Sharing of Information Across Blogs Published by Access to Justice and Legal Services Groups Could Bring Alignment to Their Work
Great article by Robert Ambrogi, a few days ago. If you care about access to justice and access to the law, take a minute to read it.
A big issue in access to justice and access to the law, per Bob, is that the groups working hard on these issues are not working in alignment, and probably don’t know what each are working on.
Two travesties persist in tainting access by all to the U.S. legal system.
One is the gaping lack of access to justice. The Legal Services Corporation estimates that 92% of the civil legal problems of the roughly 50 million low-income Americans receive no or insufficient legal help. Reasonable minds can quibble over that number – some say it is exaggerated – but no one doubts or disputes that the legal system falls dramatically short of serving those who need it, not just for those with low incomes, but also for the middle class and small businesses.
The other is the continuing lack of public access to the law. For both primary and secondary legal materials, many remain under the commercial lock and key of major publishers, or under dubious claims of copyright by government entities, or so disparately and poorly organized as to be effectively inaccessible.
As to both these travesties, there are many individuals, groups and organizations working hard to resolve them. For the most part, however, it seems that they work along separate tracks, pursuing parallel missions but employing separate strategies.”
Bob went on,
What this means, perhaps, is that there should be greater coordination and collaboration between those working to close the justice gap and those working to free the law. On both fronts, these are major fights, but in unity, as they say, there is strength.
I don’t know that the groups and individuals working hard on these causes regularly share what they are working on, what successes they are having, what conferences they are putting on and attending – and more.
I proposed a method for the “individuals, groups and organizations” working on these issues to easily share what they are doing, at the same time being able to easily see what the other groups and individuals are doing.
Give them each a blog and aggregate and curate the content so everyone can see what each other are doing.
The idea fell on deaf ears.
I am obviously partial to blogs, but they work well for the sharing of information and building networks. Bob is living proof.
Each group or individual that wants, gets a free blog. A blog post takes less than thirty minutes. More detailed on something major, an hour. Anyone can subscribe by email to that blog. Any blog post can be shared on LinkedIn.
The second a blog post is published, it goes to a “magazine site” aggregating and displaying every post. There’s a page for every author, every organization and their blog – it displays posts related to them. The content can be automatically archived by topic.
All of this is free.
Probably too much detail, but just wanted to help where I can.