Re: Terminology Map

Dear Grant,

thank you for your file. I think that finding a common nomenclature for legal concepts is an extremely useful activity, and one that would likely result in better understanding of similarities and differences in legislative practices around the world. 

Nonetheless, I am quite scared by the mere size of the endeavour. What our experience tells us from examining dozen of countries and legislative traditions in the last six years is that terminology is plentiful, detailed, and hopelessly confusing. To mention just the situation in Italy, the century old tradition of latin terms for these things has everybody using different terms for even the most trivial cases, for instance the Senate using a different name for bills than the Chamber of Deputy and yet a different one than the Government. 

For this reason, I am weary of devoting time of the TC to generating such a list. It is out of scope and really open-ended, because of the time and precision required by a good work. I do not object, and in fact I heartily approve of maintaining and updating such a list as a private activity parallel to the discussions in the TC, but I personally would not let the TC spend time on this task, as I fear it would derail the conversation to endless minutiae about minuscule details. 

I believe we should strive to define abstract terminology, neutral from each local legal tradition, independent from the workflow of each assembly and following the "pattern principle" of the Akoma Ntoso schema. I believe that whenever a term is used by different legal traditions in different or ambiguous ways, we should choose a different, more neutral term. 

Example: the type of document "bill" in Akoma Ntoso is neutral respect the phase of the legislative process. It is a <bill> when it is an initial proposal, it is a <bill> when it is a consolidated bill, it is a <bill> when it is an approved and vote bill. I would definitely prefer to concentrate our efforts on finding and approving neutral terminology, on common scenarios (examples), and on generating the documentation so that we can hopefully arrive by the end of November to the Public Review stage.

Please find the same file in attachment with a new column where you can find the Akoma Ntoso neutral terminology inspired by the document-type and to the patterns.

 
Ciao
 
Monica