologies that have already been considered to replace the current state?

The offices of the Clerk and the Legislative Counsel have not considered a list of technologies to replace the current state.

Can the government provide more context around why the legislative drafting study is being requested at this point in time, as opposed to, for example, several years ago or several years in the future? Is the current state software reaching the end of life or end of service?

The Select Committee on the Modernizations of Congress identified and adopted of the following recommendation:

Collaborative legislative drafting: The House should leverage existing enterprise-wide applications and develop other tools and solutions to better facilitate legislative drafting between member, Committee, and leadership offices and the HOLC1

This recommendation is driving, in part, the study.

The current state software is a desktop COTS product, and the age of the current software customizations is also driving the need for this study.

What tool are you using for editing bill draft?

Do you have any existing custom solutions for drafting?

If you have a drafting tool, Is the tool open source?

As seen in the Congressional Data Task Force’s tech timeline, during the 107th Congress (2001-2002), the House Office of Legislative Counsel began using an XML editor to draft legislation. This marked the official use of the “generation one” schemas for bills, resolutions, and amendments using document type definitions (DTDs). It is commonly referred to as the Bill DTD. The use of the current XML editor followed an SGML/XML study that was compiled in 2000.

This XML editor is still in use and is a highly customized version of Just Systems’ XMetaL (essential version) software. XMetaL and the House’s customizations are not open source. The XML schema and some transforms used in the editing environment are publicly available on the Government Publishing Office’s Developer Hub and their GitHub repos.

The RFI notes the integrations with the Senate, the Library of Congress and of the Government Publishing Office. Are there other integrated systems or integration points which we should be aware of at this time?

The current state tool, XMetaL, is integrated with the Government Publishing Office’s typesetting system called MicroComp. It is also being integrated with their new publishing system, XPub. This integration requirement will remain.

Is it highly desirable for the contractor to have legislative background experience?

A legislative background experience is not a requirement

Is the expectation to utilize Agile methodologies?

Yes.

Who decides when pre-introduced legislation goes into the eHopper? (the

Members of Congress decide when to introduce a bill in the House. It is their decision and their decision alone.

1 Recommendation numbered 170. For more information, see House Report 117-646 at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-117hrpt646/pdf/GPO- CRPT-117hrpt646.pdf.

https://xml.house.gov/resources/TechTimeline.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/developers https://github.com/usgpo introducing member/committee? or in collaboration with the drafter?)

Is there an expectation or need for real time collaboration tool for editing the drafts?

We assume there is a desire for real time collaboration, and this assumption needs to be validated during user discovery. This topic is part of the work to define what collaboration means in the context of using legislative drafting tools.

Is there an expectation or need for version control for the draft legislation?

Yes. We currently have version control. There is a requirement to know which electronic files match the PDF output.

What happens to the documents when a member breaks attorney/client privilege?

A Member receives a PDF of their draft from the Office of the Legislative Counsel. A Member may share this document with another Member, submit the document somewhere on the official legislative process workflow, or simply making it available online via their website. The original files are the work product of the Office of the Legislative Counsel and are maintained and remain in the custody of the Office of Legislative Counsel in case the Member would like to revise the draft in some manner, either this Congress or in future Congresses.

It is a Member’s decision when a draft is shared with others. While there is attorney/client privilege with the staff from the Office of the Legislative Counsel, the Member decides when to make documents public by introduction, offering of amendments, or simply sharing documents with others. The attorney drafter always maintains the attorney/client privilege as it relates to the draft document.

Can text be readily transformed to XML based on the current DTD standard?

Current tools to convert text or text-based documents into the agreed-upon exchange XML schemas (so they can be used in the editing environment) are clunky and cumbersome to use and not always as precise as the users need them to be. For some of drafters and paralegals working in the XML editing environment, it is faster for them to re-key than use the current text-to-XML conversion tools.

Relative to USLM in its current and future versions, does the US Congress have an opinion on whether it is important for USLM to remain interoperable with LegalDocML?

Yes. Currently LegalDocML is one of the schemas allowed within USLM.

Legislative Branch staff who are working on schema are committed to interoperability. More information on the USLM schema can be found on GPO’s github repo, as well as the Congressional Data Task Force’s Innovation hub.

Can you provide any additional definition to the term "collaborative" that are meaningful to the way drafters are allowed or disallowed to collaborate on texts prior to a measure being put in the Hopper?

As described on their publicly available website, “The Office of the Legislative Counsel provides legislative drafting services to the committees and Members of the House of Representatives on a non-partisan, impartial, and confidential basis. Our goal is to work with committees and Members to understand their policy preferences in order to implement those preferences through clear, concise, and legally effective legislative language.”

Currently collaboration happens between the Member and the drafters in meetings, working sessions, and in written communications.

Collaboration tools are most often 1) notes in an email; 2) annotations on the PDF draft; 3) track changes in Word; and oral, either by Teams, phone, or in person). Further defining what collaboration means in the https://github.com/usgpo/uslm https://usgpo.github.io/innovation/ context of legislative drafting and proposed new tools is work that needs to be completed during the study.

What is the rough percentage of drafting by member offices that are done in MS Word?

Less than 5 percent of the bills introduced into the Hopper are drafted in Word; however, this may not give the true picture. Staff in the offices of the Clerk and the Legislative Counsel suspect that many staff in Members offices use Word to formulate their bill draft ideas before submitting a formal request for drafting assistance.

When considering all the drafts of bills, joint resolutions, simple resolutions, and concurrent resolutions; what percentage cite the United States Code? What percentage cites a Statute at Large?; and what percentage cites a compilation of statutes?

For the Comparative Print Suite, a set of applications that enables House staff to produce comparative prints showing how proposed legislation may amend law and how a bill, resolution, or amendment changes from one version to another, the product team tracks citations related to amendments contained in bills.

This is a sample of the work. Parallel citations are not included in these figures.

• 36,182 bills and resolutions with amendments to current law were reviewed and— o 15,810 cites statue compilations - 43% o 4,966 cite the U.S. Code – 14% o 367 cite public laws – 6%

We caution readers in making any assumptions with these figures. To create a draft, the work process is the same regardless of which provision of the current law is being amended.

The product team has discussed the Comparative Print Suite publicly and in reports submitted to the Committee on House Administration, which can be found on the Congressional Data Task Force’s Innovation hub.

https://usgpo.github.io/innovation/