OSI Chicago-Kent
Consultancy
Richard Zorza,
Esq.
A
total of six separate preliminary mini-studies have been prepared.These
studies, which are attached, in draft, offer tentative conclusions
about: 1) the extent of direct legal information needs of poor and middle
income people, 2) the equivalent needs of legal advocates for this population,
3) the state and potential of information providers and aggregators, 4)
the state of the relevant technologies, 5) the potential for private sector
partnerships, and, 6) the opportunities for community and other nonprofit
partnerships.
These
studies are designed to constitute the background against which planning
and the development of recommendations will take place, and as such do
not include and should be distinguished from such specific recommendations.The
key components of these preliminary general conclusions themselves are
summarized as follows:
·That
need will only properly be met through technology deployment and extensive
partnerships with national and local networks of community based organizations.
·Those
collaborations will only work if both the software and the collaborations
are designed to meet the needs not just of legal advocacy programs and
the clients, but also of the collaborating organizations.
·The
current system does not reflect the wide variety of needs, from new advocate
training, to advocate legal updating, to support networking.
·The
current system has components of great potential, including a unique and
vast knowledge base, important technology innovations, and a commitment
to a collaborative community.
·Similarly,
while the need and potential of integrated content is great, the content
aggregators are not yet succeeding in organizing the information in ways
that have sufficiently engaged the potential user community.
·The
user community has not yet sufficiency committed itself to supporting the
content system that it needs and would use.
·The
variety of lay-targeted legal content providers on the web might provide
appropriate partnerships for the distribution of client-oriented legal
content..However there would be
complex problems of pricing, culture and management that would need to
be resolved.These matters should
be explored.
·One
or more of the wide variety of non-legal content aggregators on the web
(also known as “portals”)might provide the ideal partner or partners for
distribution of legal information content, as such a partnership would
provide access to a huge volume of users, without competition between the
partners.These potential partnerships
should be aggressively explored.
·Technologies
of information submission and web site data structuring will make a new
system far easier to build and maintain, since the information gathering
system can be greatly decentralized.
·Technologies
of content management will make it possible to integrate data from different
sources
regardless of software, helping provide a technical solution
to many of the political problems of information integration.
·These
partnerships can assist with content, provide the physical Internet access
and clients will need, and the support, help and follow-up that are critical
to effective use of the resources.
·The
partnerships must be built carefully with mutual respect for the complex
of needs of all the parties;courts,
for example, have special needs deriving from the required neutrality of
their role.
These
conclusions suggest the urgent need and the strong potential or technology
facilitated partnerships to meet the legal information needs of poor and
middle income people, and of the advocacy organizations that serve them.In
the second phase of the project, as described in the Scope ofWork,
a plan or plans will be developed to meet the needs, as identified in the
first two papers, with the goal of making as much use of as possible of
the resources and potential identified in the remaining four papers.
Particular
attention will be paid to the structure of any innovation, the funding
and long term self-sufficiency of any solution, and the complexities of
meeting the interrelated and often competing needs of the players.
Copyright Reserved 2000