The document discusses the open source project OpenJustitia, initiated by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland to manage court documents and decisions through an internal system. It outlines the rationale for choosing an open source approach, including cost efficiency and improved software stability, as well as the project's modular structure and community governance. The document also highlights the community's principles, intended members, and future developments in the OpenJustitia project.

1. Open Source Systems in Justice
Dr. Matthias Stürmer, /ch/open and Ernst & Young
NATO Advanced Research Workshop „Creating Awareness for
Using Open Source Systems in the Public Sector in Afghanistan“
September 15th – 17th, 2012 in Kabul, Afghanistan

2. Short Bio of Matthias Stürmer
 Studied business administration and computer science at University
of Bern until 2005, topic of licenciate thesis was open source
community building
 Finished doctoral dissertation at the Chair of Strategic Management
and Innovation at ETH Zürich in 2009 focused on open source
communities and firm involvement
 Worked at Swiss software company Liip creating agile Internet
solutions based on open source technologies
 Senior Consultant at Ernst & Young since 2010 specialised on open
source, open government, and social media
Dr. Matthias Stürmer
Senior Advisor  Matthias Stürmer is
 Board Member of Swiss Open System User Group /ch/open
Ernst & Young
Belpstrasse 23
 Secretary of Parliamentarian Group for Digital Sustainability
3001 Bern  Working group leader Office Interoperability of OSB Aliance
Switzerland  Responsible of www.opensource.ch
matthias.stuermer@ch.ey.com
 Co-founder of open data initiative opendata.ch
Work: +41 58 286 61 97  Since 2011 member of the city parliament of Bern.
Mobile: +41 58 289 61 97
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 2

3. Agenda
Open Source Project OpenJustitia of the
Federal Supreme Court
of Switzerland
1. About OpenJustitia
2. Modules of OpenJustitia
3. Community structure and governance
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 3

4. The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland
 Highest court in Switzerland based in Lausanne and Lucerne
 Around 7500 judgements annually in German, French, and Italian
 Follows open standards (2001) and open source (2009) strategy:
Use, publish, and maintain open source software
 400 thin client users (judges, staff etc.) on Sun OpenSolaris
 Since 2002 StarOffice, since 2010 OpenOffice, everything on ODF
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 4

5. About OpenJustitia
 Internal court decision administration system for
management of all documents related to a court
judgement
 Archive consists of 165'000 court decisions since 1954,
332'000 stored documents, 55'000 documents
semantically indexed
 OpenJustitia can be customized for other courts:
Configuration of individual meta data in each of the
modules
 Several other Swiss courts and legal software firms have
joined the OpenJustitia community
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 5

6. Open source stack of OpenJustitia
 All source code in Java J2EE, running on Apache Tomcat
 Open source DMS Alfresco for document management
 Apache Lucene for indexing and search engine
 PostgreSQL for data storage (index, legal norms etc.)
 Java macros for LibreOffice integration on the client
 External interfaces for Java/JDBC (for metadata) and XML
(for import/export of judgements, legal norms,
thesaurus...)
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 6

7. History of OpenJustitia
1. The Federal Supreme Court is the the final place for decisions. Thus a 100%
precise and reliant search system of previous court decisions is necessary.
2. In 2005 no court software met the Swiss Federal Court's requirements for
managing court decisions
3. Internal software development team programmed the Federal Court's
individual administration system
4. Federal Court decided to 'open source' its own software following its open
source goals within the IT strategy
5. Minor technical and governance preparations were necessary to initiate the
open source project OpenJustitia
6. Political troubles because of lobbyism of a private company
7. Release of the source code on September 1, 2011 below GNU General Public
License Version 3 (GPLv3)
8. First meeting of the OpenJustitia community in October 2012
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 7

8. Reasons to release as open source
Why did the Federal Court initiate OpenJustitia?
1. Benefitting the most of tax payer's money
●
Switzerland has dozens of national, cantonal, and regional
courts that all have similar technical needs for administrating
court judgements.
●
Federal open source strategy as well as the Federal E-
Government strategy both recommend collaborative software
development at institutional level in order to save costs.
2. Improve court management software
●
On the long term and through a healthy community OpenJustitia
will become more stable, secure and feature-rich.
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 8

9. Agenda
Open Source Project OpenJustitia of the
Federal Supreme Court
of Switzerland
1. About OpenJustitia
2. Modules of OpenJustitia
3. Community structure and governance
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 9

10. Modular structure of OpenJustitia
 OpenJustitia consists of six seperate modules:
 OpenJustitia Doc: management of documents incl. versioning and
access restrictions, powerful search engine of legal documents
 OpenJustitia LDoc: local search of legal documents integrated in
complete OpenJustitia system
 OpenJustitia Norm: automatic and semi-automatic recognition and
linking of legal norms within court judgements
 OpenJustitia Anom: semi-automatic anonymisation of judgements
integrated in OpenOffice/LibreOffice
 OpenJustitia Bib: powerful search engine for legal literature
 OpenJustitia Spider: integration of external legal data sources
including extraction of meta data
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 10

11. Text view with links in OpenJustitia Doc
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 11

12. Search form OpenJustitia Doc
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 12

13. Meta data in OpenJustitia Doc
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 13

14. Anonymization in OpenJustitia Anom
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 14

15. Indexing in OpenJustitia Norm
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 15

16. Search in OpenJustitia Bib
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 16

17. Local search in OpenJustitia LDoc
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 17

18. Other sources with OpenJustitia Spider
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 18

19. Agenda
Open Source Project OpenJustitia of the
Federal Supreme Court
of Switzerland
1. About OpenJustitia
2. Modules of OpenJustitia
3. Community structure and governance
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 19

20. Website www.openjustitia.org
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 20

21. Open source community guidelines
 From the Federal Court, only 6 pages
 Common understanding on what is
OpenJustitia and who can how in
which body participate.
 Content of the community guidelines:
 Introduction (background, goals etc.)
 Principles of the OpenJustitia community
 Intended members of the community
 Bodies of the OpenJustitia community
 Rules and procedures
 Source:
http://www.openjustitia.org/DE/01_OpenJustitia_Regeln_V1.2_d.pdf
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 21

22. Community principles of OpenJustitia
Basic principles and values the Federal Court
intends to adhere to within the OpenJustitia
community and expects the same of any other
community member:
1. Equality: Every one (court, company etc.) is
treated the same
2. Transparency: Communication happens as
open as possible
3. Meritocracy: For the moment Federal Court
is in control. But if others contribute more,
then they may also gain influence on the
projects future development.
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 22

23. Intended members of the community
 Federal Court: initiator and thus main
knowledge carrier at the moment
 Courts: all Swiss courts, but also
foreign courts feasible
 Other public institutions: using all or
parts of OpenJustitia
 Open source providers: software firms
that offer services for OpenJustitia
 Other firms: companies that may
benefit of the software, e.g. legal firms
 Universities: law schools for indexing
and researching legal texts
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 23

24. Bodies of the OpenJustitia community
 Members: free membership for any
legal entity (public institution,
company, association etc.) that uses
OpenJustitia or provides services for it
 Coordination committee: executives of
entities that use OpenJustitia in
mission-critical environment; Federal
Court directs the committee and has
two seats of a maximum of 5 seats
 Technology committee: software
developers or architects with in-depth
knowledge of the source code; is
responsible for all technical aspects
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 24

25. Rules and procedures
 Annual assembly: OpenJustitia
community members meet at least
once a year to receive annual report
and to do elections.
 Exclusion: If a community member
doesn't follow the guidelines, the
coordination committee can exclude
the member.
 Introductory support: Federal
Court offers support of 5 days to
the 5 five first members
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 25

26. Community membership
 Formal participation through written
declaration of enrollment
 Member accepts following requirements:
1. Interest in healthy progress of OpenJustitia
2. Participation at the general assembly
3. Accepts governance guidelines
4. Written withdrawal at resignation
5. Exclusion through majority vote of the
coordination committee if governance
guidelines are breached
 Source:
http://www.openjustitia.org/DE/02_OpenJustitia_Beitrittserklaerung_V1.2_d.pdf
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 26

27. Outlook OpenJustitia
 Growing member base: today several firms and public
institutions have become OpenJustitia members
 First member meeting in October 2012: initiation of
technical and leading boards, decision on how to progress
 Technical improvements: integrate OpenJustitia in public
website, optimization of automatic recognition, enhance
documentation, integration of business process software
for court decisions, possibly Italian and English translation
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 27

28. Discussion
 What software do judges at Afghan courts use?
 What kind of improvements at the IT level are necessary?
 What text editing programs are in use?
 Is there a need to search for previous decisions?
 Is there a need to anonymize names in rulings?
 In what languages are court decisions written?
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 28

29. Discussion
 Questions, comments, ideas, wishes?
Dr. Matthias Stürmer
Senior Advisor Ernst & Young
matthias.stuermer@ch.ey.com
Work: +41 58 286 61 97
Mobile: +41 58 289 61 97
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 29

30. Ernst & Young open source brochure
 Open source has one major weakness: marketing and PR
 Top management vendor-neutral brochure from Ernst & Young:
Why and how professionals use open source software
 Content:
●
Benefits, risks and good practices
●
Professional application of
open source software
●
Legal aspects of open source
●
Background information on
open source software
 Download as PDF on
Ernst & Young website
NATO Open Source Workshop in Kabul – Open Source Systems in Justice 30