This quarter we welcomed a new legal aid organization to the Document Assembly Line, created a new development roadmap with the community, added a DevOps engineer to our team, and worked on volunteer coordination.
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New partners and funding
We recently welcomed Lagniappe Law Lab to the Document Assembly Line! Lagniappe works on access-to-justice technology in Louisiana.
We also secured new funding from Legal Services Vermont through a grant from the Legal Services Corporation. Among other things, this helps us hire a DevOps engineer to improve our Docassemble hosting infrastructure.
Roadmap
At our roadmapping meeting on February 12th the community discussed and voted on priorities distilled from ideas and feedback we received from the community ahead of time. The goals of the roadmapping meeting were to help the community understand how Document Assembly Line’s resources (i.e., staff time) are allocated, and reach a consensus on the community’s priorities. Here are the resulting priorities:
Admin
- DAL project coordination/admin
- Outreach and promotion
- Contract negotiation and admin
Community software, support, and training
- AssemblyLine maintenance and upgrades
- Community coordination/management
- PDF accessibility improvements
- Documentation task force, including some specific priorities:
- Security best practices
- Accessibility best practices
- Seasoned dev best practices
- ALIncome
- AL code examples
- Review screen code examples
- Improve authoring tools to encourage accessibility
- Error troubleshooting, log investigation tool
- Deeper automated testing support
- Guided coding editor
- Tools for managing large interview libraries and users
- Volunteer coordination
- API access to interview snapshot data
Docassemble hosting
- Docassemble hosting infrastructure upgrades
- Docassemble hosting support
- New DevOps engineer onboarding
E-filing
- E-filing infrastructure upgrades
- E-filing maintenance and upgrades
- EFSP support
- LITEfile, including some potential priorities (TBD during beta testing):
- Off-ramp to get help from a filing clerk
- ODR UX research RE user trust
- Plug-and-play-ability
- TrueFiling integration
- ECF 5
- Improved e-filing error reporting
Interview building and maintenance
- Student project coordination
- Interview maintenance
Staffing updates
Our new DevOps engineer, Rajeswari, just joined the Document Assembly Line team this week! She’ll be helping us maintain, upgrade, and support our technical infrastructure, especially for Docassemble hosting.
Software updates
For detailed AL and e-filing software release notes, see these links. Here are some highlights:
AssemblyLine
Quinten added a new code linter to the dashboard, and is adding an API to all the AssemblyLine functions. This recording of our last workshop demonstrates the potential of these new features for AI development:
The Weaver can also generate placeholder labels via AI now, and Quinten is working on dashboard tools that will help label PDF and Word templates. The ultimate goal is providing a development environment that enables drafting simple interviews in 4 hours or less.
E-filing
Bryce launched a LITEfile beta test in February with Illinois, Massachusetts, and Vermont helping to test and refine the software. Our plan is to launch LITEfile later this year.
Court Forms Online
Quinten has made a number of upgrades to Court Forms Online:
- Now includes interviews from multiple jurisdictions
- Interview landing pages have been updated to improve the user experience and discoverability
- New guide to using court forms
- New blog/news feed
Document Assembly Line website
- The Document Assembly Line website now includes information about our Docassemble hosting and e-filing services
- The Getting started page and Beginner’s guide have been updated with more information about learning to use Docassemble, including new training materials
Volunteers
Michelle has been leading the effort to improve our volunteer organizing. In particular, we are looking for volunteers who can help us organize volunteer projects. If that sounds like you, please use the volunteer signup form to let us know.