Projects and documents

This section covers how to create and manage projects and the documents within them, including how to use the Dashboard and the Project Tab, generating PDFs. sharing documents and managing permissions.

Introduction

Two important concepts in Lawmaker are the Project and the Document. This section explains a bit about both and how you can interact with them.

What is a Project?

We use “project” as a generic name for the thing you’re working on in Lawmaker. Each Bill or statutory instrument you work on in Lawmaker will be represented by a separate project which is essentially a collection of documents relating to that Bill or instrument. For example, a Bill project will contain all the different versions of the Bill and all the amendments and amendment lists relating to that Bill.

Users in different organisations can work on the same project but can only see documents created by users in their own organisation or documents that have been shared with them.

When you log in, all the projects you can access are visible on the dashboard (see Finding projects on the Dashboard). A project’s name is determined by the title of the Bill or SI it relates to. (Each project also has a unique ID number like SP000123 or SI007534.)

If you’re the first person to work on a particular Bill or statutory instrument then you will need to create a project for it first. See Creating a new project for instructions on how to do that.

Documents

Everything in Lawmaker is based on documents. As mentioned above, projects are collections of documents and, when you are using the Editor, you are editing a document.

Lawmaker handles a range of different document types. The most common are Bills, statutory instruments and amendment lists but others are covered too. The kind of documents that a project can contain is controlled by the type of project you create, e.g. a Scottish Public Bill project will contain Scottish Bill documents and Scottish amendment list documents.

There are different types of document versions - working, significant and snapshot.

See Documents and folders on the Project Tab for more on the different types of document and how to work with them in Lawmaker.