It is a big break with German Internet traditions that is looming: The new legal information portal of the federal government, which runs the portals gesetze-im-internet.de, verwaltungsbedingungen-im-internet.de and Rechtssprechung-im-internet. de is supposed to merge will probably not be found under the domain rechtsinformationportal-im-internet.de. Resourceful citizens will probably have to decide on their own initiative that the online portal they are surfing on is on the Internet.

Free information is a Prerequisite for democracy. Hence: The “Best of Freedom of Information”, every two weeks, by Arne Semsrott. He is the project manager of FragDenStaat and a freelance journalist. He works on the topics of freedom of information, transparency, lobbying and migration policy.

Searchable and central federal portal The federal government is planning have been renewing their outdated online portals for legal information for several years. In the coming years – who knows for sure – the time has finally come: Laws, regulations and jurisprudence should be searchable in a central federal portal and accessible as open data. At least there is money for this: For the development and operation of the legal information portal 2011 1.6 million euros are earmarked, in each of the following years around 800.000 Euro.

A first official mockup of what the new portal could look like was provided by Fellows from Tech4Germany this week, whose draft is to be followed by an official concept and then a finished portal. This should then be integrated into the new cycle of e-legislation and e-proclamation, with which the federal government – also announced for years – wants to enable the electronic execution of legislative processes.

Competence wrangling Whether the new portal but actually uses its full potential remains to be seen. First of all, the legendary competence disputes between the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior stand in the way of a good portal. Some are responsible for laws, others for administrative regulations. And the jurisprudence is something else again.

After that, a decisive question will be whether the portal will actually become open source or whether one of the usual consultancy agencies will receive a multi-million dollar contract from the federal government. The open source idea is likely to be central to the federal legal information portal. Already 2011 the “Bundesgit” project demonstrated that versioning and linking of legislative processes is possible with a correct representation of laws and draft laws. So far, even officials of the Federal Ministry of Justice have had to laboriously rummage through legal gazettes if they want to know which law was changed when and how and which case law was there.

Publishers seal off legal databases under copyright law However, once these questions have been resolved, the central problem still remains: The Federal Government’s data sources are rather poor. The Federal Government has outsourced the distribution of the Federal Law Gazette and the Joint Ministerial Gazette to private publishers, the legal information