Showing posts with label law2.0. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law2.0. Show all posts
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e-democracia, Brazil’s Wiki Legislation Forum. What about Indonesia? (Wikislation)

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Wikislation is the term I used to describe bottom-up law making process using wiki. This has been implemented in one of Philipine’s region. Recently, Brazil came with the more sophiticated Wikislation idea through its website, e-democracia. 

 

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The Techrepublic explains:

 

The program is a kind of crowdsourcing for legislative purpose. In particular, the e-Democracia website attracts and draws together the diffuse participation of individual citizens and minority groups. The main goal is to permit easier access to the decision-making process by citizens who are not associated with strong interest groups or corporations that usually lobby for access to the center of power in Brasilia where the national government is located.

e-Democracia is driven by a belief that the lawmaking process can benefit from the convergence of political representation and citizen participation in a virtuous cycle in which one model strengthens the other. The backbone of the initiative is its website (www.edemocracia.gov.br), which provides multiple participatory mechanisms with which citizens can:
• Share information about a problem that needs to be addressed by law;
• Identify and discuss possible solutions to the problem; and
• Draft the bill itself.

 

I argued in my 2006 article that crowdsourcing legislation will benefit from reduced information asymmetry and reduced cost for information interpretation. The concept and methodology for ‘wikislation’ is still far from perfect. But the tools are here. I consider that spending our legislative resources on bottom-up IT will also decrease the cost of deliberation and eventually, the cost of promulgation. To get a complete picture on the concept of wikislation, read and download my 2006 article titled “How Legislative Process Works in the Period of e-democracy”.

Legislation in the Period of e Democracy

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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.



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Privacy concerns in cloud computing

Friday, May 28, 2010

In previous posts, I argue for the benefits of cloud computing for lawyers, lawfirms and government. However, cloud computing also posses some risks and the existing legal framework may not be adequate to tacke the problem. Read the recent ACLU publication (click on the image):


“Cloud computing”—the ability to create, store, and manipulate data through Web-based services—is growing in popularity. However, outdated laws and varying corporate practices mean that documents created and stored in the cloud may not have the same protections as the same documents stored in a filing cabinet or on a home computer. Can cloud computing services protect the privacy of their consumers? Do they? And what can we do to improve the situation?

HT @StephKimbro

 

 

Data Transfer, the DPR’s Style
6 Free collaboration tools for lawyers



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HOWTO: Tweet the right lawyers

Thursday, May 13, 2010

 

(and get a free advice on something)

Jennifer asked:

Who would be a good person to tweet for advise on Clemency and human rights? I support Australian Schapelle Corby who is mentally ill and her lawyer has appealed to the Indonesian president for clemency. I believe she is innocent and did not receive a fair trial but now her mental health is priority. She was sentenced to 20 years which is harsh by Indonesian standards with no testing of the evidence despite her demands to police and prosecution (these tests may of proved her innocence). She has suffered enough and needs to come home. Thanks, any info would be appreciated

Short answer: perhaps these people can help:

@taufikbasari @arijuliano @anggarasuwahju @TodungLubis @lisrasukur

Long answer: follow them on twitter, discover their network and give a shot. Perhaps it is better to drag people’s attention through your own twitter campaign. A lot of people is using twitter to extend their advocacy to the online world.  An important feature in this effort is in creating incentives for people to tweet their opinion. The incentive could either be external (from outside factors, such as a praise or a thank you note from other people) but they are mostly internal (they just feel good about tweeting). I will try to elaborate this further on my next post.


Related posts:

Twittering the Indonesian Legal Community
ABAnet Twitter Debate on Virtual Law Office
6 Free Collaboration Tools for Lawyers



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Data Transfer, the DPR’s Style

Thursday, May 6, 2010

According to Vivanews and Kompas, one trolley worth of documents from the House’s Special Investigative Unit for the Century scandal is ‘missing’ *. 
The Jakarta post reported:

Separately, Gayus Lumbuun from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said that the House leaders had to explain what really happened on the documents which should have been completely sent to the KPK.
Deputy House speaker Priyo Budi Santoso from the Golkar Party said he too was surprised by the fact that the KPK had yet to receive all the necessary documents and that the House leaders would investigate into the issue.


Data transfer, our generation’s style:

(Atyourlibrary.com)


Data transfer, the DPR’s style:
Mr President, Mr KPK, please enjoy the data… Sorry for being late, we’ve had a little Traffic Jam at Gatot Subroto street



(Cartoonstock.com)

* It turned out that DPR’s secretariat did not send KPK the data because DPR’s House Rules only require that the details are sent to the President and not the KPK.  (Yeah right…)

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Twittering the Indonesian Legal Community

Monday, May 3, 2010

Some of the most prominent figures of the Indonesian legal community is sharing their thoughts in twitter. Sometimes, when they are happy, they provide advices too, with 140 characters, that is.

(Hey, in this world, nothing is free, except for advices. And for lawyers, oftentimes, that is also not free. So, 140 characters is a good thing to start.)

So, who’s on Twitter? Here’s a list of those benevolent lawyers.

1. Taufik Basari often tweets about human rights law.

2. Pramudya tweets about Law and Economics.

3. Ari Juliano, who is the Indonesian Coordinator for the Creative Commons Project, often tweets about IPR

4. Faiz, our future Constitutional Court Chief Justice, tweets about, well, Constitution.

5. Arsil has his own Jurisprudence class in Twitter.

6. Anggara, our savvy Press Lawyer (he did several Judicial Reviews related to press law by the way) tweets here.

7. If you are a law student, keep an eye on Legal101 (from students, for students :)

8. Oh, I tweet too. You can find me here. I tried to organize my useful tweets, with this hashtag #lawtalk . Pram is also joining me in this hashtag. 

These people are quite friendly. So I think they will be happy to answer your twitter queries.

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6 Free Collaboration Tools for Lawyers

Sunday, May 2, 2010

You just start up a small law firm and can’t afford to pay expensive IT costs? No problem. There are tons of freebies out there which you can use to enhance your law firm’s productivity.

1. Delicious

Bookmarks cluttered your browser page? Use bookmarking sites. There are many free bookmarking services including google notebook and Digg, but I prefer delicious for my bookmarks. I have been sharing these bookmarks with colleagues in other countries working on the same issue. I don't lose anything by sharing what I found in the net and they don't risk the possibility of reinventing the wheel.
 

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In delicious, have a look at my Water Law bookmarks. If you do European Law, have a look at my EU Law bookmarks. For nanotechnology law, have a look here.
 
Important tip for delicious. In tagging, always use root words. Don’t use “nanotechnology+law” or “nanotechnologies”, unless you really have to.

2. Manymoon
Manymoon is a cool software for project management. It has project management features such as milestones, tasks, calendar, link sharing and progress report.
 
 
  













For example, if you are doing a merger, you can set the milestones into (i) Merger Plan, (ii) BoC Approval of the Merger Plan, (iii) Shareholder’s Approval for Merger and (iv) Notifications to Employees. You can add tasks to each milestones. For milestone (i) you can assign the drafting of a Merger Plan to a junior lawyer and a reviewing task to the more senior lawyer. You can set dates for these task, set a deadline and a reminder.
What I really like with Manymoon is its integration with Google Apps. Manymoon is integrated to Google Docs, Email and Calendar. It has a reporting tool too, but unfortunately, the free version only has one reporting for each projects.

Sign up to manymoon for free, here.

Oh, in case you are a time-sheet freak, yes, manymoon does track your lawyer’s time sheet.



3. Tungle
You are a very busy person with lots of schedules, but yet, your firm can’t afford to pay a secretary? It’s OK, not a problem. Tungle will help to sort out your scheduling problem.

 

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Tungle use google calendar to check the dates when you would be available. Clients can then propose several dates for a meeting or web conference or telephone call. Not clear enough, you can try scheduling a conference call with me, using my tungle here.


4. Dimdim
You are in Bali and too tired to go to Jakarta for a meeting, or you simply have a ‘virtual’ lawfirm and only work at the office if you have too. Besides, who needs an office these days, right?

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With Dimdim, you can always hold meetings online. Share presentations, share your computer screen, hold a web conference! Dimdim can record your meetings too. Again, no need for a secretary.


5. Offisync
The old school of doing review is by turning the track changes on and then sending it once you made the review. Well, there’s a more effective way of doing it.

Offisync, well, sync, your office files with Google Docs and allow instant, online collaboration with coworkers. However, there is a caveat. You may not be able to save the doc files in its original MS Word Format, unless you have a premium account with google apps. So, everytime you save docs in offisync, it save it in google doc format. If you have plenty of tables and footnotes, you might want to be a bit careful using the service. I hope they will sort out this problem soon. I will update you when they do.



6. Finally, Google Apps




Get 50 free (7GB each) email@yourlawfirm.com with google apps, integrated with calendar, docs and other google services such as video and sites. Yes, you get the email with your company’s name but using gmail services. Ain’t that cool? Sign up here.
All of the software I listed above (except for Delicious) are integrated into Google Apps. So when you sign up to google apps (the basic version) and go to the Marketplace from your domain management console, you can install those apps in your domain. Have fun! 

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Freedom of Information Law Web Tools

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Happy Freedom of Information Law Day!!!

Today, Indonesia embraces the new era of transparency by the entry into force of the FoI Law. This post will discuss exiting web tools used to enforce FoI regime around the world. The internet can be used to make transparency system more transparent! Here is how:

1. United Kingdom -- Whatdotheyknow.com 

Whatdotheyknow is quite an ingenious web portal, designed to make transparency request transparent. This way, we will all know which government branches are lagging behind in processing their FoI. I've tried this system before and it works just perfectly. Have a look at my FoI request here.

2. United States -- Thisweknow.org

Thisweknow.org acts as a database provider of the data in the US Government. For example, I want to know which factory in Nevada releases mercury. And here's the search result.

3. United States -- Openmeetings.org

The US has several kinds of transparency laws. They have the Freedom of Information Act (as old as 1966) and they also have "Sunshine Laws". What are the differences? Well, the sunshine laws obligate public meetings for public officials. The law basically states that meetings for public services should not be held in secrecy, it should be held 'in the sunlight'. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Justice Brandeis said, remember?

So, openmeetings.org provides the software to keep record of those meetings. Have a look.

In the next posts, I will give you and update of another tools. Stay tune!

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Aardvark for Legal Research?

Friday, February 12, 2010

Google had recently acquired Aardvark, a social tool designed to post and answer question or consultations. The idea is pretty much like Ask Yahoo or Google Answer, except that Aardvark can search the right person in answering your question (that is, based on your profile). I have asked this question for example, and the answer is not bad. So, now I will ask another question in Aardvark. My question would be: how much is the average sallary in London for lawyers with around 4 years of experience?

I will update in another post if I have received favourable answer.