Aaron Greenspan :: Writing :: $10,000: The Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants

In high school, as part of my senior project, I set up a 501(c)3 non-profit organization called Think Computer Foundation. At the time, I had high hopes that Think would become a household name like Apple or Microsoft, and since large companies always seemed to have charitable organizations associated with them, it seemed appropriate (to me at least) that Think would as well. When I incorporated the Foundation, I wrote down on the charter that its goal should be helping children through technology.

Once the Foundation was established to receive donations, the substantive part of the effort was shipping fixed-up PCs to Jamaica, Brazil, and eventually the Cleveland Public Schools, which may have been the only group that actually received the shipments. After that, I went to college, and the Foundation's activity was limited. A few years later, my mother essentially took over, and began organizing activities, almost all of them free, for children and young adults with disabilities in the Cleveland area, by convincing sports teams and performing arts organizations to donate tickets. She now runs a mailing list through the Foundation with several hundred subscribers.

Starting in 2011, working on PlainSite gave me another opportunity to put the Foundation to good use, and it funded the large hard drives (costing about $400 at the time) needed to store all of Aaron Swartz's PACER information at Think's data center, plus additional government data I decided to add to the database later on. I've always been wary to spend the Foundation's money on anything because generally it seems so easy to spend donated funds without any real return on investment.

That being said, Aaron Swartz's work was very important to me, and as moving as the outpouring of grief over his death has been, the truth is that very few people paid serious attention to his work (excepting the DOJ and FBI) from the time he downloaded PACER data in 2008 until now. In fact, I am fairly certain that I can count on one hand the number of people who have spent considerable amounts of time thinking about PACER and its perverse impact on society.

That needs to change, so I'll pay to make it change. Exactly $10,000 in Aaron's name, from Think Computer Foundation, in the form of two Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants, which will work as follows:

Grant 1 ($5,000): Extending RECAP

RECAP (PACER backwards) is a brilliant project spearheaded by Stephen Schultze at Princeton University that parses expensive ($0.10 per page) PACER dockets and uploads their contents to the Internet Archive so that they can be accessed for free, at least as of the date of the last download. Unfortunately, development on RECAP has all but stopped. The plug-in is only available for Firefox, and it has a few limitations.

The first group (which could also be an individual) to demonstrate that it has made RECAP work on Chrome, and to add full parsing capabilities for PACER Summary pages and PACER History pages (these are specific kinds of reports on the PACER system), in both versions, will get $5,000.00. Full parsing capabilities means that every piece of data on the page gets transformed into the XML structure sent to the Internet Archive. This is important because RECAP currently leaves out some fields, such as motion termination dates.

To get started, you can find the RECAP Github repository here. When you think you've got something, just e-mail help@plainsite.org with the details.

Grant 2 ($5,000): Visualization

PlainSite has a lot of data, but sometimes it can be hard to connect the dots. I'd like to see some cool visualization tools to help people make sense of it all. Teams will have until March 31, 2013 to take information on PlainSite and build something useful with it, above and beyond what is already available. Judges will be chosen from legal informatics specialists and the faculties of Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School.

• First Place: $2,500
• Second Place: $1,500
• Third Place: $1,000

To register your group, e-mail help@plainsite.org with your members' names, mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers, as well as a short description of what you plan to build and what you'll need from us to build it.

We'll plan to have the judges make their decisions by April 30, 2013.

For both grants: of course, by entering, you give Think Computer Foundation and Think Computer Corporation, which jointly run PlainSite, the right to do whatever they want to with your source code, possibly including making it open-source, but also possibly including making money off of it through PlainSite Pro and Pro Se subscriptions so long as the functionality is also freely available to the public.

In summary, between the two grants, I think the Foundation's money will be well spent, and I also hope that Aaron's impact will be felt even more widely than it is today. I haven't done anything like this before, so it's possible that more details will need to be worked out. If that's the case, I'll try to update the Foundation's web site and PlainSite accordingly.