Learn how Congress is starting to use Elasticsearch to modernize search, and how you can help to accelerate this change. Until just a decade ago, some of the most important precedents of Congress were stored and indexed on paper cards. This system was replaced by a slow, clunky SQL search and there was initially resistance when Xcential proposed to convert this to Elasticsearch (v1.7.2), because lawyers feared that ‘relevance’-based search would be less precise. With accurate results, 50 times faster, users were won over. Now there is a potential to use modern search, not only for precedents, but throughout the work of Congress and in state legislatures as well. We’ll talk about some of these projects, and how you could get involved (we’re hiring!).
Xcential
Director of Open Government
Ari Hershowitz is Director of Open Government at Xcential Corporation, working to modernize how governments draft and publish the law. Ari is an attorney and software engineer, always on the lookout to recruit more people into the intersection of these two fields. He has worked on modernization projects with government agencies worldwide, from the Chilean Library of Congress to the United Stat…
Ari Hershowitz is Director of Open Government at Xcential Corporation, working to modernize how governments draft and publish the law. Ari is an attorney and software engineer, always on the lookout to recruit more people into the intersection of these two fields. He has worked on modernization projects with government agencies worldwide, from the Chilean Library of Congress to the United States House of Representatives. Prior to legal technology, Ari was an advocate for endangered Latin American wilderness for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He got his undergraduate degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and his law degree at Georgetown University in the Public Interest Legal Scholars program.
Elastic
Community Organizer
Elastic
Community Organizer
