A short cartoon I made while listening to Professor Nora Engstrom’s talk on Legal Clinics & attorney advertising at Stanford Law School last month.
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The Fate of Legal Clinics
Category: Current Projects
Law as an app – technology in legal education » VoxPopuLII.
Christine Kirchberger & Pam Storr offer a great overview of where ‘apps’ (as conceived of now — and as they may develop in coming years) may play a role in giving lawyers more fluid working experiences, law students more interactive education, and general consumers direct access to the law they care about.
Their article also does a great job at laying out Key User Research Insights into how law students want to be learning with tech — and spelling out some possible models that lawyer-designers should be building upon.
They focus in on the potential for pushing forward certain types of legal ed outcomes:
- managing risks is something that practicing lawyers and other legal service professionals must do on a daily basis. Law is not only about applying legal rules but also about weighing options, estimating possible outcomes and deciding upon which risks to accept. Legal education has not traditionally included this in the curriculum, and students have arguably very little experience of such training in their studies.
- interaction between different areas of law is often hard to incorporate in legal studies, which follow a block or module structure. Each course provides students with in-depth knowledge of that particular legal area. However, the interaction between such modules is lacking, with teachers often unaware of the content of preceding or succeeding courses. For students, a problem with this module structure can be that they forget the content of a course studied at an earlier stage in their education.
- problem-based learning is generally encouraged and applied in legal education. However, most problem-based learning (PBL) is reactive, asking students to evaluate the legal consequences of a scenario that has already played out, instead of training students purely in after-the-fact solutions, in other words “clearing up the legal mess.” PBL should be made more proactive, aiming to train students in identifying and counteracting problems before they arise. This can also be viewed as an implementation of the first aspect, managing risks.
After setting out these ideal outcomes, they explore what the current state of legal apps are — and what the future could look like. One possible way would be to have apps be the links and bridges between students’ various classes — which right now are taught like blocks rather than like a fluid whole.
Legal education, as mentioned, is traditionally taught in blocks or modules, with very few references and links between them. This setup clearly has its benefits, not least logistically. There are clear arguments in favor of such an approach; planning and studying becomes easier for teachers and students alike, time limitations mean that implementing an approach that makes connections between each subject is hard. This is where we believe that technology has the potential to play an important role. Technology is not bound to physical classrooms and attendance requirements of students or teachers. It has the ability to be accessed at a time of the student’s choosing, without placing additional demands on instructors.
A legal education app could provide the key in aiding students to make connections between their study areas; it could be made to fit alongside a law degree, assuming a student’s knowledge in sync with their level of study, by including content from both current and past courses. The app would offer an easy way to implement an interactive, problem-based learning approach. It could provide additional content, quizzes, exercises, social media functions etc. complementing the education and enabling a holistic perspective.
Another insight they offer: law students may have to use the mental model of an interactive app (rather than a linear text approach) to analyze the law and consider how best to represent, analyze, and communicate the law to clients. Actually building an app could be a terrific learning exercise in the law school classroom.
In the exercise, students would look at law from a different perspective, i.e. how legal regulations affect the individual or organization. Going away from a linear text approach, students would have to translate law into a format that users or apps can read. In other words, law would have to suit the user/app, and not the other way around. Students would, therefore, have to go beyond text and translate rules into flowcharts, diagrams, mind maps and other visual tools in order for the app to be able to follow the law’s instructions.
Implementing legal rules into technology, therefore, not only encourages students to think proactively but it also motivates them to identify solutions for the application of the law and how rules could be transformed into practice. From a pedagogical point of view the exercise would allow the students to think about different aspects of law beyond the traditional case or contract. It would also encourage a wider viewpoint of law as a tool in society.
They call out the current model of using tech in legal study, which does seem to fall short of the model they’re advocating:
Legal apps have already been introduced to help lawyers study for qualifying exams, e.g. BarMax. (These are often, however, still very topic-specific.) Implementing the same kind of thinking at the educational level would start to prepare students for their future workplace, allowing them to be better prepared for helping clients with real-world scenarios dealing with complex and interrelating legal issues. If students begin such thinking at the beginning of their legal studies, it becomes normal, arguably allowing for better educated graduates.
This last approach is perhaps a little future-oriented (although not as much as, for example, grading by technology), and it is of course not easy to implement at the university level; academics must work together with app developers to produce a tool of real value to students. However, even a slimmed-down version of such an app can be a tool for helping students prepare for exams, test their knowledge of legal areas, or simply make sure that they have understood concepts covered in teaching. Some examples of such implementations in legal education are shown here
Some final notes: the article calls out how this may be done — perhaps through reformed curriculum, in which professors teach students how to build apps, perhaps through competitions or hackathons that push students to learn on their own.
Technical assistance is of importance, in order for students to know what aspects to take into account and what schematics developers need in order to be able to create an app. The exercise could be set up as a competition (Georgetown Law School – Iron Tech Lawyer) with an expert jury consisting of practicing lawyers and developers.
And perhaps just having students analyze apps could be a first step:
The students would –from the perspective of their expert area–firstly investigate possible legal issues with a specific gaming app, for example. They would analyze the application of the rules and norms within their field and identify potential conflicts or loopholes within these rules. Their investigation would include testing the app itself, as well as looking at possible end-user agreements and other applicable contractual agreements between the user, the app store and the developer of the app.
The next step would be to identify and discuss possible overlaps, discrepancies and conflicts between the different areas of law in relation to the app. The exercise should result in a written and/or oral report of the different legal issues involved and solutions to potential conflicts between the law and the app.
Adding another layer of real-life scenario, each group could be asked to present their findings to an imaginative client who is the producer of the app. This simulation would allow the students not only to develop a legal analysis based on correlating fields of law but also to present the analysis to non-lawyers, translating legal jargon into understandable everyday language.
The exercise–analyzing an existing app–very much fits into the idea often conveyed in legal education that law is applied after an incident occurs. In order to add a level of proactivity, students could be asked to analyze an app under production, before it is launched. This would guarantee more proactive thinking by the students asking them to foresee potential conflicts and avoid them, rather than discussing legal issues after they have arisen.
Usable law design from Legal Force, in the quick snapshot handouts it provides passersby at it store in Palo Alto.
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Apps to Manage Lawyers
Here’s an article by Jennifer Smith in the Wall Street Journal on new crops of apps that help clients find and monitor lawyers. It mentions Viewabill (tracking how much their lawyers are charging them, in real-time); Rocket Lawyer’s mobile app (create basic legal documents and buy plans for low-cost access to advice); Attorney Proz (lists area lawyers, who have paid to be listed); Ask a Lawyer (ask lawyers in Kalamzoo about basic legal questions and get free answers to your e-mail); and soon to be a LegalZoom app.
Now that people use apps to bank, order food and even monitor eBay auction bids, it was only a matter of time before they called in the lawyers.
Appearing in app stores are programs to help people keep track of their attorneys’ bills, draft legal documents and locate nearby lawyers.
Attorneys are doing more work on smartphones and tablets, and they have a whole host of apps at their disposal to help look up case law, track client calls and even assist with depositions and jury selection.
But until recently, few options existed for clients who wished to track cases or seek advice using mobile devices. This new crop of apps aims to add transparency, and a measure of convenience, to the process.
One new app, Viewabill, lets people track how much their lawyers are charging them in real-time. The idea is to head off sticker shock when business owners and company lawyers open up their monthly bills.
The app acts as kind of a client nanny-cam. It captures information as law firms enter it into their billing systems and transmits it to clients’ mobiles and desktops. Users select how often they want to get updates, set alerts pegged to certain dollar thresholds and can mark questionable items. The app can also be used to track hours logged by accountants and other professional service providers.
The app is now being used by a handful of companies and law firms on a beta basis, with a wider launch planned this month, said Florida-based entrepreneur David Schottenstein, who co-founded the enterprise with an attorney friend, Robbie Friedman. Firms would pay an annual cost of $25 to $40 per matter, depending on volume, or $25,000 for unlimited use, said Mr. Schottenstein.
“It helps them to understand what we do,” said Brian Baker, a bankruptcy lawyer at Ravin Greenberg LLC in New Jersey, which has been testing the app.
Errol Feldman, general counsel for JPay Inc., a Florida company that provides payment transfers and other services to inmates at corrections facilities, has been using Viewabill to make sure firms working to resolve contract disputes do so in a timely fashion.
Legal consultant Susan Hackett said the app was the latest example of a push for greater communication between lawyers and clients, who increasingly want more involvement in the work they assign to outside law firms.
Some companies with big in-house legal departments have already invested in software programs that let clients track the progress of legal matters or monitor law firm bills from their desktop computers. Such systems don’t come cheap, and not many clients use them yet—fewer than 20% of general counsel, according to a 2011 poll by the Association of Corporate Counsel.
Not all law firms may welcome the additional element of client control on the legal side of things. For Viewabill to work, for instance, lawyers have to enter their hours in a timely fashion.
“These technologies may scare people,” Ms. Hackett said. “But they are all productive parts of the march towards clients and lawyers having conversations in real time.”
This month online legal services company Rocket Lawyer Inc. is debuting a mobile app tailored to its customer base: consumers and small business owners who log on to the site to create basic legal documents or buy plans that provide low-cost access to legal advice.
Charley Moore, Rocket Lawyer’s founder and executive chairman, said more site traffic is coming from tablets and smartphones these days, reflecting his customers’ increasingly mobile bent. Many are small business owners who spend much of their time on the road, he said.
“Their office is their dashboard, so we have to deliver the tools,” Mr. Moore said.
Customers can use the app to create a non-disclosure agreement (more forms will soon be available) or modify existing documents they have already created. The app itself is free, and users can access some functions gratis.
Users can also locate nearby attorneys from Rocket Lawyer’s network—the app is integrated with Google GOOG +0.53% Maps—and punch in basic legal questions, although the reply, which is supposed to arrive within one business day, may not be swift as some might hope.
A handful of other apps offer similar services. Attorney Proz also lists area lawyers, who pay to be included. Ask a Lawyer, an app linked to Kalamazoo, Mich., law firm Willis Law, also offers free answers to basic legal questions, with replies sent to users’ email addresses.
Not to be outdone, online legal services company LegalZoom.com Inc., a Rocket Lawyer competitor, also has an app in the works, a company spokeswoman said.
A version of this article appeared March 11, 2013, on page B5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Apps Help Find Lawyers, And Keep an Eye on Them.
A USDOJ report on Law Schools’ Access to Justice programs:meaning, what pro bono & public service offerings the schools have.
The report allows schools to present what offerings they have, but it is a more a spotlight on programs, and less a detailed or critical summary of what’s working & what’s not.
Overall, it’s a nice school-by-school summary, but still a little too short and self-reported to be fully useful.
The description:
At the October 13 Champions of Change event, Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode noted that it is a “shameful irony that the country with the highest concentration of lawyers in the world does such an abysmal job of ensuring that they are available for the vast majority of low-income people who need them, and whose needs are greatest.” When millions of people in the United States cannot get legal help that is often critical to their wellbeing and freedom, all parts of the legal profession need to be engaged to address the crisis. There is no better place to begin than when future lawyers are at the very start of their careers – when they are still in law school.
Champion Martha Bergmark, President of the Mississippi Center for Justice, noted with some envy that when she was in law school, clinics were only just beginning. But as most Champions observed on October 13, times have changed and law schools now offer a wide range of opportunities for students to learn about legal issues involving poverty and equal justice, and get hands-on experience helping victims of domestic violence, or people with a criminal record get a second chance, or provide defender services for Native Americans.
What are law schools really offering? The U.S. Department of Justice Access to Justice Initiative asked participating law schools to discuss how they are institutionalizing their commitment to pro bono and public service. They were asked to address two questions: 1) What is your school doing to support a public service ethic in every student?; and 2) What new public service opportunities are you offering in the 2011-12 academic year?
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Law Kiosk in action
Back in 2004, the Legal Services Corporation sponsored a law kiosk for an “online legal service center” on Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Read an article from back when it was debuted. It meant to deliver access to justice, specifically for consumer and tax law.
“DNA Peoples Legal Services installed computer kiosks throughout the 25,000 miles of Navajo and Hopi Nations located in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico through a Technology Initiative Grant from Legal Services Corporation. These web-based kiosks connect to the Internet via satellite and DSL allowing users to access legal information through either spoken instructions delivered in English, Hopi or Navajo or written instructions in English. To further increase accessibility, DNA created custom graphic icons to help clients navigate the website. These touch-screen kiosks, installed in each of its nine offices located on or near Hopi and Navajo reservations, provide information through DNA’s internal web server on issues such as Consumer Law, Tax Law, Trash and Recycling, and information on free income-tax seminars. These kiosks allow DNA People’s Legal Services to better serve these Southwestern Native American communities, which spans across an immense geographical area.
DNA Legal Services was supplied by a kiosk company, NBG Solutions. A 2002 article from Portland’s Business Journal gave more explanation to the project.
DNA is a nonprofit agency providing free civic legal services to low-income people in its service areas—which happen to cover Navajo and Hopi reservations.
DNA was awarded a technology grant by the Legal Service Corp. to find an innovative way to deliver legal services to clients spread over a vast area— more than 25,000 square miles—with a very small staff.
DNA’s task is challenging: to provide help with legal chores such as name changes, simple divorces and guardianships.
The help is sorely needed. Much of the population in DNA’s service area is under-educated, and poor enough to lack such basic amenities as a phone in the home, let alone a computer.
Language is also an issue for DNA’s clients. “Most of our clients don’t speak or read English,” said Chris O’Shea Heydinger, director of development and information technology for DNA.
“They certainly don’t read in their native languages,” an accomplishment that is limited only to university graduates who pursue the study of Native American languages as an academic subject. Neither Navajo nor Hopi was codified as a written language until the mid-20th century.
A technological solution of some sort was required, rather than simply offering stacks of self-help brochures at DNA offices, precisely because written materials would be no help at all to most clients.
DNA’s answer, built by NBG Solutions, is a kiosk equipped with a touch-screen web browser that can be navigated using custom-designed icons supplied by DNA—for example, a traditional hogan (Navajo house) denoting the home page, and an arrowhead denoting “back” or “forward.”
With the kiosks already delivered and waiting, DNA is in the last stages of designing its web site to deliver spoken information in Navajo or Hopi, depending on where the kiosk is located.
Clients will be able to navigate the graphics-intensive web site to the services they need, and will be able to listen to instructions in their native language, then print out forms as they need them.
The web site, “a labor of love,” according to Heydinger, will go live in April.
The kiosks will be connected to the internet via satellite, because the reservations are so far from the internet backbone.
A great article from Slate on Tech being used for Legal Aid & Access to Justice, with lots of specific examples of how SMS and other basic tech can give reminders, process updates, basic advice, and more lawyering to people who can’t afford lawyers.
The concepts:
- Automated Call Back Systems from legal services to people who have reached out
- SMS reminders from courts to litigants about what expectations are
- Using data for legal services to better track their work & targets
- Virtual office kits to provide legal services on the go, or outside of legal offices
- An app that gives checklists to lawyers to ensure they’re catching all the issues
“Don’t Forget Your Court Date”
How text messages and other technology can give legal support to the poor.
It has been three years since the Great Recession ended, but the nation’s courthouses are still swamped with eviction cases, foreclosures, and debt collection suits. If overdue bills and late rent were crimes, all low-income tenants and debtors could get a public defender for free. Because those cases are civil suits, though, the state doesn’t provide an attorney. Which means that in civil court, most people don’t have a lawyer in their corner—even though their homes and financial stability are on the line.
What many do have in their back pockets, however, is a smartphone. And soon, they might be able to find some legal help there, too.
Like everyone else, lawyers for the poor are trying to do more with less, as government grants and private funding have dried up. Increasingly, that means turning to tech, using new tools to deliver information to clients, support volunteer lawyers, and improve their own systems. They’re using text messaging, automated call-backs, Web chats, and computer-assisted mapping.
A crush of new clients is pushing the growing reliance on technology, as the old systems just can’t keep up. For years, people seeking help have called their local legal services offices, only to wait on hold for 20 minutes or more. If someone has a pay-by-the-minute cellphone, as many low-income people do, that gets expensive fast. Many callers just give up, says Elizabeth Frisch, the co-executive director of Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania. So Frisch and her team are piloting an automated call-back system, using voice over IP, to reduce hold time and save those precious minutes.
Text messages can also improve efficiency. If courts sent SMS reminders to litigants, that would help move along cases that get postponed over and over when one party doesn’t show up, says Glenn Rawdon. Rawdon runs the technology grants program at the Legal Services Corp., the federal program that funds legal aid groups. A text could also help people remember to bring documents to meetings with their overworked lawyers. “It’s very time-consuming if they come to the appointment and say, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot to bring the papers,’ ” Rawdon says. And SMS can be used to deliver basic legal information, like what to look for when signing a lease, or the laws surrounding a wage claim. Legal aid groups in Georgia, New York, Washington, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are all piloting text-based campaigns this year.
For simple questions, technology can help deliver information to clients. For more complicated problems, only a lawyer will do. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough lawyers to go around. That’s particularly true outside of cities.
For example, 70 percent of Georgia’s lawyers are in the Atlanta metro area, although just under 30 percent of the state’s population lives there, according to the State Bar of Georgia. Six counties have no lawyers at all.
“It’s really expensive to deliver legal services in a rural area. Lawyers have to travel,” says Michael Monahan of Georgia Legal Services. Some lawyers at his organization cover six or seven counties, he says, working in the field three or four days a week.
So five years ago, Georgia Legal Services created virtual office kits, with laptops, portable printers, and scanners. They also got an assist from Sprint, which provided free air cards for mobile Internet access and an “extremely low data rate” for unlimited usage.
In Ohio, which also has big rural areas and a shortage of lawyers to serve them, Web chat can help volunteers reach more clients.
The system “allows us to address an imbalance between where the attorneys are and where our clients are,” says Kevin Mulder, executive director of Legal Aid of Western Ohio.
But logistics aren’t the only hurdle for volunteers. They can be “a little uncomfortable taking cases that are outside their practice area,” says David Lund, who runs the Legal Aid Service of Northeastern Minnesota.
If you’re used to dealing with real estate contracts, for instance, a Medicaid case can be intimidating. So he’s developing a set of checklists for specific issues, optimized for tablets, that lawyers can use when they’re volunteering.
They’ll use it at the start of a case, as they’re laying out a client’s options, and at potential settlements, to make sure that they haven’t missed anything crucial. In eviction cases, for example, a landlord can get a judgment of possession. This allows the tenant to leave without paying back rent, but it’s still a judgment against him, which means it can jeopardize eligibility for future subsidized housing, like Section 8. An experienced landlord-tenant lawyer would know that. An occasional volunteer would not. Which is where the checklist comes in.
Some things are best left to full-time legal aid lawyers. But since there are so few, groups are using data analysis and mapping to better focus their scarce resources. Prairie State Legal Services in Rockford, Ill., is using its “incredible mass of data” to develop a mapping project, plotting addresses and legal needs. Director Michael O’Connor says this will help them answer questions like, “Are there clusters in certain communities where lots of people are facing issues with access to public benefits, or substandard housing?” Armed with that information, his staff can do targeted outreach campaigns or ramp up for litigation.
No one thinks technology is a cure-all. Even the best app or website can’t stand next to you in front of a judge, responding to the opposing counsel.
And despite these promising tools, unmet need is enormous. Many clients want more support than they can get from an app or a chat, but limited funds make that unlikely. “For a large percentage of those folks, [help via technology] will be it. That will be the most that we will be able to offer,” says Deb Jennings, who manages a phone helpline at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Toledo, Ohio. And the use of new tech tools is in the early stages—many projects are somewhere between concept and beta.
The tools that are in use show great promise. Groups across the country have developed self-help websites, and they’ve been hugely popular. In 2012 so far, more than 3 million people downloaded resources from LawHelp.org, a nonprofit site that offers legal information and legal aid referrals. Through an affiliated site, people can answer simple questions and produce documents ready to file in court. More than 300,000 people have created documents this year, for things like wills, leases, and custody agreements.
In an ideal world, everyone who needs one would have a lawyer. But few people know better than lawyers for the poor just how far from ideal this world is.
Relying on technology “is a bit waving the white flag and saying we acknowledge we’re not going to help everybody, so here’s a second best solution,” O’Connor says. “And it is second best, but it is at least providing help to some people who otherwise wouldn’t get anything.”
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
CanLii is an app out of Toronto that allows for easier searching of Canadian law. It’s an effort to make the legislation more accessible, and hoping that trickles down to more numbers of people in Canada being in control of their legal pathways.
New mobile app gives free access to legal resources, legislation and jurisprudence:
by Mitch Kowalski
While RIM flounders, other Canadians in the legal tech field continue to make giant strides.
The newly released app, WiseLii, Canada’s Mobile Legal Research Tool is now available free of charge from iTunes.
This new app was developed with the permission of CanLii (although not affiliated with CanLii) and gives increased mobile access to legal information, legislation and case law for all Canadians.
According to the app’s creator, Toronto lawyer Garry Wise, “This project is an access to justice initiative, bringing legal information, legislation and jurisprudence to all Canadians, free of charge, on the iPhone mobile platform.”
Garry, who is a fervent legal blogger, speaker and one of Canada’s top social media influencers, has been working on this passion project for more than a year.
“I began hearing about law firms building apps,” he said. “I was intrigued but wanted to do something that went beyond the typical “mobile business card” that I was seeing. Increasingly, I found myself reaching for my iPhone at pretrials and mediations, looking up cases, legislation and blogs that were relevant to issues that came up, but the results were hard to read on mobile and the process was not so nimble. A legal research app seemed like an obvious direction. One of our former articling students, Chris Bird was instrumental in developing the idea. As it evolved, the app’s usefulness to the general public as an access to justice tool became increasingly clear – free information democratized justice. That’s the beauty of CanLii.”
Wise pauses for a moment. Then a sly smile appears. “But truth be told, we built it because I wanted to use it myself. “
A major problem in governance is the spread of misinformation and rumors. Sometimes these result from concerted campaigns by political actors, to manipulate politicians with rumors meant to make them suspicious or fearful about something. Other times rumors are not driven by anyone, but snowball on their own. Either way, flare-ups of rumors can wreak havoc on governance, personal security, community relations, and rule of law.
Misinformation can also be a problem regarding the law. With a proliferation of online forums and social media, people may get legal information from their peers that is incorrect. Can we use mobile tech to combat common misinformation and rumors, and spread quality and correct information?
Technology can be a carrier of rumors — see the unrest in the last Kenyan elections, when rumors sent by text fed into ethnic attacks, riots, and deaths. But there are some tech design projects which are trying to quell, staunch, and kill rumor campaigns to improve local governance and relations. A recent report by the USIP highlighted several of these in Afghanistan.
Call-In Program: Present the Rumor to Experts & Check if Its True
“Afghanistan has evolved rapidly as a test bed for mobile-based programs at the district level that have the potential to improve both communication with government officials and transparency. This is exemplified by the work done by the UK-managed Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which has launched two mobile-based programs that deserve careful consideration for broader rollout in other districts: a specialized call-in radio program and a crime-reporting hotline. The team has demonstrated initial success in holding local government officials accountable for their response to emergencies and crime while engaging civil society anew, and the programs make for worthwhile case studies. Radio call-in shows are not new to Afghanistan. What distinguishes this weekly program in Helmand is the expanding audience it has, thanks to its regular use of provincial official as hosts who take questions from citizens about civil administration. The show is hosted on local station Bost and is funded by the UK government, which purchases commercial airtime for the show.
“Radio is the most popular and easy-to-use communication medium in Afghanistan, but call-in programs have had varying degrees of success. This show, however, has proved to be very popular by allowing provincial officials, who are constrained in their ability to travel because of security concerns and poor transport, to speak about the state of affairs in their sectors and address the concerns of constituents. Nick Lockwood of the Helmand PRT underscored the potential of this forum when he described a program that had led a senior police chief to make a number of changes to his unit in response to listeners’ complaints about corruption among his officers. Subsequent programs hosted by other district police chiefs benefited by attracting ever bigger audiences.
In an information-starved environment like Afghanistan, where such call-in programs meet with notable success, officials should also consider using an IVR-based news system to combat the rumors that can be so dangerous. In fact, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting launched its IVR-based news service around the September 2010 elections in Afghanistan. Its Cell Phone Voter Project provided users with a toll-free number to access news stories about the elections via their phones in Dari, Pashto, and English.”
Fact Check by SMS
“MobileActive.org’s Katrin Verclas, a pioneer in mobile phone deployments, pointed to Zimbabwe, where MobileActive.org had helped to implement an information system with features that could be adapted for similar purposes. On hearing of an event or news story, users can send an SMS to the system, which then replies with a phone call that provides accurate information about the event or news. Users can listen to messages in three different languages. In the first week of its implementation in Zimbabwe, this program received over three thousand phone calls and is helping to create a more politically engaged public.”
Mobile Citizenship
“Verclas further noted that mobile telephony is likely to be used more frequently in this way to raise awareness of critical issues of citizen concern, share documented stories of localcrime and corruption, record user responses to questions and prompts, and poll citizens about local issues. Lockwood of the Helmand PRT confirmed this observation in the Afghan context, indicating plans to explore ways of promoting the agenda, activities, and meetings of the District Community Councils (DCCs) as a way of creating a sense of ownership of the DCCs among their constituent populations and instilling a demand for services. USAID also has plans to create a service called Mobile Khabar (khabar means “news” in Dari and Pashto) to use mobile phones as a delivery system for news and information.”
Dispute resolution mechanisms inside refugee communities can be a model for other resolution systems in non-refugee contexts.
For example, consider the ideas identified in this write-up of design interventions in a Serbian camp in the 1990s, by Divna Persic-Todorovic. In particular, consider in-person and game-based trainings in dispute resolution.
“This article is about the work on interpersonal conflict resolution in refugee camps in Serbia by the MOST group for non-violent conflict resolution. Difficult living conditions in refugee camps (lack of facilities; the necessity to share them) created many interpersonal disagreements. The situation was worsened by the sense of hopelessness that people brought from the places which they had to flee. They shared horrible stories of the war and of failed attempts to make their lives better. This circular motion of pain produced more sorrow.
“To break these dynamics, MOST organized activities in summer camps for refugees to teach people problem solving skills and active listening, promoting more understanding between them. They used such techniques as “Communication Games”, the “Secret Friend” game and workshops with an emphasis on conflict analysis. The “Secret Friend” game created an atmosphere of joy. People were coming up with creative ideas for how to make another person happily surprised. In analyzing their relationships, people were exercising active listening techniques and learned to recognize each others’ needs. Going from there, they tried to create solutions. The author concludes that the work done by MOST produced encouraging results in improving refugee’s relations and their view of life.”
Persic-Todorovic, Divna. Conflict Resolution, Working with Refugees. Conflict Resolution Notes. V. 12, No. 4. April, 1995. Pp. 44-45.