This project leveraged existing materials, benchmarking and analyses as well as an existing online prototype to advance several knowledge development goals that together produced a practical and open source toolkit to support legislative development, monitoring, and compliance exercises on a global scale. These are:

1. Comprehensive national, regional, and international legal frameworks: This part of the toolkit was built from existing open source compilations (comprising approx. 128 jurisdictions). It also utilized the Legal Atlas cloud-based database to scale research capacity for the project. In addition to primary access, secrecy and privacy laws, it includes (where applicable) constitutions, administrative and criminal procedures, environmental impact assessment laws, land tenure, natural resource, whistleblower protections for an estimated 20-30 jurisdictions. The goal was to go beyond the compilation of primary laws in order to produce a full picture of all laws and legal procedures that define the practical realities for access to information, transparency and accountability for a select number of countries. This can include sub-national laws as well.
2. Breakdowns and assessments against established benchmarks: This involved rendering legal documents into a relational database where laws and individual provisions can be ‘tagged’ for relevance to legal structures, principles, and benchmarks. Converting law into data supported several assessments, descriptions, and information delivery purposes for the toolkit including: the breakdown of legal texts into key components; rapid cross-jurisdictional comparisons in the aggregate and by component; direct reference to controlling provisions; automated reference aids and tables of content, and the creation of a variety of visual analytics that digest complex information sets.
3. Geo-referencing and map analytics to show patterns and relationships: A significant challenge to understanding law and legal frameworks is the abstract nature of law, the volume of material and the substantial fragmentation of a given subject between laws and across interrelated jurisdictions. Geo-referencing and map analytics are key tools to overcome these challenges. On a practical level, geo-referencing allows the automated display of information at all jurisdictional scales - global, multi-lateral, bi-lateral, supra-national, national, and local jurisdictions, enabling all types of vertical and horizontal comparisons. Map analytics help bring context to law and make it less abstract by enabling the automated and relational use of a wide variety of information and statistics, including data on socio-economic parameters (population, demand, trade, wealth, health, etc.) as well as environmental parameters (carbon emissions, air and water pollution indices, etc.). This permits a high level of evidence-based policy discussion and development that can be rapidly updated and amended to continuously test for patterns and relationships.
4. Additional contextual information: The toolkit also processed, geo-referenced, and tagged other types of information to facilitate a fuller understanding of the subject. These included interrelated databases on key court decisions, government authorities implicated by A2I legal frameworks and positive and negative examples of black letter law, enforcement or adjudication identified by group members and outside experts as informative of the state of the law.