A free, open source, PHP- and MySQL-based application to parse and display laws. This project can be seen in action on sites for Virginia, Maryland, Chicago, San Francisco, and a long, growing list of others.

Project documentation can be found at statedecoded.github.io/documentation. It is its own GitHub project, with its content automatically published via Jekyll, so in addition to reading the documentation, you are welcome to make improvements to it.

This is a pre-1.0 release, which is to say that it is an incompete product. A capable developer who is comfortable with legal terminology should be able to wrangle her laws into this release with a couple of hours of work. All others should wait for v1.0.

The State Decoded benefits from APC and Varnish, as it is written to capitalize on the caching benefits provided by these excellent programs. Likewise, it also benefits from mod_pagespeed, to streamline the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But none of these programs are required.

• Use State Decoded sites and share your feedback in the form of filing issues—suggestions for new features, notifications of bugs, etc.
• Write or edit documentation on the wiki.
• Read through unresolved issues and comment on those on which you have something to add, to help resolve them.
• Contribute code to fix bugs or add features.
• Comb through existing code to clean it up—standardizing code formatting, adding docblocks, or editing/adding comments.

Follow along on Twitter @StateDecoded, or on the project website at StateDecoded.com.

Development of The State Decoded is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge.