open tenancy legal decision trees.
We need help writing up decision trees to get our open source access to justice project off the ground. The long story short is that we are targetting primarily students, but also those with tenancy issues in the UK. We want to create a simple questionnaire, that they can then walk away with a document listing their tenancy rights at the end.
Keen to help? Awesome! What we need is help figuring out the relevant questions to be asking: which is where you come in.
You can find a list of our current topics that we need decision trees for here. We've also included an example of our electricity decision tree here. If you want to talk about any of the topics, or have any questions, visit our Discussions tab.
If you have never used GitHub before to make contributions, that's fine! We made a small video tutorial in collaboration with UoA Legal Tech Society, with the link below. Don't forget that you can ask us questions on our Discussions tab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzYPEcwFoqs&t
Was that not enough information? Watch our extended tutorial here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOrE4B-eib4
As part of the questionnaire we've already asked the initial questions such as if they have a valid tenancy, and do they understand that the use of openTenancy does not meaning they will be receiving binding legal advice. To put more simply, this is what the initial questionnaire looks like:
Select a topic from the list of topics here, and start writing the questions in any form that is simplest for you! Just remember that you'll already have all of the information such as if they have a valid tenancy, and that they understand the guidance given by the system is not legal.
All of the answers in the grey blocks above will be different options that the individual users can click on to help guide them through the rest of the system, so they'll only go down the corresponding paths.
We can also include definitions - which you can see in the green box next to the terms. Those will appear when the user hovers over the individual terms, that way if they don't know what a periodic tenancy is - we have a plain and clear statement detailing just that.
Please specify which jurisdiction you are submitting for when you add your descision tree to Github. If you're interested in helping us open up to a new jurisdiction please get in touch with [email protected].
After we clarify the jurisdiction in the initial questions we then branch in to verifying that they have a valid tenancy.
We understand that you may not have legal experience, or extensive experience with tenancy rights - that's fine (someone with legal experience will check all submissions to verify their validity, and we will make it clear that this is not legally binding advice). If a topic is too large, break it down in to a simple yes or no route that you would ask someone to get to the bottom of their problem based on that topic. Just let us know when you submit the aspects of that topic that you didn't cover, and we can expand on that!
We'd prefer them to be in the style of a flowchart OR a decision tree, a decision tree is something like this:
question: are you feeling good today?
yes: that's good that you're feeling good! are you excited for the weekend?
yes: yay glad to hear you're excited for the weekend! do you have any plans?
no: that's cool time to relax! END OF INTERVIEW
yes: awesome enjoy! END OF INTERVIEW
no: oh no that sucks that you aren't excited for the weekend :(
no: why don't you feel good today?
If that format is too confusing from you, consider doing it as a more visual flowchart like this:
Obviously they will get a bit more complex, but make them as complex as you feel comfortable with - we can do the rest, or open it up for further submissions who can build on your work!
You do not have to make them full, gramatically correct, questions if you're strapped for time - a few notes that we can expand on would be brilliant.
Make sure you note where the interview ends (ie where you give them the final tenancy advice; whether that is to talk to their landlord, contact the local council, file a complaint, etc. - that way we know where to generate the document).
here are a few useful, accurate, resources to identify the relevant law:
Note that these are for guidance ONLY and we will not accept any pull requests that contain plagirism. Please refer to the government website or legislation as a first port of call in all instances.
We'd prefer if you did it through Github. You will need to make an account, fork our repository, create a branch, commit your file to the decision trees folder, and then review and submit it to our repository - that way we can then approve it once verified and add it directly to this page for one of our coders to input to our questionnaire! A really handy tutorial is available at this repository. These instructions cover the details, however if you're struggling with some of the steps shoot us an email at [email protected]. A big benefit of submitting through Github is that you will be listed on our list of contributors for the project!
However, if that's a bit tricky for you feel free to send it as an email to [email protected].
You can upload them in a .txt file, .pdf, .docx, .md or any format that you prefer! As long as it is clear.
If you want to talk about any of the topics, or have any questions, visit our Discussions tab. We're also happy to just have general chats and get to know one another here!
If you upload to our Github - you will be listed as an official contributor! We will post on our linkedIn, twitter, and instagram when we upload - and refer to our many amazing contributors who helped made this possible. Being open source means we're helping break the barriers of the legal system, and ensure that everyone is able to enforce their rights!
Amy Conroy | Anastasia Shmyglia
Copyright (c) Amy Conroy, Anastasia Shmyglya | License