Mussings on law, tech, & unrealted topic by a geek

I just can’t pass up a road trip to Portland. I will be joining Rachel Bridgewater, an Academic Librarian from Reed College, on a panel about the Google Book Settlement at the 2010 Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference to be held September 16-17 at the PCC Sylvania campus in Portland Oregon.

PS I heart Reed, between my AA and my BS/BA, while I was working for Wizards, I audited a few classes at Reed including intro to psychology and a history of Buddhism class (maybe i ghosted one of those…).  At the time Reed had a great policy where members of the community could join 2 classes a year for $100 each as long as the instructor was cool with it.  The class sizes were very small and they always had great conversation both during and after the classes, the students were very friendly and outgoing.  I learned more useful information from the psychology class then in many of my law school classes!

Update: Reed Still has the policy in place:

people may audit no more than two courses in one year, with written permission of the instructor. The auditor’s fee is $100 per course, per semester, plus any additional course fees.

I will be speaking at this years ATJ Conference in Wenatchee on June 5th. Here is the panel I am on : Technology Power Tools for Justice

Development and advances in technology have provided the justice system with transformative tools that can effectively, efficiently and economically make available both information and services to vast numbers of people almost anywhere in minutes. These tools can serve and empower people who have been powerless, excluded, underserved – and do so in practical ways with concrete effects. These tools can also enable and make real diversity in the people we serve, inclusiveness in the justice system and those who govern and work in it, and enable intergenerational communication and cooperation and leadership development at all levels. Focused on understanding how to use technology to serve our fundamental values and deliver meaningful justice in the daily lives of all people, we will demonstrate important tools and opportunities available now, and some exciting future directions.

We are likely to cover a lot of accessibility tools along with some other cutting edge projects. My hope is to include CC, twitter, mobile access, social media and Diaspora in the conversation.

Logging in to online banking never fails to irk me somehow.  I have a bills account that run a balance of about 2k that is waiting for the money to be pulled out for various expenses like car payment, insurance, ect.  The account even has a special name that makes me feel appreciated “First Choice Gold” at least I feel that way until I see how well I am appreciated.  Here is the interest on the account:

Really 1 cent interest on 2k… If I owed them 2k on a credit card I am sure they would not be charging me 1 cent.

Today’s Access to Justice Tech Committee meeting had a great presentation on How people use computers at public libraries.  The full report is Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Librariesand the presentation was given by Mike Crandall. I also recommend checking out the toolbox section which helps libraries use the study for local press and outreach.  Here are my quick and dirty notes:

2/3 of people in the US use the library
1/3 use public computer access at libraries
1/2 youth use the libraries and most of them do so once a week on average

44% of people at or below the poverty line use computers at public libraries while less then 25% of the wealthiest Americans use public libraries for computer access

Only 2% use the wireless exclusively

22% of users rely sole on the public library as their sole source of internet access

63% of users helped someone else using library computers 31% was people helping strangers!

How people use the public computer access:

Social Networks 60% (74% connect with family & friends, )

Education 42 (37% do homework, 24% take online classes, 14% applied for a program)

Employment 40% (76% searched for jobs, 47% worked on resumes 3.7 million people got hired after submitting an application)

Health & Wellness 37% (83% learned about illness)

Law 37% (57% learn about laws or regulations, 57% find Gov’t forms 38% looked for legal advice 8.3 million people got legal help online!)

Community Engagement 33% (79% learned about candidates or issues)

Managing Finances 25% (60 online banking, 53% purchase something, pay bills 50%)

Entrepreneurship 7%

Very interesting PHD proposal coming up Monday at the iSchool on cyberprotests today.  We have a growing public space, the Internet where it is tough if not impossible to protest other peoples websites.  In meat space it is easy to protest outside a Walmart or the Deans Office, but how do you protest Amazon or an online degree program if all the physical locations are way from the eyes of the other consumers and students?  I how Volodymryr Lysenko has some interesting ideas:

Volodymyr Lysenko:

Political cyberprotest in the (semi-)authoritarian societies as an information system: development of the theoretical framework

Date: 5/17/2010 to 5/17/2010
Time: 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: Mary Gates Hall 420

Abstract: The Internet-based ICTs can play significant role in the globally important protest activities. Unfortunately, there is no theoretically substantiated and practically tested coherent theoretical framework describing political cyberprotest under the (semi-)authoritarian regimes. In the dissertation I will develop and test such a framework.
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Today I am at day two of the Washington State Supreme Court Boards and Commissions Visioning Process. During the first day of the committee, we did not make a lot of progress, but It looks like that will change.  The project as been basically restarted with significantly more focus and direction.  This first meeting is focusing on orienting the members for the project to the roles and practices of the existing Commissions. At the beginning of the meeting it was made clear that we are here to focus on presenting ideas to help improve the commission system from a strategic perspective. As important as the focus is what we have not been asked to do, we have not been asked to  eliminating programs. We are not an implementation committee, we will stop working with a suggestion paper that focus on the strategy not the detailed tactics.

Todays meeting will specifically look at 10 committees or commissions and what they do through presentations by committee members:

Presentation 1: The Access to Justice Boards (ATJ) Justice without Barriers Committee, by Merrie Gough.

This is a new sub committee that has been formed with in the last year.  The ATJ Board asked the impediments committee, which worked on disability and accessibility issues, and the Pro Se Committee which focused on self help and litigants.

Accomplishments:

• Create and find Funding for a disability coordinator at the Administrative Office of the Courts
• Help create GR 33 a court based implementation the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
• Creation of needs assessment for Pro-Se litigants

Challenges

• Limited resources
• Limited funding that expires in June for some of the committees work
• Knowledge of other similar projects

Ideas for improving

• Better communications with other committees
• focus on status impediments & system impediments – are the

Current projects:

• Plain Language forms
• Self Help Center from Pro Se litigants

Stats:
Funding: ATJ Board funds, Grants, 50k from Supreme court (a 2 year fund request), staff support 2 to 3 full time staff from WSBA 300k to 400k a year from license fees.
Staff: 2 to 3  staff members part time
Reports to: ATJ Board
Target populations: Pro Se, people with disabilities, anyone with other barriers to ATJ such as geographic or language.

Q: How is the Self help project different from Washington Law Help?
A: The work of the committee is still strategic at this point.

Q: Who has approval power?
A: the ATJ Board

Q: How active in oversight is the ATJ Board on committees?
A: The committees are mostly independent, they report to the ATJ Board yearly and to make periodic reports as projects are completed

Presentation 2: ATJ Technology – Dexter Mejia from AoC

My notes on this session are a little light, I ended up answering some of the Q&A and helping a little with the presentation. I have been on this committee for 5 years now. One of the committees strengths is the diversity, the committee.  The technology committee has techies, lawyers, Judges, marketers, academics, librarians that are both from inside the justice system and outside.

Stats: same as ATJ Justice without barriers
Target Populations: AoC, JISC, WSBA anyone that provides technology to the community

Challenges:

• Funding, must of the projects ATJ Tech does are unfunded.  One prime examples ATJWeb.org . This is a good website, that could be a blog and a place (CMS) to share best practices, but three years after the launch it does not have staff to update it.
• Implementation of projects

Suggestions:

• More partnerships like the liaison position that shares knowledge with the Judaical Information Systems Committee (JISC)
• Iterations – we need more resources to update older projects as tech moves forward
• More partnerships, we need to resources share and communicate with other commissions
• Cooperative governance – possibly a work group that shares knowledge over upcoming projects

Time is getting short on this meeting.  At 11am we have 2 hours for 8 more presentations.  We made it through 2 presentations in the first 2 hours, I do not think I can keep up blogging the rest of the presentation given how quickly the final presentations will need to be made.  I will see about posting some of the handouts from the meeting in an update.

Check out MoMA Popart an interactive way to explore 198 MoMA paintings.  I have been to MoMA several times in the last few years and this flash based website (I usually hate flash!) is more fun in several ways the visiting the actual museum.  You can browse by tags and create your own collection of favorites.  You can easily flip between to peices of art work and compare them which is much more efficient then running back and forth across the gallery floor.  You can even take screen shots of the high ress scans to remix in other art, which is much safer then taking photos which can get you thrown out of many galleries.

Finding good endgame books to study is tough.  There are a lot of useless endgame books out there that cover esoteric position you will never see in a real game.  There are also a lot of endgame books that do nothing to explain what is going on.  They will simply have long strings of moves followed by a +- symbol.  I need positions explained in plain English to learn chess.  Several years ago I found one book, that was recommended to me by Charles  Schulien, that was very good at explaining endgames in simple terms that book is Essential Chess Endings, Explained Move by Move Volume 1 Novice thru Intermediate by Jeremy Silman (PS Volume 2 is by another author and is junk).  Unfortunately the book tough to find and not great print quality.  When asked by a parent recently What to recommend I was lost until I noticed that Silman has completely redone the book in a much better format.  The new book is:

Silman’s Complete Endgame Course: From Beginner to Master is Great! The book is expanded to cover content from the very basic through master level and has very strong explanations and with stragies and lots of practical quizzes. Silman even covers how to use the book and at what levels to learn which parts. I recommend Silman’s Complete Endgame Course for players from just starting to 2200 ELO and to chess coaches.

One final note, unlike tactics endgames are tough to study on your own.  To study them right and learn you really need to practice them against someone.  Some people will swear by using a chess computer for this but I have to strongly disagree.  Ideally you want to find another chess player  to practice with, someone that will try different approaches and help translate the moves into strategies.  I will be adding two days a week  of endgame practice work to my chess study plan. If anyone wants to join me at a coffee shop here in Seattle to work through the first few chapters please ping me Brian at BrianRowe dot ORG,