A public encyclopedia of legal process
People navigating the legal system up close — often from inside a prison — understand how its processes actually work. Doing Process turns their hand-drawn maps into a public, machine-readable record of the law in action.
01 The idea
A legal process is just a sequence: who does what, in what order, under which law. Grievances, appeals, parole, sealing a record — the people who run these gauntlets learn them cold, and that knowledge mostly goes unrecorded and uncredited.
Doing Process captures it as a process map in BPMN — boxes, arrows, and decision diamonds. Drawn on paper, it can be scanned, read by software into a machine-readable model, checked against the law it cites, and published for anyone to read.
02 The path
The route one map travels. It is itself a process — so here it is as one. Every stage runs on owned hardware; a person signs off before the corpus is touched.
One process per page: a step, the role that does it, and the rule it comes from.
The page is mailed in, scanned, deskewed, and cleaned so software can read it.
A local model turns the drawing into BPMN — detector or vision model, never a cloud.
A linter enforces the rules: real deadlines, a citation on every step, nothing unsupported.
A person corrects it, strips identifying details, and releases it under CC0 with a handle.
The map enters Lexipedia, merged and cross-referenced with the rest of the corpus.
03 Where it’s of value
Because a map is both human-readable and executable, the same artifact serves people, clinics, courts, and researchers at once.
Plain maps for grievances, appeals, record sealing and expungement, and records requests — for pro se litigants and people reentering.
A citable, reusable library of procedure a clinic can hand a client or build its intake around.
Material for process mining and conformance work — how procedures are written versus how they actually run.
The same map explains a procedure to a person and drives a workflow, closing the gap between the rulebook and the counter.
Recognition for hard-won procedural knowledge and a durable, portable record of authorship.
Every map is CC0 and free to read, cite, and build on — a shared account of how the law works in practice.
04 The handbook
Two roles, one workflow. Contributors draw; operators run the intake. Both are documented so the whole thing stays legible and auditable.
05 Open & local
The whole pipeline runs on your own hardware with local models — a deliberate choice, so that material from people inside prisons never depends on a third party.
Recognition, OCR, checking, and storage all run on owned hardware. No scan or draft touches a cloud service.
Code is Apache-2.0; every contributed map is CC0. Free to read, cite, run, and fork.
Recognition is automatic; publication is not. A person reviews and releases every map.
06 Get involved
Facilities and reentry programs that can carry the mail. Clinics and legal-aid groups with procedures to map. Researchers who want the corpus. Volunteers who can scan, review, and sign off. And contributors with a process worth writing down.
hello@doingprocess.org
Tell us which side of the workflow you’re on and we’ll send the right packet.