Public Safety Codes of the World: Stand Up For Safety! by Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org — Kickstarter

"Hi. My name is Carl Malamud and I run Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit that helps make important government information available to you. In the past, we've posted over 6,000 government videos through our FedFlix program and were responsible for putting the historical opinions of the U.S. Court of Appeals on the Internet for the first time. Our most recent project is to publish the world's public safety codes. In the last two years, we've posted 28,040 public safety codes from around the world. We post all these documents on law.resource.org and make them available on the Internet Archive. These codes—building, fire, electric, plumbing, HazMat, elevators and much more—are mandated by law and regulate every aspect of our lives. But citizens have not been able to access these codes without paying hundreds of dollars. That's right! Hundreds of dollars to consult your local building code. Hundreds of dollars to research that oil spill or find out if your factory is operating safely. Hundreds of dollars to find out if your baby stroller meets the latest safety standards mandated by law. That's wrong, and we're changing that. (Read why this is wrong in my essay 'Twelve Tables of Law.') But we want to do more, and to do more we need your help ...  We've spent a fortune buying paper copies of public safety codes, but low-quality scans just aren't good enough. We're asking your help so that we can rekey the codes into valid HTML. We carefully key in the text of each code, comparing two independent keyed versions for accuracy, then setting that all into valid HTML.  What this means is all these codes become available in a standard format that works with today's search engines, on mobile platforms, and are significantly more accessible and usable than the scans.  If we reach our funding goal, we'll be able to continue our project to key in many of the 28,040 public safety codes we've posted that are incorporated into law. We'll also go the next step, which is to redraw the graphics into SVG and recode all the formulas into Math Markup Language. This makes these vital public safety specifications much more accessible and more usable ... "