Client

Sara Frug, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
Email: <sara.frug@cornell.edu>

Advisors

Thomas Bruce, Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
Email: <tom@liicornell.org>

Craig Newton, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
Email: <craig@liicornell.org>

Student contact

Bipra Kundu, <bk372>

Background

The Legal Information Institute (LII) operates the single most active web site at Cornell, accounting for approximately two thirds of the traffic in the cornell.edu domain. It serves between 30 and 40 million unique users each year -- between 10 and 15% of the adult population of the United States. Last year, the LII provided Federal statutes and regulations to people from 246 countries.

Since 1992, the LII has been a leader in the application of Internet-based technologies to legal data. It was the first legal website, and one of the first 30 websites in the world. The LII has worked with several successful CS 5150 project teams over the years.

The work of the LII and of the students who work with the institute has high visibility at Cornell and within the legislative and executive branches of the Federal government.

Project Summary

The clients have written the following description of the project.

Web statistics kiosk

"For many reasons, it is important for us to communicate the impact of our activities to others, often informally in the context of a conference or some other gathering. In the past, we have found that real-time displays of site usage are a particularly compelling, sometimes hypnotizing way to communicate what we do, who it affects, and how. Very often, these displays reveal that our audience is responding to events in the news, sometimes in surprising ways, persuading our colleagues and others that perhaps legal information is not such a dry subject as it might seem. That is particularly so at a time when our system of government is under stress.

"In the past, we have simply used a web browser to display the “real time overview” offered by Google Analytics. Recently, we have experimented with using a Raspberry Pi to run a browser with a rotating display of several different analytics screens, some real-time and some not. What we ended up with was just good enough to persuade us that we could do much, much better if we went beyond Google’s “one size fits all” approach. A first step would be to create custom displays within the Google Analytics framework that would better demonstrate important impacts that we wish to communicate. A second would be to make use of the Google Analytics API to extract and present information that is uniquely useful in showing what we do (as opposed to what most Google Analytics users do). A third would be to go directly to our own logfile data for things that Google does not support, or does not support well.

"The job of the 5150 team will be to help us put on an effective, data-driven show."

Discussion

In many ways this will not be a conventional 5150 project. The client expects that the programming burdens will be comparatively light, but that there will be considerable emphasis on presentation. The project will stress rapid development, continually iteration, and a strongly collaborative approach. The initial specification is less likely to be the specification for a finished product, and more likely to be a framework for the construction of a series of quick iterations each of which will result in a feature that will be fitted into the overall sequence of displays. Project management will come from the client's engineering team, but there will be lots of input from a communications specialist who will be primarily concerned with the effective visual display of content.

In short, this project will be a fair representation of a type of software engineering that you are increasingly likely to encounter in your careers: light on coding, relying heavily on APIs, and using rapid, client-driven iteration as a way of exploring solutions.