Allows bills and other legislative documents to be drafted, debated, decided and published reliably, easily, and quickly.
Allows multiple individuals to draft bills, and, through a track change view, to simultaneously propose conflicting changes to the same bill.
Analyzes proposed changes to a bill describes them in a legally precise document that can be actioned in chamber.
Provides for automated merging of accepted amendments into a new version of the bill and assures that conflicting amendments are not passed.
Is configurable to exactly match existing, long-established democratic processes.
Enables highly sophisticated contextual search of legislative documents.
Provides timely access to information and enables legislators, staff and constituents to better understand the intent and effect of amendments and changes to the law, ultimately leading to better decision-making.
Offers long-term system and data ownership and opportunities to offer innovative services to members, agencies and constituents.

Legislative Workbench Lawmaking Module

Lawmaking

Making and modifying the law is a vital part of the work of a legislature. Built upon many centuries’ worth of accumulated wisdom and containing numerous checks and balances, the lawmaking process is designed to support effective governance and democratic accountability.

The process of making the law is complex. To enact the simplest law many require many months of discussion, analysis and the exploration of alternate legal forms. A law does not stand alone but is linked to other statutes and will rarely be interpreted in isolation.

Propylon’s Lawmaking module supports the work of lawmakers throughout the legislative life-cycle. Through research, drafting, consideration and promulgation, the Lawmaking module provides support and assistance within in a single, integrated framework.

Commentary

The Commentary module allows legislators to solicit commentary on proposed legislation and to categorise, sort and rank the resulting input. The module can be used to gather comments from constituents, agencies, lobbyists and interest groups.

Drafting

The Legislation Editor allows users to produce structured legislative documents from within a familiar word-processing environment, speeding up common tasks such as formatting, pull-ins of boilerplate text, citation, cross-referencing and renumbering. Its structured word processing environment allows the creation of valid legislative documents while hiding the complexity of the markup from the author.

The Editor has been designed specifically for the production of legislative documents. It assists with, and greatly simplifies, the complex task of formatting and editing legislative measures which may preserve several generations of recorded changes in a single document.

The Editor guides the user through the complexities of stricken, underlined and bracketed changes, arcane numbering systems and citations.

The Legislation Editor brings all the benefits of 21st century technology to the drafting process whilst fully supporting formats and conventions which are rooted in precedent and tradition.

Proofing

The Proofing module supports the rigorous and systematic document proofing and indexing processes required by a legislature before a document can be offically published. The Proofing module allows for on-screen or paper-based proofing and is integrated tightly with the Drafting, Amendment Management, Search & Index and Publication modules. The Proofing Module assists the proofer by providing one-stop access to multiple proofing resources such as dictionaries, spell-checkers, thesauri and word-lists. The deployment of these resources can be linked to customised workflows in order to ensure that proofing is conducted systematically according to the needs of the legislature.

Amendment Management

The Legislative Workbench Amendment Management module manages the amendment and engrossment of bills and resolutions. Amendments can be recorded in a simple and intuitive way with all associated technical documentation and descriptive text being generated automatically. Amendments are correctly described in relation to page and line numbers of the official publication.

The Amendment Management module assists the process of amendment consideration. Amendments may be viewed as standalone documents or in the context of the document to be amended. Various sets of amendments can be engrossed on a trail basis and alternate versions of the final bill can be compared. Amendments-to-amendments and over-the-floor amendments are fully supported.

Engrossment of amendments which have been approved is also supported by the Amendment Management module. Intergration with chamber voting systems allows a new, engrossed copy of a bill to be available within minutes of a vote. Physically conflicting amendments are identified by the engrossment module and are flagged as requiring operator resolution.