Southeast Asia Regional Meeting on Paralegals Nov 6-7 Jakarta

Southeast Asia Regional Meeting on Legal Workshop
Jakarta, Indonesia
November 6-7, 2012

Call for Applications

Does your organization provide community-based paralegal services in Southeast Asia? Are you interested in learning from the experiences of others to address common challenges? Do you want to know more about the impact your program is having, and how to improve on it?

The Open Society Justice Initiative, TIFA Foundation, Namati, and the Indonesian Legal Resource Center (ILRC) are bringing together legal empowerment practitioners from across Southeast Asia to a Regional Workshop for Community-Based Paralegal Programmes.

The training workshop will provide a space for NGO leaders and senior program managersto learn from each other about the breadth of legal empowerment methods employed in the region and methods for improving them. It will also offer participants an opportunity to explore their own monitoring and evaluation plans with some of the world’s leading experts in measuring the impact of legal empowerment.

For more information, click here. To download an application, click here. Applications are due on September 7, 2012.

Discussion on legal technology innovation, in San Francisco, California

Tim Hwang tells us  http://twitter.com/RobotandHwang/status/242024464336969728  that he is organizing a dinner / discussion about legal technology innovation, in San Francisco, California, on 4 September 2012, this coming Tuesday.  To RSVP, please contact Tim via the email listed on his Website  http://brosephstalin.com/  or on Twitter at  http://twitter.com/RobotandHwang/  or  http://twitter.com/timhwang/

Most Pressing Need: Legal Information for the Layperson

Delivering legal information targeted on needs of disputants is key to legal empowerment. It came out as the number one strategy for improving access to justice when 100 experts discussed a Trend Report on Basic Justice Care.

"We the People" Software is now Open Source

The software that powers "We the People"  https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions  -- the epetition platform for the U.S. Presidency -- has been made free and open source and is now available on GitHub  https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition. Here is background information from Andrew Webster at The Verge:  http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/24/3265491/white-house-we-the-people-open-source  (shortlink:  http://vrge.co/QBgO80  )

HiiL Publication: Towards Basic Justice Care for Everyone: Challenges and Promising Approaches 2012

People suffer from ‘local’ problems in their key relationships: in their family, at work, with neighbours, about land and housing or about the way their community is governed; even obtaining an ID may be hard. This can have a serious impact on their livelihood and personal security. If best practices in law and justice from across the world would be widely applied, at least 75% of such problems could be solved in a satisfactory way (at the moment many places do not reach 50%). This is the main message of HiiL report on worldwide trends in providing access to justice: Towards Basic Justice Care for Everyone: Challenges and Innovative Approaches, released beginning of April 2012.  Download here:  Strategies Towards Basic Justice Care 

Goyal on Legal Technology Innovation and lawTechCamp

Monica Goyal, J.D., M.Sc., of MyLegalBriefcase has published Why Tech Innovation Comes Slow in Legal Profession, on itbusiness.ca.

The post describes the panel discussion on “Legal Techs in a Brave New World” at lawTechCamp 2011, held 18 June 2011 in Toronto.

In this post, Ms. Goyal identifies several factors that inhibit legal technology innovation, including lawyers’ general lack of education in science and engineering, unduly strict regulation of the legal services market, and a lack of funding. Ms. Goyal highlights the current process in the UK of deregulating the legal services market, as a model for reform in other jurisdictions.

In addition, Connie Crosby recently wrote a post summarizing lawTechCamp 2011 at Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog. Discussions begun during lawTechCamp 2011 are being continued ina LinkedIn group.

New AfricLaw Blog for African Rule of Law Issues

AfricLaw, launched in April 2012, is a blog which provides a platform for discussion for those interested in the rule and role of law in Africa. The AfricLaw blog is a joint venture of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa (ICLA) and the Centre for Human Rights (CHR) of the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria.

All areas of law applicable to Africa are covered, both international (global and continental) and national. Legal academics and students, researchers, international and national civil servants, legislators and politicians, legal practitioners and judges, as well as those who are not lawyers but have an interest in law are among those who are welcome to participate in the discussions. 

AfricLaw provides a space for the discussion of issues of substance, forming of opinions and information sharing among people living on the continent, those from Africa who are in the diaspora, and anyone else who is interested in participating. AfricLaw will also serve as a vehicle for comments from Africa on legal developments in the rest of the world. 

Berkman Series: Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video

Tuesday, April 17, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women's grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses - legacies of colonialism - in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. However, there are also videos by women's groups that defy both the historical linearity and spatial fragmentation of the ICT4D framework. These videos instead remix, reclassify, and globally reconnect women's experiences in the contemporary moment. Culled from hundreds of online videos produced by ICT4D programs, including those in countries classified as having "Low Human Development" according to the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Program, these media represent powerful instances of a decolonial aesthetics, an altogether unexpected development. These ICT4D videos make compelling claims for other historical narratives and visions for women's future lives, identities, and uses of information communication technologies.

Dalida María Benfield's research addresses artists' and activists' creative uses of video and other networked digital media towards social justice projects. Her work is focused on the transformational capacities of media art across different scales. As an artist and activist, she has developed production, education, exhibition, and distribution initiatives focused on youth, women, people of color in the U.S., and local and transnational social movements, including co-founding the media collective Video Machete. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. RSVP Required- more information on Berkman's website>