Volunteer
If you are interested in lending a hand in the creation of OpenGavel, we would love to hear from you. In our current stage we could use volunteers to find, convert and tag a variety of sample court decisions—an unforgiving but relatively simple task. However, we are also in need of some specialized web development skills but any helping hand would be appreciated. The list below are the specialized skills that we need the most. If you are interested, please contact Volunteer@OpenGavel.com.
Most Desired Skills
Legal/Court Experience: A significant portion of the project's efforts would be aided by knowledge of court opinions and how potential users would go about researching those documents. We would be interested in anyone with experience performing basic legal research or handling court documents. These skills would be helpful in making design changes, as well as testing new features as they are developed.
XML Experience: A lot of the project involves working with data in different XML markup formats. Anyone comfortable editing basic HTML would be useful, but if you have any experience designing XML languages, working with XML schema, or XSLT stylesheets we also had a need for those skills.
RDF and Semantic Web Experience: Although the goal of the project is not to build search/research tools, experience working with RDF or other semantic web technologies would help us incorporate the markup necessary to power those tools.