We’ve written often about Carl Malamud, the rogue archivist who has devoted his life to making the world’s laws, standards, and publicly owned information into free, accessible, beautiful online documents. Now, I’m pleased to help him launch an ambitious, vital Kickstarter project aimed at raising at least $100,000 to turn the world’s public safety codes into thoroughly linked, high-quality HTML documents (presently, many of the 28,040 public safety codes that Carl and public.resource.org have put online exist as scanned bitmaps that can’t be searched or linked). The project involves a careful re-typing of all that scanned material and re-tracing of images and formatting them as vector-based SVG files.
Carl and his colleagues have fought in the courts for their right to publish the law that we, the people, are expected to follow. They have passed on lucrative careers in the private sector to devote themselves to public interest, public spirited work that makes the sourcecode for the world’s governments available at our fingertips. The work they are doing unlocks untold billions in value — from being able to ensure that your weekend DIY rewiring project meets code and won’t burn down your house, all the way up to giving workers in deadly factories in Bangladesh access to the laws that are supposed to be honored in their workplaces.
$115 gets you a copy of their giant, amazing book of global safety standards, but there are interesting and awesome premiums at price-ranges from $10 (public acknowledgement on the Wall of Safety) to $475 (the Big Box of Propaganda!). I’ve put in my $115 — not for the book, but as a way to thank Carl and co for the amazing work they do, and as a means of funding more of it. I hope you’ll give, too.
3 Examples of What We’re Doing
We’ve been doing this for several years, and there are many examples of our work on-line at law.resource.org. Here’s 3 examples:
* Here’s the pdf version of the 1990 ANSI standard for safety of metal ladders, which is mandated by OSHA. Here’s the version after it has been rekeyed.
* Here’s India’s standard for sampling water and wastewater in pdf format and then rekeyed into html.
* Here’s the UK standard for access to buildings by the disabled in pdf format and rekeyed into html.
Public Safety Codes of the World: Stand Up For Safety!