Smith and Heath: Police.uk and Data.police.uk: Developing Open Crime and Justice Data for the UK

Amanda Smith and Tom Heath of the UK Open Data Institute have published Police.uk and Data.police.uk: Developing Open Crime and Justice Data for the UK , JeDEM , 6(1), 87-96 (2014).

Here is the abstract:

In this paper we describe the evolution and development of the police.uk and data.police.uk sites, which publish open data about crime and justice in the UK, and make it accessible and comprehensible to the public. Police.uk has received over 64 million visits (754 million hits) since launching in January 2011. Open crime and justice data represents a key sector in the UK open data landscape, and citizens are keen to engage with the criminal justice system to become more informed about local levels of crime and other policing information. This paper sets out the policing context in the UK, discusses the journey in providing such open data, the processes involved and challenges encountered, and explores possible future developments.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Data sets, Policy debates, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Administration of justice data, Amanda Smith, Crime data, Criminal justice data, JeDEM, Justice data, Legal data, Open crime data, Open justice data, Open legal data, Tom Heath



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Bennett: Legal Resource Registry

Frank Bennett of Nagoya University has launched Legal Resource Registry: An Open Archive of Law-Making Institutions and Publishing Channels .

Here is a description of the registry, from its Website:

This archive contains structured descriptions of legal resources and the publications from which they can be obtained. To view the descriptions for a given resource and jurisdiction, follow the links below.

The Registry is extensible: any visitor with a GitHub account can propose the addition of institutions, reporting services, or entire national jurisdictions. Proposals must be accepted by the editors of the Registry, and may be modified following discussion. To propose an addition or amendment, click on the link for a given resource in any Registry page, and follow the instructions provided in the source-code view. […]

These pages were built by Frank Bennett, using resources from CourtListener.com, a project of the non-profit Free Law Project. […]

Frank adds:

Tip for visitors to the Legal Resource Registry: court names link to court pages. http://t.co/KnP64V8EjW More than just a metadata schema!

— Frank Bennett (@fgbjr) November 27, 2014

For more details, please see the registry.

HT @fgbjr

Filed under: Applications, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Frank Bennett, GitHub and legal information systems, Legal citation registries, Legal citation standards, Legal descriptive metadata, Legal information archives, Legal information registries, Legal metadata registries, Legal metadata standards, Legal Resource Registry, Legal Resource Registry: An Open Archive of Law-Making Institutions and Publishing Channels



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HiiL Innovating Justice Forum 2014: Results, storify, links, and resources

The Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law’s Innovating Justice Forum 2014 was held 25-26 November 2014 in The Hague.

The Website for the event, with links to descriptions of the competing projects, is available at: http://ift.tt/1vpOAVH

The winning law-related projects included:

• BRAC’s Business Model for Land Measurement Enabling Sustainable Micro-Entrepreneurship


• Kanan Dhru’s LawforMe: Demystifying Laws and Legal Processes Through Simple Flowcharts

Twitter hashtags for the event included: #ijawards14 #ijawards2014 #ijawards

Click here for a storify of images and Twitter tweets from the event.

Here is a description of the event, from Christina Moreno’s post entitled “If the justice system does not allow changes, we will then change that system”:

This year, HiiL Innovating Justice, C&A Foundation, and Next2Company partnered together in organising the 5th Annual Innovating Justice Forum: an Innovation Boostcamp on Justice Delivery and Living Wages. The goal of the event was to put justice and living wage innovators right in the centre. During the first day of the Boostcamp, we began by preparing the 9 finalists from this year’s innovation selection round – 6 innovators focused on justice delivery and 3 on living wages – with delivering great pitches.

HT @InnoJustice

Filed under: Applications, Conference reports, Conference resources, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Access to justice technology, Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law, Innovating Justice Forum, Innovating Justice Forum 2014, Legal document assembly systems, Legal simulations, Simulations in legal information systems, Technology for access to justice, Visualization of legal information



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5 Apps for Working from Home This Holiday Season

This week is Thanksgiving, and you're going to be out of the office, but you're not really going to be out of the office, are you? Let's face it: Come Friday, you're going to be back on your computer, billing...



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Moving Law Offices? Here is a Really Big Checklist

Moving stinks, no matter what your budget or occupation. But for us, the lawyers, it's an even bigger pain: everybody, from the courts to the bar to clients, all need to be notified, there is no room for downtime, and...



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Advice to Clients in Wake of Ferguson Grand Jury Decision

Now that the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri has decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown, there were protests, and there will be more protests. As a lawyer, you might be representing one of...



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Englert et al.: Logical Limitations to Machine Ethics with Consequences to Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Matthias Englert , Sandra Siebert , and Martin Ziegler have posted Logical Limitations to Machine Ethics with Consequences to Lethal Autonomous Weapons .

Here is the abstract:

Lethal Autonomous Weapons promise to revolutionize warfare — and raise a multitude of ethical and legal questions. It has thus been suggested to program values and principles of conduct (such as the Geneva Conventions) into the machines’ control, thereby rendering them both physically and morally superior to human combatants.

We employ mathematical logic and theoretical computer science to explore fundamental limitations to the moral behaviour of intelligent machines in a series of “Gedankenexperiments”: Refining and sharpening variants of the Trolley Problem leads us to construct an (admittedly artificial but) fully deterministic situation where a robot is presented with two choices: one morally clearly preferable over the other — yet, based on the undecidability of the Halting problem, it provably cannot decide algorithmically which one. Our considerations have surprising implications to the question of responsibility and liability for an autonomous system’s actions and lead to specific technical recommendations.

Mark Gibbs has a recent post at NetworkWorld describing the paper: Forget your robot overlords: Watch out for Lethal Autonomous Systems that make mistakes.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Policy debates, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Algorithmic law, Artificial intelligence and law, ArXiv, Drone law, Drones, Halting problem, Intelligent agents' legal decision making, Intelligent agents' legal decisionmaking, Law of robots, Law of war information systems, Laws of war information systems, Legal algorithms, Martin Ziegler, Matthias Englert, Modeling legal decision making, Modeling legal decisionmaking, Robot law, Sandra Siebert, Trolley Problem



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What Lawyers Should Know About Pres. Obama's Immigration Plan

Last Thursday, President Obama outlined his plan for dealing with the problem of undocumented immigrants. It involves selective enforcement of immigration laws, focusing more on criminals and less on families and children. With the implementation of new immigration regulations come...



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Katz and Bommarito: The Three Forms of (Legal) Prediction: Experts, Crowds and Algorithms

Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito of Michigan State University and the ReInvent Law Lab have posted slides of their presentation entitled The Three Forms of (Legal) Prediction: Experts, Crowds and Algorithms , given 19 November 2014 at Chicago Legal Innovation and Technology Meetup, in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Among the topics covered in the presentation are:

• Katz’s research on quantitative legal prediction


• The Supreme Court Forecasting Project


• Katz, Bommarito, and Blackman’s {Marshall}+ algorithm


• Combinations of automated, crowdsourced, and expert legal prediction methods

Some comments about the presentation are shown in the storify of the meetup.

HT @legalhackCHI

Filed under: Applications, Slides, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Chicago Legal Innovation and Technology Meetup, Computational Legal Studies, Crowdsourced legal prediction, Crowdsourcing legal prediction, Daniel Martin Katz, Expert legal prediction, Expert legal predictions, Legal crowdsourcing, Legal prediction, Michael Bommarito, Quantitative legal prediction



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The Good Law Hackthon: 22 November 2014, London

The Good Law Hackathon is being held 22 November at the UK Ministry of Justice in London.

I think John Sheridan of The National Archives is organizing the event.

The event appears to be associated with the UK Government’s Good Law Initiative.

Here is a description of the event, from the event’s eventbrite page:

Your chance to the hack the entire statute book

If you’ve ever wanted to hack the whole statute book, not just individual pieces of legislation, come along to the Good Law Hackathon. Our goal is to develop various hacks that measure the statute book in some way. Imagine creating a ‘census’ of the statute book!

When most people think of legislation they think of words not numbers, yet the simple act of counting can reveal a great deal about how we are governed. Imagine counting how many times a legally significant word or phrase occurs, or the use of powers, or the number of internal or external references in legislation. Imagine what it tells us – for example, when does legislation start to ‘wear out’?

We’d like you to hack ‘indices’ for some aspect of statute book – the things you’d like to have a go at counting. It’s just not been possible before – but we’ll provide all the data you’ll need.

Here are some of the datasets and tools you’ll be able to download and use:

• As enacted legislative texts by type and year in HTML, XML and Akoma Ntosa XML


• Revised current legislative texts by type and year in HTML, XML and Akoma Ntosa XML


• Effects by legislation type and year in RDF/XML


• The CLML Schema


• XSLT for legislation.gov.uk XHTML

[...]

Do you have questions about The Good Law Hackathon? Contact John Sheridan, The National Archives: http://ift.tt/145Wpqv

[...]‘

Click here for other posts about the Good Law Initiative.

HT @demsoc

Filed under: Algorithms, Data sets, Hackathons, Hacking, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #goodlaw, #LegalHack, (John Sheridan, Good Law Initiative, Good Law Project, Legal hackathons, Legislative hackathons, Open legal data, Open legislative data, Open parliamentary data, Parliamentary hackathons



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Lawyerly Skills Can Pay Off: 5 Things You Can Negotiate

Americans don't really negotiate over things as much as people do in other countries. We're accustomed to just paying the sticker price and moving on with our lives. But there are a plethora of things you can acquire for a...



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Can Free Consultations Pay Off for Lawyers?

Smooth or crunchy? Sean Connery or Roger Moore? Free consultations or no? These are the debates that characterize our times. Because this is a legal blog, we're going to have to save the first two for another blog (although, off...



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Lawyering On the Go: 5 Tips for Working While Traveling

I hope you've purchased your Costco-sized bottle of antacids: The holiday season means travel, and travel means stress via missed flights, delayed flights, poor weather, nasty people, and luggage that's in Boston instead of Albuquerque (but don't worry; you'll get...



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Gift Ideas for the Lawyer in Your Life

Black Friday will soon be upon us; or, more properly, the month-long holiday binge once called "Black Friday" is already here. That means you can get discounts on lawyer gifts for your lawyer friends as early as today. But what...



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Land Matrix: Data and Visualizations Concerning Large Real Property Transactions

Land Matrix is a free and open database of large land transaction data, with visualization tools.

Land Matrix is operated by a group of organizations including International Land Coalition and GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies / Leibniz-Institut für Globale und Regionale Studien.

Here is a description of Land Matrix , from the project’s frontpage and About page:

The Land Matrix is a global and independent land monitoring initiative that promotes transparency and accountability in decisions over land and investment.

This website is our Global Observatory – an open tool for collecting and visualising information about large-scale land acquisitions. [...]

In the Global Observatory, a deal is referred to as an intended, concluded or failed attempt to acquire land through purchase, lease or concession that meets the criteria defined below.

The Global Observatory includes deals that are made for agricultural production, timber extraction, carbon trading, industry, renewable energy production, conservation, and tourism in low- and middle-income countries.

Deals must:

• Entail a transfer of rights to use, control or ownership of land through sale, lease or concession;


• Have been initiated since the year 2000;


• Cover an area of 200 hectares or more;


• Imply the potential conversion of land from smallholder production, local community use or important ecosystem service provision to commercial use.

[...]

According to the project’s Website, the Land Matrix database currently contains data on 1,021 transactions.

Filed under: Applications, Data sets, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Conveyancing information systems, Land Matrix, Land transaction information systems, LandMatrix, Property information systems, Real property information systems, Visualization of land transactions, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of property data, Visualization of real property data



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Ceci: The Role of Argumentation Theory in the Logics of Judgements

Marcello Ceci of University College Cork has published The Role of Argumentation Theory in the Logics of Judgements , in Michał Araszkiewic et al. (Eds.), Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule-Following (Springer 2015).

Here is the abstract:

The present paper represents an effort towards the acquisition of an acknowledged standard for the rule and logics layer of the semantic web stack of technologies. It is part of a broader research trying to improve the state-of-the-art of legal knowledge representation by facing its main issues: the gap between document representation and rule modeling, and the need for a shared standard in the logic layer to represent legal reasoning. The paper focuses on the upper part of the semantic web stack, namely the rules and logics layers: here, the Carneades Argumentation System supports the reproduction of judicial argumentation through a ruleset and a knowledge base imported from an OWL/RDF ontology. Being based upon the theories of argumentation developed by Gordon and Walton, Carneades supports argumentation schemes and uses them as templates while instantiating rules, ontology and cases into argument graphs. We argue that using argument schemes is the only viable choice to represent legal reasoning properly, and for this purpose, the concept of argument scheme should include templates that represent procedural aspects of legal processes, such as the acts available to the parties during a court trial. Even if emerging standards in rule representation (such as LegalRuleML) overcome many of the limitations of precedent languages, they lack a complete model of the argumentation process. This, as the paper tries to demonstrate, prevents the representation of legal arguments in their procedural aspects and in those aspects related to patterns and tasks of argumentation, hindering its capability to perform a correct evaluation of the acceptability of legal arguments. In order to support that claim, two examples are provided. The concluding remarks broaden the perspective to include the general need for a standard in legal reasoning engines.

Filed under: Applications, Chapters, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Argumentation schemes, Artificial intelligence and law, Carneades, Legal argumentation, Legal argumentation schemes, Marcello Ceci, Modeling legal argumentation, Modeling legal arguments, Modeling legal logic, Modeling legal reasoning, Problems of Normativity Rules and Rule-Following



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The Pros and Cons of an Online-Only 'Virtual' Law Practice

There is a lot of debate about what exactly a "virtual" law practice is: Is it someone who doesn't have a full-time office and primarily uses email? Or is it something more: online-only, using secure document portals for clients, perhaps...



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Čyras and Lachmayer: Toward Multidimensional Rule Visualizations

Vytautas Čyras and Friedrich Lachmayer have published Toward Multidimensional Rule Visualizations , in Michał Araszkiewic et al. (Eds.), Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule-Following (Springer 2015).

Here is the abstract:

This paper reviews visualizations in legal informatics. We focus on the transition from traditional rule-based linear textual representation such as “if A then B” to two- and three-dimensional ones and films. A methodology of visualization with the thought pattern tertium comparationis can be attributed to Arthur Kaufmann. A tertium visualization aims at a mental bridge between different languages. We explore how visualizations are constructed and what types can be found here. Review criteria comprise comprehension, relations, vertical-horizontal arrangement, time-space structure, the focus of attention, education, etc. Picture for review are selected from JURIX 2012 proceedings. We conclude that making visualizations as avante-garde as JURIX projects themselves is a tough task that requires knowledge of law, computing, media, and semiotics.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Chapters, Methodology Tagged: Friedrich Lachmayer, Problems of Normativity Rules and Rule-Following, Visualization of legal information, Vytautas Cyras



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Colarusso: Beta release of new programming language for lawyers: QnA Markup; Comments welcome

David Colarusso of Public Counsel Services has released a beta version of a new programming language for lawyers, called QnA Markup, and he welcomes comments on it.

The project’s Website is at: http://ift.tt/1BbDwRJ

The code is available at: http://ift.tt/1sFh2iP

The project’s wiki is available at: http://ift.tt/1xE1kJ9

Here is a description, from the wiki:

QnA is a simple markup language for people with little or no programing experience. It was designed with attorneys in mind and transforms blocks of nested text into interactive QnAs. These QnAs can be used as stand-alone expert systems or in the aid of rule-based document construction (see example). You can find a live implementation of a QnA Markup editor and interpreter at www.QnAMarkup.org. [...]

A collection of QnA projects can be found on the Gallery page of this wiki, contributions welcome. [...]

HT @Colarusso

Filed under: Applications, Software, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, David Colarusso, Legal decision support systems, Legal expert systems, Legal markup languages, Legal programming languages, Legal question and answer systems, Markup languages, Programming languages for lawyers, QnA Markup



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MIT Legal PrototypeJam, 14-16 November 2014, Boston, Massachusetts: Links and resources

MIT Legal PrototypeJam is being held 14-16 November 2014, at District Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

The Webpage for the event is at: http://ift.tt/1tVCSkX

The blog for the event is at: http://ift.tt/1unlzLi

One Twitter hashtag for the event is #prototypejam

Here is a description of the event, from the event’s Webpage and blog:

The MIT Human Dynamics Lab, in collaboration with LawGives, UMKC Law School, Brooklyn Law School and the MIT Kerberos & Internet Trust (MIT-KIT) Consortium, are working with City of Boston and Kansas City, MO to design and prototype an open source next generation interface for business interactions with city governments.

Designed to work for key interaction types such as business permits, small business assistance and grants, this collaboration will culminate with a combination of creative commons open licensed design-phase conceptual use cases and prototype open source, free and documented code. The creative commons and open source software license covering PrototypeJam contributions ensures that easch collaborator and any city is free to use, contribute to or fork any of the projects worked on together.

‘Every Wednesday from 4pm-6pm EST this projects related to this collaboration are developed by one or more of the partners at regular class sessions hosted by the MIT Media Lab, UMKC Law School and Brooklyn Law School. An in-person prototype jam event is planned for November 14-16 when all the collaborators can work together on the project and plan a prototype user engagement test and final semester demo presentation.

The November PrototypeJam is [... intended] to focus on use case iteration describing the intended functions and interactions for each project and rapid prototyping of each project to provide meaningful design review, practical feedback and solution development.

This in-person event is focused on providing space for current collaborators and invited contributors to work on existing project together. Additional tables at the venue and online channels will be available for members of the public who wish to contribute to the projects being prototypes at this event. For more information on how to contribute contact us [...].

The PrototypeJam is organized by researchers focused on Computational Law and Big Data Systems the MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Group. This event is an in-person meeting of an informal semester-long collaboration convened by the MIT Media Lab, who may be contacted here for more information on this collaboration and how other parties may get involved.

Dazza Greenwood of MIT’s Computational Law research program says that the event will include “a legal agreements and terms of use team working on a review of OpenID Connect and broader OAuth 2 legal terms and the language of user grants of permissions.”

For more details, please contact Dazza Greenwood’s Computational Law research team at MIT.

Filed under: Applications, Hackathons, Hacking, Prototype, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #LegalHack, #prototypejam, Brooklyn Law School, Business law information systems, Business permit information systems, Dazza Greenwood, egovernment systems, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, MIT computational legal science research, MIT Legal PrototypeJam, MIT Legal Science research team, MIT PrototypeJam, UMKC Law School



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Facebook Adds 'Places' Directory: Yet Another Yelp Clone

There's Google My Business, a local directory that also has Google reviews baked in. There's Apple Maps Connect, which is its own local directory with ratings and reviews. And you know you need to keep your eye on Yelp, the...



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Why Lawyers Need to Advise Clients to Stay Off Social Media

Social media is a mixed blessing. Sure, it allows instantaneous communications with friends and family (especially over cat photos), but it also allows clients to make terrible decisions at the push of a button. Part of your initial meeting with...



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Storify: Discussion of open source for courts

An interesting discussion of open source software for courts took place on Twitter on 12-13 November 2014, and included contributions by John Mayer, Brian Carver, Ansel Halliburton, and Amy Wan.

Click here for a storify of the discussion.

HT @johnpmayer

Filed under: Applications, Online discussions, Policy debates, Storify Tagged: Amy Wan, Ansel Halliburton, Brian Carver, John Mayer, Legal open source software, Open source software for courts



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Orozco: Democratizing the Law: Legal Crowdsourcing

David Orozco of Florida State University has posted Democratizing the Law: Legal Crowdsourcing (Lawsourcing) as a Means to Achieve Legal, Regulatory and Policy Objectives , on SSRN .

Here is the abstract:

This article defines the emergent practice of lawsourcing, which is an extension of the increasingly popular crowdsourcing model. As defined in this article, lawsourcing occurs when a party releases an open call to online participants that requests their support to achieve a legal objective. This online call may involve private or governmental participants that leverage a crowd to achieve a legal objective. Various lawsourcing techniques fall under this umbrella and are described in this article. These practices fall under the following three broad categories: legal Q&A platforms, government participation forums, and strategic nonmarket practices. As discussed in the article, lawsourcing leverages the positive economic and social aspects of crowdsourcing. These qualities provide the foundation for lawsourcing to be a disruptive force in the current legal environment. The positive attributes of lawsourcing also indicate that it can be a powerful instrument to achieve legal reform, greater transparency with respect to the quality of legal services and improved access to the legal system.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Policy debates, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Crowdfunding litigation, Crowdlaw, Crowdsourcing in online dispute resolution, David Orozco, eparticipation systems, lawsourcing, Legal crowdsourcing, Legal question and answer systems, Legislative crowdsourcing, Litigation crowdfunding, Online dispute resolution, Parliamentary crowdsourcing



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Are Your Clients Confused? 5 Things Lawyers Can Explain Better

Lawyers often assume that clients know how things work, and when clients say, "You bet I understand!," the lawyer takes the client as his word. But the client doesn't always understand why, for example, you haven't called in three days...



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In Focus: How Lawyers Can Reduce Eye Strain

You know what was vastly underrated? The Smith-Corona typewriter. Typewriters didn't distract you with celebrity gossip. They didn't have email alerts popping up in the corner of your screen, ready to interrupt your work every few minutes. And eye fatigue?...



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Malik et al.: Predictive Visual Analytics for Community Policing and Law Enforcement

Abish Malik , Ross Maciejewski , Sherry Towers , Sean McCullough, and David Ebert are scheduled to present a paper entitled Proactive Spatiotemporal Resource Allocation and Predictive Visual Analytics for Community Policing and Law Enforcement , at IEEE VIS 2014, being held 9-14 November in Paris.

A video preview of the paper has been posted at: http://ift.tt/10SPUoP

Here is the abstract:

In this paper, we present a visual analytics approach that provides decision makers with a proactive and predictive environment in order to assist them in making effective resource allocation and deployment decisions. The challenges involved with such predictive analytics processes include end-users’ understanding, and the application of the underlying statistical algorithms at the right spatiotemporal granularity levels so that good prediction estimates can be established. In our approach, we provide analysts with a suite of natural scale templates and methods that enable them to focus and drill down to appropriate geospatial and temporal resolution levels. Our forecasting technique is based on the Seasonal Trend decomposition based on Loess (STL) method, which we apply in a spatiotemporal visual analytics context to provide analysts with predicted levels of future activity. We also present a novel kernel density estimation technique we have developed, in which the prediction process is influenced by the spatial correlation of recent incidents at nearby locations. We demonstrate our techniques by applying our methodology to Criminal, Traffic and Civil (CTC) incident datasets.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Methodology, Research findings Tagged: Abish Malik, David S. Ebert, IEEE VIS, IEEE VIS 2014, Predictive analytics, Predictive law enforcement, Predictive policing, Quantitative legal prediction, Ross Maciejewski, Sean McCullough, Sherry Towers, Statistical methods in legal informatics, Visual analytics, Visual predictive analytics, Visualization of legal information



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5 Qualities to Look For in a Law Firm Marketing Manager

Marketing is one of those things that people think they can do on their own. A couple slogans, a sign, and boom -- you're done. But marketing turns out to be harder than it looks. That's why some law firms...



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5 Fun Facts About Harold Hamm's $1B Divorce Settlement

What's the biggest divorce you've ever handled? A million-dollar pie? A billion-dollar pie? Try $14 billion, the net worth of oil tycoon Harold Hamm. Hamm. The CEO and majority shareholder of Continental Resources is breathing a sign of relief after...



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MIT Legal PrototypeJam, 14-16 November 2014, Boston, Massachusetts

MIT Legal PrototypeJam is scheduled to be held 14-16 November 2014, at District Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Here is a description of the event, from the event’s Webpage and blog:

The MIT Human Dynamics Lab, in collaboration with LawGives, UMKC Law School, Brooklyn Law School and the MIT Kerberos & Internet Trust (MIT-KIT) Consortium, are working with City of Boston and Kansas City, MO to design and prototype an open source next generation interface for business interactions with city governments.

Designed to work for key interaction types such as business permits, small business assistance and grants, this collaboration will culminate with a combination of creative commons open licensed design-phase conceptual use cases and prototype open source, free and documented code. The creative commons and open source software license covering PrototypeJam contributions ensures that easch collaborator and any city is free to use, contribute to or fork any of the projects worked on together.

‘Every Wednesday from 4pm-6pm EST this projects related to this collaboration are developed by one or more of the partners at regular class sessions hosted by the MIT Media Lab, UMKC Law School and Brooklyn Law School. An in-person prototype jam event is planned for November 14-16 when all the collaborators can work together on the project and plan a prototype user engagement test and final semester demo presentation.

The November PrototypeJam is [... intended] to focus on use case iteration describing the intended functions and interactions for each project and rapid prototyping of each project to provide meaningful design review, practical feedback and solution development.

This in-person event is focused on providing space for current collaborators and invited contributors to work on existing project together. Additional tables at the venue and online channels will be available for members of the public who wish to contribute to the projects being prototypes at this event. For more information on how to contribute contact us [...].

The PrototypeJam is organized by researchers focused on Computational Law and Big Data Systems the MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Group. This event is an in-person meeting of an informal semester-long collaboration convened by the MIT Media Lab, who may be contacted here for more information on this collaboration and how other parties may get involved.

Dazza Greenwood of MIT’s Computational Law research program says that the event will include “a legal agreements and terms of use team working on a review of OpenID Connect and broader OAuth 2 legal terms and the language of user grants of permissions.”

For more details, please contact Dazza Greenwood’s Computational Law research team at MIT.

Filed under: Applications, Hackathons, Hacking, Prototype, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Brooklyn Law School, Business law information systems, Business permit information systems, Dazza Greenwood, egovernment systems, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, MIT computational legal science research, MIT Legal PrototypeJam, MIT Legal Science research team, MIT PrototypeJam, UMKC Law School



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Is Billboard Advertising for Law Firms a Good Idea?

You've undoubtedly walked by a billboard featuring a smiling lawyer in a suit, with a caption claiming that he'll fight for you, along with a checklist of things he'll help you fight for. Then there's a phone number at the...



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USC Legal Tech Startup Weekend, November 7-9, 2014, Los Angeles: Results, links, and resources

USC Legal Tech Startup Weekend was held 7-9 November 2014 at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Results of the event — consisting of four projects, including three winners — are described in Adam Long’s post at Amy Wan’s blog, The Legal Pioneer : Results of USC Legal Tech Startup Weekend.

The event Website is at: http://ift.tt/1pJf0gc

The schedule is posted at: http://ift.tt/1xkbWxr

Some Twitter hashtags being used for the event were: #legaltech and #legalhack

The Twitter account for the event is @USCLegalTech_SW

Here is a description of the event, from the event Website:

[...] The legal industry is in dire need of innovation and is asking for your help. Come join us Nov. 7-9 for the inaugural USC Legal Tech Startup Weekend hackathon and help us bring the legal industry into the 21st century. Anyone can make an elevator pitch Friday night. The top vote-getting ideas will be hacked into minimally viable products to be presented to a panel of industry experts. Prizes will be awarded (each member of the winning team will get an Amazon Kindle!); friendships will be made; and the legal industry will be forever in your debts. [...]

HT @amyywan (here and here)

Filed under: Applications, Hacking, Showcases, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #LegalHack, Access to justice technology, Adam Long, Amy Wan, Hacking events, Law practice technology, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, Legal startups, Legal technology startups, Technology for access to justice, USC Legal Tech Startup Weekend, USC Legal Tech Startup Weekend 2014



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UK Parliament Hackathon 2014: Results, links, and resources

UK Parliament Hack 2014, called Accountability Hack, was held 8-9 November 2014 at the National Audit Office in London.

Results of the event, consisting of 19 projects, are listed at: http://ift.tt/1oBf06K

Click here for Tracy Green’s announcement of the event at the Parliament Digital blog.

The eventbrite page for the event is at: http://ift.tt/1ujNw6a

The discussion forum for the event is at: http://ift.tt/1oBf06P

Twitter hashtags for the event included #ParlyHack14 and #AccHack14

Here is a description of the event, from the eventbrite page:

A unique chance to hack NAO, ONS and Parliamentary information in one place at one time

Interested in how Parliament works; how public sector expenditure is audited; or the key statistics generated by the public sector? Then come to #AccHack14 incorporating #ParlyHack14

NAO, ONS and Parliament are holding a joint hack event to look at how they use each others information; what their users want to do with their data and information; and how to improve what they do online.

So are you an armchair auditor? Keen on Parliamentary processes? Use lots of public sector data? Then this is the event for you. There is the bonus opportunity to stay overnight in the NAO buildiing if you so desire.

There will also be a follow up event during Parliament week so that non developers can see what was achieved during the hack – more details to follow.

Who is organising the event?

• National Audit Office (NAO) – Nick Halliday


• Office of National Statistics (ONS) – Matt Jukes


• Parliament – Tracy Green [...]

HT @greentrac and @jukesie

Filed under: Applications, Hackathons, Hacking, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #AccHack14, #ParlyHack14, Accountability Hack, Legal hackathons, Legislative hackathons, Open legal data, Open legislative data, Parliamentary hackathons, Tracy Green, UK Parliament Hack, UK Parliament Hack 2014



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