Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

I will be offline, on vacation, the next two weeks.

I had a great meeting yesterday with Disability Rights Washington over social media strategy which has prompted me to update my list of recommend resources for NPO’s thinking about getting into Social Media. Here is the new list:

Best Blogs:
BoingBoing – Great short form blog, Cory Doctorow is my favorite writer on the blog he cover everything from Do It Yourself Culture to user rights technology issues.
Freedom to Tinker: Group blog hosted by hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Very strong policy posts with a diverse set of views.
EFF Deep Links – EFF’s blog is a decent example of a nonprofit blog for an npo that also does litigation.
Blogging Best Practices Post w/ a video from Cory Doctorow
Posner and Becker’s Blog – Law and Economics, this a long form blog that covers current issues in a back and forth debate between Posner a very out spoken judge & Becker an Econ professor at Chicago U.  The post are a little long for my taste but a lot of people really like them, I would not publish post longer then this.

Online video:
RSS in Plain English by Common Craft.  Common Craft is a great local start up that does amazing short informational videos.
5 mins with Harold Feld - FCC/ Copyright public interest lawyer at Public Knowledge that is great at translating Law into plain English.
New in IP – a weekly video cast I do on Copyright & Patent issue, very low production cost focusing on recent news and commentary.

Flickr photo pools for NPO:
Sierra Club’s Daily Ray of Hope – Amazing User Generated photo pool.
Tech Soup’s Article on How NPO’s can get the most out of Flickr

Free copyright licensing designed to enable sharing:
Creative Commons
Blog posts From Beth Kanter on How NPO’s can utilize CC

Hehe, great video. Several people I know from the UW’s iSchool are in it including my information systems professor Bob Boiko:

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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