Two Days in Ithaca in October – Law via the Internet Conference
The unique and indefatigable Tom Bruce is the Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell – no need for a geographical adjective when you were the first on the block.
Yes, LII was the first – and it’s coming up to its Twentieth Anniversary – or at least an excuse for a party in Finger Lakes.
Tom explains:
The LVI conference started out as a rather clubby event for a smallish group of open-access publishers largely based in the academic world. More recently, we’ve been joined by some academic researchers in legal informatics and by a few government people here and there.
This year, I’d like to press the reset button: the world of open access to law is now much, much larger. That is true of the community that is doing open access to law, and it is true of the subject matter with which we concern ourselves. Operations that call themselves “LIIs” are now only a small (if influential) part of the much larger community that actually publishes primary legal materials for free. And the subject matter with which we concern ourselves has gone from simple legal publishing into broader notions of public understanding of law, civic engagement, transparency, and government information policy.
So, 20 years after open access to law was first implemented here at Cornell, we’d like to both celebrate 20 years of accomplishment by the open access community and also reformulate and reestablish that community in a way that’s aimed toward the future. Everyone who’s getting this note has, I believe, something to contribute to that process, and so I’d urge you to both attend and to think about presenting something at the conference.
The Slaw community may also be interested in presenting:
Each track session will be one hour in duration with 30 minutes for open discussion in between sessions. Sessions can take the form of papers, visual presentations, panel discussions, or any format which is suitable to the material being discussed. Those submitting presentations should suggest the track in which they believe they should appear. The Track Chairs reserve the right to move presentations to a different track for purposes of theme continuity or scheduling.
The topic tracks cover a lot of ground that matches much of the discussion on Slaw.
Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
The Internet brought a great democratic promise for public engagement in government affairs. It lowered the barriers to participation and gave people tools to hold their governments more accountable. Two main ideas have been guiding the discourse on e-participation. First, there is a belief that broader participation will necessarily yield better democratic results. Second, there is a belief that what prevents people from participating effectively is the lack of appropriate tools. But if you build it, who will come? What constitutes meaningful online public participation? What technical solution, psychological traits, and social processes help or hinder effective public engagement in government affairs using the Internet? How does mobilization of masses for civic protests differ from helping people take constructive part in policymaking processes? What can we learn from the successes and failures of e-participation initiatives? This track will address these and other questions exploring the gap between the promise and the reality of e-participation.
What it’s about
Engaging public in government activity
Rulemaking
E-participation
Transparency
Community-building
Success or failure at motivating public participation
Who it’s for
E-government researchers
Political scientists
Social-media strategists
Rulemakers and regulatory professionals
Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
Open access to law is a central mission of many different types of organizations. However, open access must be paid for, and if not by its users, then by whom? Over the years, different open-access providers have discovered different funding models appropriate to different national and institutional settings. Some operate in universities, some in government, and some in the private sector. Some are hybrids or partnerships. All have different sources of revenue, support, and cross subsidy. All operate in different markets and different business environments.
What it’s about
Sustainability of free-to-air services
Cooperation with government/bulk data service
New developments in epublishing: ebooks and apps
Public/private collaboration in e-publishing
Licensing and copyright as a business matter
Business and sustainability in the developing world
Successes, failures, and how to tell the difference
What to expect in the future
Who it’s for
Managers and leaders of open-access projects
Legal publishers (public, private and nonprofit
Funders
Editorial managers and product developers
Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
Government, and government information policy in particular, forms an important part of the environment for open access to law. It places technical and legal restrictions on the availability and format of documents; creates intellectual-property, privacy, financial, and secrecy regimes that dictate what is available to whom; and instantiates a bureaucratic process between the public and government information. It does much to determine the economic value of legal information and facilitate rent-seeking. It may also be a key player or competitor in the open-access arena. This track is concerned with the effects of various aspects of government policy and government behavior on open access to law.
What it’s about
Transparency
Access to legal information and bulk data
Public records and personal information
Assessment/evaluation of public access and open-government systems
Digital divide and public understanding
Public sector experience in developing countries
Private-public collaborations for open access
Failures
Who it’s for
Policymakers
Compliance officers
Public policy researchers
Journalists
Advocates
Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
Open access to law activities run the gamut from providing basic access to primary documents to supporting public participation around legal reform to improving intellectual access to the law. Application developers are in the guts of open access, transforming raw data into features and applications that can be of use to the general public, non-lawyer professionals, and legal experts. This track is concerned with the achievements, challenges, and opportunities around open-access-application development.
What it’s about
Content-management systems
Text-processing software
User behavior, user interfaces, and legal research
Application development for the Semantic Web
Development for mobile platforms, small screens, etc.
Multimedia and non-textual information
Cooperative development of applications
Search engines and web crawlers
Information extraction and data mining
Failures
Who it’s for
Application developers
Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics
Tools and techniques for legal information search, retrieval, visualization, representation, organization, and management are vital to improving access and understanding of legal information and legal knowledge. The general public, business, government officials or legal professionals can benefit from research and implementation on enhanced legal search and retrieval capabilities, document drafting and case management tools, legal document production, management and publishing systems, or workflow management and compliance monitoring solutions, to name a few.
Proposing solutions to deal with information overload and poorly-structured dirty data, to represent legal documents or concepts and organize legal structure, to offer solutions for multilingual or multi-jurisdictional search and retrieval of legal documents, in short, to better organize legal knowledge and deal with legal complexity, are some of the challenging tasks that this track will explore.
What it’s about
Legal knowledge and information systems (implementation, evaluation, etc.)
Legal information retrieval, management and use
Metadata representation, data models and XML standards
Legal ontologies and semantic annotation techniques
Crowdsourcing, authority, and commentary integration
Multilingual legal resources and global interoperability
Open data and linked data for law
Failures
Who it’s for
Legal information scientists
Librarians
Metadata specialists
Data modelers
Driving distance from both Toronto and Montréal – and a pretty drive by the lakes too – and the vendange will just be over. See Slaw in Ithaca
In 2012, we mark the 20th Anniversary of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, the first legal website on the Internet and the birthplace of the free law, open access movement. This year also marks the 10th Anniversary of the Declaration on Free Access to Law, a document crafted and signed by delegates from more than a dozen countries assembled at the Law Via the Internet (LVI) conference in 2002. To mark this achievement and to strategize for the next 20 years, the 2012 LVI conference will be held in the United States for the first time, at the birthplace of the open access, free law movement, Cornell Law School in Ithaca, NY.
Ah this follows on directly after the International Association of Law Libraries 2012 conference in Toronto, September 30 – October 4th. Combining the two could make for a nice educational road trip.