Crowdsourcing Ballot Initiative Voters’ Guides: Living Voters’ Guides

[NOTE: As of 11 July 2012 the original Living Voters Guide Website appears to be down. Click here for an archived version of the Living Voters Guide.]

A new platform — called Living Voters’ Guides – for crowdsourcing the development of voters’ guides that inform voters about referenda and other ballot initiatives, has been launched by a team including:

• CityClub of Seattle;
• The Design, Use, Build group @ the University of Washington, including Professor Dr. Alan Borning; Travis Kriplean, creator of the Reflect eParticipation system; and Jonathan Morgan;
• The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement @ the University of Washington, including Professor Dr. Lance Bennett and Deen Freelon; and
• Reinspire Me LLC.

The project is funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Click here for Professor Dr. David Domke’s post about the platform.

New ABA Ethics Opinion on Lawyers’ Use of Websites

American Bar Association (ABA) Formal Ethics Opinion 10-457 (August 5, 2010), on lawyers’ use of Websites, has been posted on the Avvo Blog.

The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 invites comments on the opinion, and on Internet-based client development tools. Comments are due December 15, 2010.

HT @MarkRosch and @joshuamking.

Law.gov Receives Substantial Grant

Google, Inc. has provided a grant of $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to fund the Law.gov legal open government data project. The grant is given as part of Google’s Project 10^100.

Click here for Carl Malamud’s announcement of the grant.

Click here for more information about Law.gov.

Howard: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam

Professor Dr. Philip N. Howard of the University of Washington Department of Communication has published The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam (2010). Here is a summary:

Around the developing world, political leaders face a dilemma: the very information and communication technologies that boost economic fortunes also undermine power structures. Globally, one in ten internet users is a Muslim living in a populous Muslim community. In these countries, young people are developing political identities online, and digital technologies are helping civil society build systems of political communication independent of the state and beyond easy manipulation by cultural or religious elites.

With unique data on patterns of media ownership and technology use, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy demonstrates how, since the mid-1990s, information technologies have had a role in political transformation. Democratic revolutions are not caused by new information technologies. But in the Muslim world, democratization is no longer possible without them.

• first book to move beyond potential and hypothetical relationships between technology diffusion and democratic transitions to look at lived experiences for countries under study
• Draws on a statistical study that compares data trends across 74 Muslim countries between 1990 and 2008
• Addresses 2009 presidential elections in Iran

Some of the research reported in this book was produced in connection with the projects The Effect of the Internet on Society: Incorporating Central Asia into the Global Perspective and Human Centered Computing: Information Access, Field Innovation, and Mobile Phone Technologies in Developing Countries.

[NOTE: This post was last updated 25 September 2010.]

Legal Information Systems Website Back Up & Running

Access has been restored to the Legal Information Systems and Legal Informatics Resources site, and the Legal Informatics Conferences Calendar, both of which are associated with this blog. Both sites were unavailable earlier this week. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Wash on Authentication as a User-Centric Activity

Mike Wash, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has posted Authentication Is a User-Centric Activity, on his blog, The WashBoard.

Mr. Wash’s post identifies key issues respecting the authentication of digital government information — including U.S. federal legal information — and discusses GPO’s approach to authentication.

For other recent discussion of authentication of digital legal information, please see Sean McGrath’s post, Pssst…there is no such thing as an authentic/original/official/master electronic legal text, and Jason Eiseman’s VoxPopuLII post, Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information.

HT @propylonsean.

September 21, 2010: Presentation: “Hacking the Casebook”

A presentation about new resources for creating digital legal casebooks, entitled Hacking the Casebook, will be given by the H20 Development Team on 21 September 2010 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The presentation will be Webcast.

Here is the abstract:

Traditional law school casebooks are expensive, bulky and stagnant. With the support of the HLS Library, Berkman has been updating our suite of classroom tools, H2O, to create an online alternative to casebooks that are free, online and remixable. H2O includes our new tool Collage for editing down and annotating cases, Playlists for aggregating materials, the Question Tool for in-classroom back channel, and the Rotisserie for out-of-class discussion. In this lunch we’ll demo some of the tools (all still in alpha) and show how Jonathan Zittrain‘s Torts class is using them this term.

McGrath on Authentication of Digital Legal Information

Sean McGrath of Proplyon, has written an interesting new post on authentication of electronic legal information, entitled Pssst…there is no such thing as an authentic/original/official/master electronic legal text.

Updated: Syllabus on Law as a Complex Adaptive System, by Katz & Bommarito

Daniel Martin Katz and Michael J. Bommarito II, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies, have updated their syllabus on law as a complex adaptive system. This syllabus lists a wealth of material relevant to the study of law as an information and knowledge system, and so should be of interest to many legal informatics researchers.

Mr. Katz has also posted slides from his recent course, Introduction to Computing for Complex Systems.

New on VoxPopuLII: Eiseman: Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library has posted Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Mr. Eiseman poses the question, “Is there a good reason why judges should not be blogging their opinions?” In his response, Mr. Eiseman discusses a range of timely issues related to the transition to digital legal publishing, including the costs of print publication, the official status of digital legal information, authentication, preservation, citations and identifiers, and open access to legal scholarship.

This post will be of interest to legal professionals, legal publishers, and the legal technology community.