Public.Resource.Org is pleased to announce the Law.Gov Report contest.
A series of 15 workshops were conducted that resulted in a strong
consensus on 10 core principles. Those workshops also produced a huge
amount of material to work with including presentations by many of the
leading lights in the field.

We've put a great deal of thought into how to do the report on this
process that has been requested by members of Congress, the Courts,
and the Administration and have concluded that we should take a page
from the playbook of the founding fathers, which is to get a consensus
on some high-level concepts (in their case the Constitution, in our
case the Law.Gov principles) and then allow many people to all explain
what those concepts mean (in their case, the Federalist Papers, in our
case this contest being announced today).

The Law.Gov Report is a contest. We will accept submissions as a
written essay or as a video essay.  The topic is really quite simple:
What Does Law.Gov mean? You can write about one of the principles, or
all of the principles, or any other take on the topic.

For the video essays, there is a tremendous amount of high-resolution
footage available you can draw with talks by luminaries such as Vint
Cerf, Larry Lessig, John Podesta, and many others. We have released
final mixes of the first 27 talks and the remaining high-res footage
will be available by mid-November.

If you submit an essay, please keep a couple of points in mind. First,
you must attach a liberal license to your work or we will not accept
it. That means at a minimum a Creative Commons license that allows
derivative works with attribution, and we'd prefer if you simply used
CC-Zero or Public Domain. You must also submit your work in a form
that we can use for republication. In the case of a written essay, you
can submit in PDF, but we'd also like revisable form text such as HTML
or a word processing format. For your video, this needs to be high-
resolution (you should shoot for at least NTSC size and at least
several megabits per second on the encoding) and a relatively open
codec (H.264/MP4, MP2, WebM).

The winning written essay will receive a prize of $5,000. The winning
video essay will also receive a prize of $5,000. Submissions are due
before Memorial Day (May 31). Winners will be announced the day after
Labor Day at a prize ceremony in Washington, D.C.

The Memorial Day deadline was set so that students can consider making
this a class project. We hope that professors in law schools, i-
schools, journalism schools, and any other discipline will let their
students know about this contest and offer them credit in their
classes for preparing a submission.

Public.Resource.Org has put $10,000 into the Law.Gov Report Prize
Fund. If others wish to contribute prizes such as books, conference
tickets, lunch with a justice, or other items of educational value,
please contact us.

If you have questions about the contest, please ask them on this list
or contact Carl Malamud at Public.Resource.Org. (You can find his
email address on the about page.)

Here are a few resources for you to work with:

1. The Law.Gov videos on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8F37CB2515AAA6D0&sort_field=a...

2. The Law.Gov videos on the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Agovernance&sort=...

3. Our directory of final footage:
http://bulk.resource.org/ntis.gov/law.gov/final/

4. Miscellaneous additional law.gov materials:
http://bulk.resource.org/ntis.gov/law.gov/