Video app provides underserved clients with immediate legal advice


Springwise: “Pickle is a video call app that gives everyone access to a greater understanding of their constitutional rights, via on-demand legal advice.

Legal representation is expensive and we have already seen platforms in the US and the UK use crowdfunding to help underprivileged clients fund legal battles. Now, Pickle Legal is helping in a different way — it enables video calls between clients and attorneys, which will give everyone access to a greater understanding of their constitutional rights.

Pickle connects clients with legal representation via real-time video communication. Anyone in need of legal advice can download the app to their smartphone. When they launch the app, Pickle alerts their network of attorneys and connects the client with an available professional via a video call. The client can then gain immediate advice from the attorney — helping them to understand their position and rights in the moment.

Pickle Legal is currently in Beta and accepting applications from attorneys and clients alike. During the testing phase, the service is available for free, but eventually clients will pay an affordable rate — since the convenience of the platform is expected to reduce costs. Pickle will also be archiving videos — at the discretion of the parties involved — for use in any case that arises…(More)”

Who May Use the King’s Forest? The Meaning of Magna Carta, Commons and Law in Our Time


David Bollier: “The relationship between law and the commons is very much on my mind these days.  I recently posted a four-part serialization of my strategy memo, “Reinventing Law for the Commons.”  The following public talk, which I gave at the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin on September 8, is a kind of companion piece.  The theme: this year’s celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and its significance for commoners today.

Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight about the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta and the significance of law for the commons.  It’s pretty amazing that anyone is still celebrating something that happened eight centuries ago!   Besides our memory of this event, I think it is so interesting what we have chosen to remember about this history, and what we have forgotten.

This anniversary is essentially about the signing of peace treaty on the fields of Runnymede, England, in 1215.  The treaty settled a bloody civil war between the much-despised King John and his rebellious barons eight centuries ago.  What was intended as an armistice was soon regarded as a larger canonical statement about the proper structure of governance.  Amidst a lot of archaic language about medieval ways of life, Magna Carta is now seen as a landmark statement about the limited powers of the sovereign, and the rights and liberties of ordinary people.

The King’s acceptance of Magna Carta after a long civil war seems unbelievably distant and almost forgettable.  How could it have anything to do with us moderns?  I think its durability and resonance have to do with our wariness about concentrated power, especially of the sovereign.  We like to remind ourselves that the authority of the sovereign is restrained by the rule of law, and that this represents a new and civilizing moment in human history.  We love to identify with the underdog and declare that even kings must respect something transcendent and universal called “law,” which is said to protect individual rights and liberties.

In this spirit, the American Bar Association celebrated Magna Carta in 1957 by erecting a granite memorial at Runnymede bearing the words “Freedom Under Law.”  On grand public occasions – especially this year – judges, politicians, law scholars and distinguished gray eminences like to congregate and declare how constitutional government and representative democracy are continuing to uphold the principles of Magna Carta.  More about that in a minute.

This evening I’d like to explore a richer, more complex story about Magna Carta and its meanings for us today.  There are in fact two distinct but related stories to be told.  Story No. 1 – call it “The Triumph of the Modern Market/State” – is the one that I just told.  It is usually invoked by distinguished elites to celebrate constitutional democracy, its close alliance with so-called free markets, and the idea of “freedom under law.”  Story No. 1 assures us that constitutional government and representative legislatures actually serve as the brave bulwarks of liberty and law, defending the rights enshrined in Magna Carta.  And to be sure, the Great Chart represents a significant advance over the monarchy, tribalism, and a Hobbesean war of each against all that once prevailed in many regions of the world.

Myself, I’m more interested in the neglected side of the history of Magna Carta, a story that doesn’t get told very often.  Call it Story No. 2, or what I call Law for the Commons. ...(More)”

Democratic Rulemaking


New paper by de Figueiredo, John M. and Stiglitz, Edward for the Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, Forthcoming: “To what extent is agency rulemaking democratic? This paper examines the soundness and empirical support for the leading theories that purport to endow the administrative state with democratic legitimacy. We study the theories in light of two normative benchmarks: a “democratic” benchmark based on voter preferences, and a “republican” benchmark based on the preferences of elected representatives. We conclude that all of the proposed theories lack empirical support and many have substantial conceptual flaws; we point to directions for possible future research….(More)”

Humanizing Technology: A History of Human-Computer Interaction


Steve Lohr in the New York Times: “The march of progress in computing is a climb. Each big step forward is also a step up, so that communication is further away from the machine, more on human terms.

And each time, the number of people who can use computing increases dramatically. At first, programming languages were the medium of communication between man and machine. Fortran, the breakthrough computer language, was designed to resemble the algebraic formulas familiar to scientists and engineers — reasonably enough, since they were the only people anyone could imagine using the relative handful of giant calculating machines back then.

Today, billions of people roam the Internet from computer phones they hold in their hands. Dramatic advances in hardware, of course, are a big part of the explanation, notably the flywheel of technological dynamism known as Moore’s Law, celebrating the chip industry’s ability to double computing power every couple of years (there’s a debate about whether the pace is tailing off, but that’s another story).

Yet there is another force in the striking democratization of computing beyond hardware, one that is more subtle but still crucial. That is the steady stream of improvements in the design of computer products, mainly software, which have opened the door to new users by making computers easier to use. The term most used now is “user-interface design.” But that suggests a narrower, product focus than the field that stretches back several decades, called human-computer interaction, which embraces psychology, anthropology and other disciplines.

“I think human-computer interaction designs have had as much impact as Moore’s Law in bringing the web and mobile devices to the world,” said Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

To try to raise the profile of prominent people in the field, Mr. Shneiderman last week published a web site for what he calls “The Human-Computer Interaction Pioneers Project.” It is a personal project for Mr. Shneiderman, who founded Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory in 1983, and is an avid photographer. The web page for each of his pioneers includes a brief text description and photographs, often several, that Mr. Shneiderman has taken of the person, at professional conferences and elsewhere over the years….(More)”

Can the crowd deliver more open government?


  at GovernmentNews: “…Crowdsourcing and policy making was the subject of a lecture by visiting academic Dr Tanja Aitamurto at Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology earlier this month. Dr Aitamurto wrote “Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making” and led the design and implementation of the Finnish Experiment, a pioneering case study in crowdsourcing policy making.

She spoke about how Scandinavian countries have used crowdsourcing to “tap into the collective intelligence of a large and diverse crowd” in an “open ended knowledge information search process” in an open call for anybody to participate online and complete a task.

It has already been used widely and effectively by companies  such as Proctor and Gamble who offer a financial reward for solutions to their R&D problems.

The Finnish government recently used crowdsourcing when it came to reform the country’s Traffic Act following a rash of complaints to the Minister of the Environment about it. The Act, which regulates issues such as off-road traffic, is an emotive issue in Finland where snow mobiles are used six months of the year and many people live in remote areas.

The idea was for people to submit problems and solutions online, covering areas such as safety, noise, environmental protection, the rights of snowmobile owners and landowners’ rights. Everyone could see what was written and could comment on it.

Dr Aitamurto said crowdsourcing had four stages:

• The problem mapping space, where people were asked to outline the issues that needed solving
• An appeal for solutions
• An expert panel evaluated the comments received based on the criteria of: effectiveness, cost efficiency, ease of implementation and fairness. The crowd also had the chance to evaluate and rank solutions online
• The findings were then handed over to the government for the law writing process

Dr Aitamurto said active participation seemed to create a strong sense of empowerment for those involved.

She said some people reported that it was the first time in their lives they felt they were really participating in democracy and influencing decision making in society. They said it felt much more real than voting in an election, which felt alien and remote.

“Participation becomes a channel for advocacy, not just for self-interest but a channel to hear what others are saying and then also to make yourself heard. People expected a compromise at the end,” Dr Aitamurto said.

Being able to participate online was ideal for people who lived remotely and turned crowdsourcing into a democratic innovation which brought citizens closer to policy and decision making between elections.

Other benefits included reaching out to tap into new pools of knowledge, rather than relying on a small group of homogenous experts to solve the problem.

“When we use crowdsourcing we actually extend our knowledge search to multiple, hundreds of thousands of distant neighbourhoods online and that can be the power of crowdsourcing: to find solutions and information that we wouldn’t find otherwise. We find also unexpected information because it’s a self-selecting crowd … people that we might not have in our networks already,” Dr Aitamurto said.

The process can increase transparency as people interact on online platforms and where the government keeps feedback loops going.

Dr Aitamurto is also a pains to highlight what crowdsourcing is not and cannot be, because participants are self-selecting and not statistically representative.

“The crowd doesn’t make decisions, it provides information. It’s not a method or tool for direct democracy and it’s not a public opinion poll either”.

Crowdsourcing has fed into policy in other countries too, for example, during Iceland’s constitutional reform and in the United States where the federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled its strategy after a string of natural disasters.

Australian government has been getting in on the act using cloud-based software Citizen Space to gain input into a huge range of topics. While much of it is technically consultation, rather than feeding into actual policy design, it is certainly a step towards more open government.

British company Delib, which is behind the software, bills it as “managing, publicising and archiving all of your organisation’s consultation activity”.

One council who has used Citizens Space is Wyong Shire on the NSW Central Coast. The council has used the consultation hub to elicit ratepayers’ views on a number of topics, including a special rate variation, community precinct forums, strategic plans and planning decisions.

One of Citizen Space’s most valuable features is the section ‘we asked, you said, we did’….(More)”

How Startups Are Transforming the Smart City Movement


Jason Shueh at GovTech: “Remember the 1990s visions of the future? Those first incantations of the sweeping “smart city,” so technologically utopian and Tomorrowland-ish in design? The concept and solutions were pitched by tech titans like IBM and Cisco, cost obscene amounts of money, and promised equally outlandish levels of innovation.

It was a drive — as idealistic as it was expedient — to spark a new industry that infused cities with data, analytics, sensors and clean energy. Two-and-a-half decades later, the smart city market has evolved. Its solutions are more pragmatic and its benefits more potent. Evidence brims inSingapore, where officials boast that they can predict traffic congestion an hour in advance with 90 percent accuracy. Similarly, in Chicago, the city has embraced analytics to estimate rodent infestations and prioritizerestaurant inspections. These of course are a few standouts, but as many know, the movement is highly diverse and runs its fingers through cities and across continents.

And yet what’s not as well-known is what’s happened in the last few years. The industry appears to be undergoing another metamorphosis, one that takes the ingenuity inspired by its beginnings and reimagines it with the help of do-it-yourself entrepreneurs….

Asked for a definition, Abrahamson centered his interpretation on tech that enhances quality of life. With the possible exception of health care, finance and education — systems large enough to merit their own categories, Abrahamson explains smart cities by highlighting investment areas at Urban.us. Specific areas are packaged as follows:

Mobility and Logistics: How cities move people and things to, from and within cities.

Built Environment: The public and private spaces in which citizens work and live.

Utilities: Critical resources including water, waste and energy.

Service Delivery: How local governments provide services ranging from public works to law enforcement….

Who’s Investing?

….Here is a sampling of a few types, with examples of their startup investments.

General Venture Capitalists

a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) – Mapillary and Moovit

Specialty Venture Capitalists

Fontinalis – Lyft, ParkMe, LocoMobi

Black Coral Capital – Digital Lumens, Clean Energy Collective, newterra

Govtech Fund – AmigoCloud, Mark43, MindMixer

Corporate Venture Capitalists

Google Ventures – Uber, Skycatch, Nest

Motorola Solutions Venture Capital – CyPhy Works and SceneDoc

BMW i Ventures – Life360 and ChargePoint

Impact/Social Investors

Omidyar Network – SeeClickFix and Nationbuilder

Knight Foundation – Public Stuff, Captricity

Kapor Capital – Uber, Via, Blocpower

1776 – Radiator Labs, Water Lens… (More)

The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification


New Book by Richard Rottenburg et al: “The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance. (More)”

Memex Human Trafficking


MEMEX is a DARPA program that explores how next generation search and extraction systems can help with real-world use cases. The initial application is the fight against human trafficking. In this application, the input is a portion of the public and dark web in which human traffickers are likely to (surreptitiously) post supply and demand information about illegal labor, sex workers, and more. DeepDive processes such documents to extract evidential data, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, job types, job requirements, information about rates of service, etc. Some of these data items are difficult for trained human annotators to accurately extract and have never been previously available, but DeepDive-based systems have high accuracy (Precision and Recall in the 90s, which may exceed non-experts). Together with provenance information, such structured, evidential data are then passed on to both other collaborators on the MEMEX program as well as law enforcement for analysis and consumption in operational applications. MEMEX has been featured extensively in the media and is supporting actual investigations. For example, every human trafficking investigation pursued by the Human Trafficking Response Unity in New York City involves MEMEX. DeepDive is the main extracted data provider for MEMEX. See also, 60 minutes, Scientific American, Wall St. Journal, BBC, and Wired. It is supporting actual investigations and perhaps new usecases in the war on terror.

Here is a detailed description of DeepDive’s role in MEMEX.”

 

Proofreading of legal documents


 at Techcrunch: “.. jEugene…helps the drafters of legal documents catch mistakes that could be fatal to such documents’ validity or enforceability.

The original idea of Harry Zhou, who, as a first-year lawyer, was tasked with proofing a 250-page contract and wanted more than his supervising lawyer’s assurance that “you did great,” jEugene scans through a legal document and highlights in text potential drafting mistakes in the document.

The product is being used by White & Case LLP and is undergoing trial at Fenwick & West LLP. Tens of smaller law firms are accessing jEugene through Clio, a provider of cloud-based legal management software. Other clients are under NDA.

Errors that jEugene currently detects may seem innocuous at times, but could lead to hefty costs. For example, millions of dollars that certain creditors recently failed to recover in a famous bankruptcy case could have been avoided had jEugene been used; and jEugene’s analysis of legal documents disclosed on SEC EDGAR routinely reveals similar errors missed by some of the most sophisticated law firms (they say).

Here’s how it works: A user uploads a document, waits a few seconds, and downloads the resulting file. This emulates handwritten markups that lawyers are used to seeing, and highlights potential drafting mistakes in the document with different colors. The user then reviews the results to determine whether any revision is necessary….(More)”

Anonymization and Risk


Paper by Ira Rubinstein and Woodrow Hartzog: “Perfect anonymization of data sets has failed. But the process of protecting data subjects in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy. While the deidentification debate has been vigorous and productive, there is no clear direction for policy. As a result, the law has been slow to adapt a holistic approach to protecting data subjects when data sets are released to others. Currently, the law is focused on whether an individual can be identified within a given set. We argue that the better locus of data release policy is on the process of minimizing the risk of reidentification and sensitive attribute disclosure. Process-based data release policy, which resembles the law of data security, will help us move past the limitations of focusing on whether data sets have been “anonymized.” It draws upon different tactics to protect the privacy of data subjects, including accurate deidentification rhetoric, contracts prohibiting reidentification and sensitive attribute disclosure, data enclaves, and query-based strategies to match required protections with the level of risk. By focusing on process, data release policy can better balance privacy and utility where nearly all data exchanges carry some risk….(More)”