Leader's Dialogue (World Water Week)

Wednesday, September 8, 2010


Moderator: Margaret Catley-Coxon

Thai minister Suwit Khunkitte explains the condition of Thai's water resources. They tried to implement Water Grid System and introduce capacity building. The minister considers that more water does not lead to more productivity. Efficiency is more relevant.

Thai is focusing on participation programs. The King talked to the farmers that forest are important to them. One million questionnaires are sent to water users.

Interesting comment from the minister: ADB is pushing Thailand to charge its water. Ramesh Vaidya elaborate that the use of water for agriculture is high. Charging water for irrigation may not work if the institution is not set up. He refers to the work of Elinor Ostrom that there could be other ways: e.g. taxes, community participation and management.

Ravi Narayanan pointed the problem of information in water resources management. Margaret responds that it may be a good idea to crowdsource information gathering in WRM.

Highlights:

*Pricing

Uniform water pricing is difficult to implement. However, variety of prices may impact competitiveness on the food market.

*Tradeoff
1 percent saving in agriculture is 30 percent saving for drinking water

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Indolawreport goes to World Water Week

Monday, September 6, 2010

 

World Water Week

 

Packing for Stockholm: BothEnds and several other NGOs/IGOs are planning to hold a side event on this September’s Stockholm world water week. The topic: Human Rights Based Approach to Improving Water Quality. 

 


Chair: Mr. Jean-Benoit Charrin, WaterLex, Switzerland

14:00

Welcome and Introduction. Ms. Lucinda O'Hanlon, Special Procedures Division, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

14:10

Concepts I - "Legal and policy development, water quality & the right to water". Dr. Riant Nugroho, Board Member the Jakarta Water Regulatory Body, Indonesia

14:30

Concepts II - "The Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA) and the right to water", Ms. Natalia Uribe, UNESCO Etxea, Spain

14:50

Concepts III - "A Human Rights Based Approach to IWRM - a new initiative", Ms. Susanne Schmidt, Water Governance Specialist, UNDP

15:10

Break

15:20

Case Study I - Ecuador. Ms. Sara Caria, ACRA, Ecuador

15:40

Case Study II - Indonesia. Mr. Mova Al’Afghani, UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Dundee University, United Kingdom

16:00

Case Study III - Tanzania. Mr. Alejandro JimĂ©nez, IngenierĂ­a Sin Fronteras - ISF (Engineers Without Borders), Spain

16:20

Case Study IV - BiH & Tajikistan. Ms. Katy Norman, junior independent consultant working with UNDP

16:40

Panel Discussion. Chair: Dr. Tobias Schmitz, Both ENDS, Netherlands

17:20

Closing Remarks. Dr. Tobias Schmitz, Both ENDS, Netherlands

17:30

Close of Seminar

If I can find some wi-fi there,  Indolawreport may hold a series of live-blogging. More details to follow. If you happens to be in the World Water Week, join us.

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Indonesia Law Report to be archived by the Library of Congress

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Good news and an honor for Indonesia law Report. I have received the following email from the Library of Congress:


The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to Legal Blawgs. The Library of Congress preserves the Nation's cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including websites.

With your permission, the Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your website at regular intervals over time and make this collection available to researchers both at Library facilities and, by special arrangement, to scholarly research institutions.  In addition, the Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Internet materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them.

Our Web Archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were "born digital" and never printed on paper.

 

The library of congress recently archive a number of high-quality blawgs. You can access them here. I have also accepted their proposal for off-site access. To know more about Library of Congress Web Archiving program, click here.

Hopefully, we can soon see Indolawreport to be listed there and accessible to everyone in the future. Happy blogging and participate in writing history!



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Encourage your government to ratify the UN Watercourses Convention

 

The WWF launched postcard campaign to encourage more ratification of the UN Watercourses Convention. In order for the convention to be in force, another 16 ratification would be necessary. Indonesia has land border with East Timor, New Guinea and Malaysia. As such, there might be possibilities that transboundary water is shared.

 

According to the WWF:


We encourage you to download copies of the postcards and of their accompanying leaflet, in order to find out more about the 2011 target and what YOU can do to help achieve it, whether you are an influential individual, a government official, or a representative of an NGO or other interested institution. Join the numerous individuals and institutions that have already vowed to support the UN Watercourses Convention Global Initiative.


Click on the picture above to download “Everything you need to know about the UN Watercourses Convention”

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Drinking Water Quality Regulation Updated

Wednesday, September 1, 2010


Last April, the Ministry of Health updated drinking water quality regulation. The Permenkes 492 contains minimum obligatory standard of drinking water quality parameters that should be followed. The Permenkes also obligates examination of drinking water quality by water quality providers and government agencies. In practice, regional governments enumerate this rule through regional by-laws. The previous drinking water quality regulation – issued in 2002 – is therefore repealed.

Download the Permenkes here.



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More on evernote for legal practice

Thursday, August 26, 2010

 

 

Here a list on what evernote can do to enhace your legal practice:

  1. As a blogging tool for legal bloggers (of course!)
  2. Research tool (collection of snippet and bookmarks) and digital filing cabinet.
  3. Customer relation management (CRM) tool
  4. Client tagging, note taking, auto forwarding from website contact form

I think evernote is good to be used for start-up lawfirms or those with SOHO (Small Office Home Office) practices. Recently I connected my inexpensive Lexmark s.305 Wi-FI printer to send scanned files (PDF or Pictures) directly to evernote so that it can sync with the system there. But if you have a scanner with autofeeder, I think it would be much faster and better to scan documents, deeds, contracts and all those boring stuffs :) No need to use expensive Knowledge Management softwares, its a waste of money!

Read our previous post: Evernote for Lawyers.



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Evernote for Lawyers

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

 

 

Many lawfirms are investing thousands of dollars for Knowledge Management software only to discover that their lawyers and workers find a hard time implementing it because they are not user-friendly. The reason why most KM software doesn’t work is because they are not embedded in your daily life; the inputs are tedious and time-consuming.

 

It’s time to liberate yourself. Someday you will quit working for that lawfirm and set-up your own (or do better things like enjoy your life) so you better have your own Knowledge Management system to satisfy your future need of information.

 

With evernote, you can write notes, clip web pages, take picture notes and voice notes directly from your desktop and mobile. Evernote has apps for ipads, blackberry, android and other OS. All of them are synced together in the cloud. The software is also equipped with integrated OCR (optical character recognition), so every text in the picture you take or document you scanned will be recognized. Some printers can also directly send scanned files to evernote.

 

Here’s a list of things that a lawyer can do with evernote:

  1. Take pictures of/scan business cards
  2. Use the voice note for interviews (using blackberry – silently :)
  3. Take a snapshot of important clauses
  4. Scan your meeting notes
  5. Scan legal documents
  6. Take pictures during site visit (and tag it in your project folder)

Evernote is linked with many other apps: your email (you can forward your mail to evernote), twitter and google reader, just to name a few. The most important of all: it’s free!
Click here to sign up.