In this Clay Shirky talk at TED Global, he describes how democratic principles of freedom of expression and engaged citizenship can be enabled online by the use of “distributed version control”, or software that allows “collaboration without coordination.” This is a funny and thought provoking talk, urging people to seek, as he puts it, not only a dashboard from their governments, but also a steering wheel.

The main barrier to this development is expressed concisely in this image:

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Last week, fellow Slawyer Kim Nayyer wrote about the launch of the new Congress.gov in Washington. It will eventually incorporate the well-known THOMAS federal legislative information website.

Earlier this week, In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress, ran an interview with Meg Peters, an Information Architect in its Office of Strategic Initiatives. She is part of the team that designed the new site.

Since October 2010, In Custodia Legis has been running an interview series featuring members of the library staff. There are over 80 interviews in the series so far. The Law . . . [more]

I was perusing my library collection this morning while shelving books. This activity made me think of great new titles that are slated for upcoming release, my 2013 library collection budget, and which hard copy title that I wouldn’t, and couldn’t live without.

Would it be a reference work, a general text, a text specific to an area of law, an annotated set of the Rules of Court?

Consider that your desert island has high speed internet service and someone with good negotiating skills to acquire a broad spectrum of reasonably priced electronic subscriptions. The electronic subscriptions include Canadian secondary . . . [more]

Right to Know Week is an international event started in Bulgaria in 2002. Its purpose is “to raise awareness about people’s right to access government information while promoting freedom of information as essential to both democracy and good governance.”

In Canada, events across the country are posted on the website http://www.righttoknow.ca/.

Last week I was fortunate to attend a run-up event to Right to Know Week called Open Data, Big Data, Yes…but NOT Personal Data, put together jointly by the Toronto Board of Trade and Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian. She encourages public institutions to . . . [more]

This is certainly one of the more ambitious public legal education initiatives in Canada.

The third season of the television series “Le Droit de Savoir” (The right to know) began on Quebec cable TV on September 18th on the Canal savoir channel (with repeats on the Télé-Québec public educational network in the summer of 2013).

The French-language series is a co-production of the Quebec Bar Association. Lawyers already write the deals for TV and film projects. So, why not just jump into producing the material itself?

Episodes in the coming season will feature reports on topics such as aboriginal law, . . . [more]

Earlier today I followed from afar the US Library of Congress launch of the new Congress.gov, which is still in beta. As we watch the new site develop, we can also begin our good-byes to THOMAS, which, it was confirmed today, will be replaced. Andrew Weber of the Law Library of Congress posted the news – about the new Congress.gov and the eventual demise of THOMAS – at that institution’s blog, In Custodia Legis:

Today also marks the first public announcement of the eventual end of THOMAS. It isn’t going away today or tomorrow, but sometime in the

Current Cites recently ran a description of a spirited rejection of the current (broken, expensive) eBook offerings from publishers, from Sarah Houghton, Director of California’s San Rafael Public Library:

As the technically-savvy library director for the San Rafael Public Library (CA), the author can be considered on the front lines of the disaster known as e-books in libraries. And this post makes it clear that she’s fed up and won’t take it any more. Using a brilliant metaphor of breaking up with a “bad boyfriend”, Houghton skewers the e-book publishing industry.

(some NSFW language in the wall of text, but . . . [more]

As I write this the NHL is roughly 12 hours away from locking out the players for the third time in a row; right about now you are thinking that this is going to be a post about labour law (note labour spelled the proper way-with a “u”); but that is not the case. This post is going to trend closer to property law. You may recall that during the last NHL lockout a question arose as to the ownership and awarding of the Stanley Cup which arose in part from Lord Stanley’s words in 1892 when he wrote:

I

CanLII has added 1,600 Supreme Court of Canada cases, bringing the total of SCC opinions to 9,000 and taking the scope of the SCC database back to 1907. As the press release (soon to be available on the CanLII blog) says:

As with all Canadian court and tribunal decisions available on CanLII (over 1M and growing at a rate of over 2,000 per week), these decisions are fully integrated and cross-linked to any subsequent case on CanLII in which they are referenced.

This is not yet true with respect to earlier Supreme Court decisions on CanLII, which are . . . [more]

It’s the average number of references per year, in reported cases, to my text Apportionment of Fault in Tort, in the 32 years years since it was published: 61 in total based on Carswell and CanLII. (I didn’t check on QL to see if there are some others.) On the other hand, there were only 6 in the first decade, but there’s been 30 in the past 10 years so I must be on a roll. Of course, most of them are in cases quoting other cases, but a reference is a reference, is a reference.

The thing has . . . [more]

It’s halfway through the first week of the new academic term and time for me to revisit my summer projects list. Regretfully, I report I was less successful in checking off completed projects than was Shaunna Mireau in checking off her substantial writing project.

As it turns out, I check off as complete my “standard mundane tasks” and “institutional projects”—so, hooray, me!

On the flipside, the institutional projects consumed most of my available summer hours. By way of either prescience or a well-planned rationalization, though, I had prefaced my project list with this:

Summer rarely seems to offer the