Technola : Public Interest Law & Technology Updates & Commentary : Matthew Burnett & Kate Bladow : Tech Advice for the Non-Profit Legal Sector

One of the Equal Justice Conference sessions that I was involved in, Making Recovery From Disasters Easier Through Technology, addressed various ways that technology is being used by legal services organizations and others in the wake of natural disasters. Below is a list of online resources on disaster law that were covered during the session, as well as a few others I came across while researching this post:

• DisasterLegalAid.org – A national disaster law resource for both lawyers and the public by the American Bar Association, Legal Services Corporation, National Legal Aid and Defender Association and Pro Bono Net. (See also KatrinaLegalAid.org for Katrina-specific resources.)
• ABA Disaster Law Resources – Legal information for victims and lawyers about disaster preparedness, resources and recovery by the American Bar Association, including the ABA’s Principles for Rule of Law in Times of Major Disaster (PDF) and the State Implementation of ABA Model Court Rule on Provision of Legal Services Following Determination of Major Disaster (PDF).
• Disasters & the Law Database – An excellent database of disaster law resources by the UC Berkeley School of Law.
• Immigrants and Disaster Assistance – Fact sheets, issue briefs, advocacy resources, articles, reports, and community education materials by the National Immigration Law Center, as well as links to disaster resources from other nonprofits and government agencies.

Additionally, many statewide advocate websites have disaster law resources, including the Georgia Online Justice Community, probono.net/iowa, probono.net/la, and FloridaAdvocate.org. If you're aware of other online disaster law resources, please include them in the comments. -M

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Right after I suggested Zamzar as a way to convert files, I received another suggestion from Ken Montenegro: cometdocs. cometdocs is a free online file conversion utility that works with PDF, XPS, and more. In addition, it looks like cometdocs offers on-the-fly OCR conversion. - K

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Google and Yahoo! all have keywords that let you find out who is linking to a page or site.

Google
Google uses the keyword link. For example, link:http://www.techno.la returns all of the sites that link to the page at http://www.techno.la.

Google link

Yahoo!
Yahoo! uses the keywords link and linkdomain. Use link to find all of the pages that link to another page. For example, link:http://www.techno.la returns all of the pages that link to the page at http://www.techno.la.

Yahoo! link

Use linkdomain to find all of the sites that link to a domain. For example, linkdomain:www.techno.la returns all of the pages that link to any page that begins with www.techno.la.

Yahoo! linkdomain

linkdomain would return pages that link to http://www.techno.la as well as http://www.techno.la/2009/04/articles/softwareappstools/pbwiki-launches-legal-edition.

In addition to satisfying your curiousity, you can use this tool to evaluate how well your outreach has worked or to find out if an organization thinks your site is helpful.

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While researching and writing an article on social network sites and social networking, I was reintroduced to the research of danah m boyd, a Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. danah has spent a lot of time investigating the intersection of technology and society, teen use of social network sites, and social media. I highly recommend reading the article that she wrote with Nicole Ellison, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship," which is an interesting introduction to social network sites. Almost immediately after reading that article, I added her blog, apophenia, to my reader. (And for those of you who think that I've forgotten to capitalize her name, I haven't.)

Her latest post, is Facebook for old people?, reflects on teens and their choice of social network sites. danah has some great observations, but what struck me was her thoughts about socioeconomic background and preferred site. Simply put, danah suggests that youth from lower- and higher-income communities choose different social network sites to use.

So what does this mean for organizations that work with low-income families? Obviously, it gives us some direction about where we need to be doing outreach. But is there more than that? Does this raise other issues that we need to think about when incorporating these sites into our work? - K

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TechSoup, a technology resource website for nonprofits, is holding a webinar on May 21, 2009 at 2 pm Eastern, where you can learn more about TechSoup and its free resources. - K

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M+R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network recently released the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, which analyzes online messaging, fundraising, and advocacy metrics from 32 leading nonprofits. Benchmarks, which are broken down by sector (including civil/legal rights), include open rates, click-through, response rates, attrition, page conversion rates, online giving, average gift size and monthly giving, among others. The study also includes a handy reference sheet with key benchmarks. -M

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Our thoughtful colleague at Pro Bono Net Tory Messina pointed out this gem: a review of ten free case law websites by Robert Ambrogi.  - K

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This week LSNTAP announced that they will be hosting a GIS Mapping webinar series starting in June 2009. For more information, check out the LSNTAP website. - K

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Common Knowledge, one of the organizations behind the recently released Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report, is hosting a series of free webinars on social networking.

• May 15, 2009: Top Five Secrets for Fundraising on Social Networks
• May 20, 2009: Build a Big Brand Online Using Social Networks: Marketing & Communications Strategies
• May 27, 2009: Social Networks for Health Nonprofits
• June 3, 2009: Twitter for Nonprofits

All webinars will be held at 2:30 PM EST/11:30 AM PST. - K

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In the middle of April, I glanced at NTEN's post Time to Tap Into Your Inner Poet: ZD Technology Haiku Contest (Win $ for a good cause!), thought "Ah! TIGs! No time for poetry! Focus! Project narratives! Letters of support!" and promptly moved on to the next unread item in my Google Reader.

However, the Public Interest Clearinghouse and the Legal Aid Association of California didn't ignore the announcement and are now up for a $2000 prize. Help them out by voting for Tressa Milford's haiku:

Joint projects? Sticky!
Sharing info can get rough.
Solution? Wiki!

Vote by May 15, 2009 at ZeroDivide.org. - K

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For those of you who won't be attending the Equal Justice Conference next week, there are several ways to follow the conference on Twitter. The first is to follow 2009 EJC (@09EJC), a Twitter profile created just for the conference. You can also follow the hashtag #09EJC, which participants will be adding to their Twitter posts from the conference (here's an RSS feed for the search, which you can drop directly into your RSS reader). Finally, Technola will be covering technology related sessions on its Twitter feed (@technola). -M

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The annual ABA/NLADA Equal Justice Conference will take place next week (May 14-16) in Orlando, FL, and as always there will be lots of innovative technology sessions to choose from. Below are a few sessions that I'll be a panelist on:

Making Recovery From Disasters Easier Through Technology
(Thursday, May 14th 9:45am-11:15am) Presenters: Matthew Burnett, Mike Monahan, Eve Ricaurte and Juliet Choi

The Future Is Here Now: What Emerging Technologies Can Do For Your Mission
(Friday, May 15th 8:45am-10:15am) Presenters: Shirley Williams, Joyce Raby, Matthew Burnett and Liz Keith

50 New Tech Tips To Survive Hard Economic Times
(Friday, May 15th 10:30am-Noon) Presenters: Rachel Medina, David Bonebrake, Glenn Rawdon and Matthew Burnett

Other technology sessions that you should consider attending include:

Not Just A Pretty Interface: A2j Author® Is Changing How We Achieve Justice Through Technology
(Thursday, May 14th 1:30 - 3:30 pm) Presenters: John Mayer, Rachel R. Medina, Eve Ricaurte, Ronald W. Staudt

Creative Uses of Technology in Addressing the Foreclosure Crisis
(Friday, May 15th 2 pm-3:30 pm) Presenters: David Bonebrake, Jason Vail and Liz Keith

Statewide Websites: A Showcase Of Outstanding Client, Pro Bono And Advocate Features
(Friday, May 15th 2 pm-3:30 pm) Lisa Colpoys, Michael Genz, Vince Morris, Ken Perri, Glenn Rawdon

Technology-Enabled Self Help Centers
(Friday, May 15th 3:45pm-5:15pm) Presenters: Carol Austin, Michelle Hopkins, Claudia Johnson and Liz Keith

For the full agenda, visit the EJC website. If you plan to attend, be sure to join us for a session or stop by the Pro Bono Net booth in the exhibitor area and say hi! -M

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WomensLaw.org, a site that provides legal information and resources on domestic violence and sexual assault, was chosen as the winner of this year’s Webby Award for the Law category. The People’s Voice Award went to GetLegal.com, a commercial website with legal information and resources for lawyers and the public. Congratulations to the winners, as well as this year’s nominees and honorees! -M

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Do you want to blog but don’t know if you are able to make the time commitment? Or do you want to attract more readers to your new blog? Maybe you should try guest blogging.

Guest blogging is a common practice in the blogosphere. When guest blogging, you post an article on someone else’s blog or someone else posts an article on yours. Either way, the idea is to expose readers to new ideas and gain a few more readers for your blog.

Before you offer to guest blog on someone’s site or ask someone to guest blog on yours, read the other person’s blog. Start out by writing thoughtful comments on his or her blog. This should make the blogger notice you. After all, it’s Foley’s First Rule of Building a Relationship with a Blogger:

(If commenting doesn’t work, use Foley’s Second and Third Rules, too.)

Once you’ve started to build rapport with a blogger, reach out and see if the blogger is interested. You want to have a few topics to suggest that are appealing and relevant. For example, you wouldn’t offer to blog about Michigan’s new technology project on the TRLA Press Center. However, you might approach Taxgirl or another tax law blogger about contributing posts on low-income tax issues or tax resources for the public. (But this might even be off-base for some tax law blogs. That’s why you need to do your research first.)

For more information about guest blogging, read “How to be a Good Guest Blogger” and ProBlogger’s other articles about guest blogging, which describe what you’ll be expected to do.

Are you ready to try guest blogging now? Two law blogs recently announced that they are looking for guest bloggers: Legal Blog Watch and Law Librarian Blog. - K

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This video, which features a client of Montana Legal Services Association telling the story of how a MLSA attorney, Amy Hall, helped keep her and her children safe from abuse is a great example of the effective use of video by a legal services organization. It's simple, straightforward and powerful.  To learn more about how your organization can use video to support your work, see Sharing Your Story Social Media Style, part of the We Are Media Project by the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). -M

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End of April already? It seems like it was just March last week. In case the month disappeared as quickly for you and you weren't able to keep up with the Technola feed, here's April's top five:

• One-Page Technical Cheat Sheets
• Beyond LexisNexis & Westlaw: New Online Legal Research Guide by UCLA
• Three Public Interest Websites Nominated for Best Law Site in 13th Annual Webby Awards
• Free Friday: Getting Started with Social Media Webinar
• Why Lawyers Should Write More Plainly

And if you're all caught up with Technola, check out some of my favorites from other blogs:

• Unfair and Deceptive Data Trade Practices - Schneier on Security
• 09NTC How to Decide: IT Planning & Prioritizing - Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech
• 50 Terrific Social Sites for Law Students and Lawyers - e-Justice Blog
• 47 Awesome Twitter Tools You Should be Using - deontée.com

Happy Reading! - K

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