IJIS & LegalXML Announce "Springboard Program" for E-Filing

On April 2, 2013 the IJIS Institute issued a Call for Participation in cooperation with the OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing workgroup to “spring” development and adoption of the 4.01 standards.

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What is a Springboard Program?

It is a volunteer effort in support of the IJIS Institute’s nonprofit mission.  Specifically;

“The Springboard program mission is to provide a setting where industry can advance national information sharing and interoperability standards for Justice and related domains. The program promotes information sharing via the inspection and testing of standards-based interoperability specifications. It endeavors to work with a variety of stakeholder organizations, including authoritative source organizations (ASOs) as the source of interoperability specifications and standards development organizations (SDOs) as the providers of foundational standards and standardized interoperability specifications. 

In addition to advancing the adoption of standards and interoperability specifications themselves, the program seeks to promote underlying standards-based interoperability tools such as the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and the Global Reference Architecture (GRA). These tools provide foundational components for the building of more strongly constrained, implementation-ready specifications. 

In particular, the ECF specifications have already been adopted as a recommended standard for the courts community by the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) and the National Association for Court Management (NACM). The Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of COSCA and NACM, along with staffing and support of NCSC and technical guidance of the Court Information Technology Officers Consortium (CITOC), have actively participated in development and vetting of ECF. 

This industry support and active participation of practitioners, combined with encouragement to leverage technology more effectively, has resulted in current initiatives by courts nationwide to implement electronic filing based on the ECF 4.01 specification. OASIS is now also considering ECF 4.01 as a Candidate OASIS Standard.”

Full details of the program can be viewed here.