Currently a work in progress

A drafting environment based on Etherpad built for and with legislative policy drafters

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The status of policy document editing on the web today only focuses on aesthetics - bold, underline, italics, etc. This is a very shallow representation of more complex documents such as legal codes or policy documents. The markings on these documents have meaning, and the meaning is much more important than the font weight. The web and semantic markup gives us the ability to capture this meaning behind the scenes while keeping the drafting process simple for the author.

Authors will be able to draft in an environment that feels like what they’re used to - word processors such as MS Word. The platform, however, will have an understanding of the document context. The editor will understand citations to legal codes, amendments, and other domain-specific elements and simplify connecting inter-related documents. It will also provide the final product in a multitude of formats including Word documents, PDFs, HTML, and even XML.

We're developing a number of plugins for Etherpad to customize the tool to be tailored for policy drafting. The plugins and installation guide are listed below.

• ep_comments_page
• ep_page_view
• ep_br_to_p
• ep_real_time_chat
• ep_context
• ep_define
• ep_reference
• ep_indent_context
• ep_table_of_contents
• ep_spellcheck
• ep_mammoth
• ep_text_statistics
• ep_headings2
• ep_align
• ep_print

1. See the Etherpad Installation Instructions on how to get the platform up and running.
2. To install our specific plugins, run npm install ep_comments_page ep_page_view ep_br_to_p ep_real_time_chat ep_context ep_define ep_reference ep_indent_context ep_table_of_contents ep_spellcheck ep_mammoth ep_text_statistics ep_headings2 ep_align ep_print

which will be included automatically when Etherpad runs

Our roadmap is actually located in a different repo and needs to be copied over.

Our roadmap is included via our issue log. Please feel free to open an issue with added suggestions.

If you're looking to contribute to the platform directly, take a look at the Creating an Etherpad plugin documentation.

Our original platform pitch Hackpad

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