Category: Ideabook

Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Navigation maps for all legal services in a jurisdiction

prototyping-access-to-justice-final-presentation-49

This concept proposal is to create a single map and wayfinding system for all the different types of legal services, across all kinds of different providers, in a jurisdiction. It can be a geographic map, as well as organizational and process map.

It would lay out where a person could go find help, and direct them to these different stops in a coherent and standard way.

It would have similar markers (like an i for Information, or a legal image) everywhere that a person could find legal help in a geographic area.

This concept comes from our class on Prototyping Access in Spring 2016.

Categories
Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Legal Health Checkup concept sketch

An increasingly popular concept for access innovations is the Legal Health Checkup, that would serve as an initial outreach to laypeople. It would help them understand what issues they are currently dealing with that might have legal recourse — and then would give them resources to follow up on this.

For checkups, I’ve observed three types:

  • ones for a specific problem
  • ones for a specific type of person (of a certain age, profession, family situation, nationality)
  • ones that are generic for everyone

They can be administered online, through surveys, bots or checklists. Or they could be done at work, at a church/synagogue/mosque, at a school, or another community institution.

legal health checkup

There are some existing checkups, like one in Ontario. One concept idea is for a checkup is more mobile and resourceful than the current models. Here are some sketched notes exploring how there could be a richer type of checklist, with better:

  • outreach touchpoints
  • technology delivery
  • takeaways given after the checkup is done

legal health checkup 

 

 

 

Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

Secure video uploads to document rights violations

safe video export service
This concept is for an online service that would allow for secure uploads from places that are under surveillance or without great digital freedoms. The service would allow them to anonymously, securely upload videos and photos that document human rights abuses and other potentially controversial events. The service would ensure the content got to the outside world, and would prevent repressive regimes from taking it down.

Categories
Advocates Ideabook

THE BUOY PROJECT – Tech For Justice

The winner of the New Mexico Tech for Justice hackathon was THE BUOY PROJECT .

Here is the description of the project — an emergency services line for a community — from the site.

Buoy is a private, enhanced 9-1-1 for your website and community. It is a community-driven emergency dispatch system because everything about it’s design is based on the idea that in situations where traditional emergency services are not available, reliable, trustworthy, or sufficient, communities can come together to aid each other in times of need. 

Buoy can be used by groups of any size, ranging from national organizations like the National Coaliation Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), to local community groups such as Solidarity Houston, or even private social clubs such as your World of WarCraft guild.

The more community leaders who add the Buoy system on their websites, the safer people in those communities can be. Buoy is software that equips your website with tools that your users can use to help one another in the real world; the more buoys are deployed on the ocean, the safer traveling becomes for everyone.

Inspired by community-based emergency response technology Better Angels, development for Buoy originally began at the September 2015 Tech for Justice and New Mexico Legal Aid event to develop technology-based justice tools around the issue of domestic violence.

The Buoy project currently consists of a fully functional prototype for a web-based app based on a WordPress plug-in, which you can download here. The ultimate goal of the Buoy project is to develop a native shell mobile version of the Buoy app. 

buoy mobile img

How can I get Buoy?

Since Buoy is so new and is designed to be used in real-life emergencies, we are only working with a small group of alpha testers in order to ensure that there are no major technical or usability issues before its widespread adoption. However, we are very excited about the possibilities and we are currently looking to include more people in the testing process. If you think this is exciting and want to help put the finishing polish on this tool, please get in touch with us here.

That being said, if you are a community leader, and you maintain a WordPress-powered website, you can try out Buoy right now by installing it directly from your WordPress admin screens! It’s just as easy to install as any other WordPress plugin. Similarly, if you yourself are not a “community leader,” but you want to try it out, you can either ask to join our private testing phase or you can tell others in your community about Buoy and see if the group of you can install it on your own group’s website.

How it works

Tutorial

FAQ

Support

More information about the app, how to use it, how to set it up, and what it does, is compiled here.

In order to be maximally inclusive, though, we’d love to have the app be translated into Spanish. To that end, we’ve made a separate space where anyone who speaks both English and Spanish can use their Web browser to help us translate the app from English into Spanish. To help, sign up as a translator from this page.

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

Legal Rapid Prototyping Core team

What if we had on-site teams that could quickly spot problems, create an intervention, test it, and improve on it — all in one day or less, to make a great new design that actually works and is meaningful to the stakeholders (say, in a legal clinic, self help center, or court).

Rapid Prototyping design

Ideally this team would have design, research, and development skills on it, and could quickly build and implement promising new solutions.

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Ideabook Training and Info

Street Law cartoon outreach

Legal Design Ideas - ideabook for access to justice - cartoon outreach around street law

Could we make gripping cartoon outreach posters — with basic primers on key points of law and legal services, that apply to people who are likely to be hanging out in a certain physical space?

This idea came up for Trafficking, in airports, bus terminals, and other places of transit. Could we have small illustrated stories or explainers about the law that applies, and what some cases’ storylines and outcomes are?

It will make the law seem more relevant, and also help people better understand what options and strategies are open to them.

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Advocates Ideabook

Legal Advocate SMS

Legal Design Ideas - ideabook for access to justice - Advocate SMS

A mobile-first solution, that would let any lay person connect to basic legal knowledge and education through virtually free SMS back-and-forths. It could be lessons taught in small bite-size chunks and stories, through a series of texts. It could be daily reminders with key lessons to remember. Or it could even be virtual mentoring and instruction, with a real person (or an automated teacher) on the other end, helping a person understand a specific idea.

The goal is to get basic, essential legal knowledge into people’s hands in a lightweight, and virtually free way.

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Advocates Ideabook Integration into Community

“Human Law” drop-in problem-solving centers

Legal Design Ideas - ideabook for access to justice - Human Law

What if there were physical locations in communities, in which people with life problems could drop in and get help?

There would be lawyers there, but there could also be medical, mental health, social service, immigration, and all kinds of other specialists.

It would be a center for holistic care, that you could understand your problem’s possible solutions in many dimensions at once.

Ideally, the tone of the place would be different from most social, government, or legal service centers. The place could be friendly, nice, human-scale, anti-bureaucratic, and warm.

Categories
Advocates Ideabook

Lawyer transparency with stats cards

Legal_Design_Concepts - lawyer baseball card
If one of laypeople’s main concerns about using the legal system is the lack of transparency around hiring a lawyer (how much do they cost? are they any good? will they be the right fit for me?) — then how can we give a person more insight into their possible choices of lawyers and who might be right for them?

There are plenty of lawyer indexes and matchmaking sites online, but what would be cool would be a Stats Card, akin to a baseball card, with hard numbers (not proprietary rankings, that lawyers can game by authoring articles or participating in an online system) about the lawyer’s actual performance.

If a third party neutral entity could count how many cases, proceedings, mediations, outcomes, etc. a lawyer has achieved, as well as client satisfaction with the process (if not also the outcome), this could help prospective users of the legal system be more confident in making a smart choice — and so perhaps more likely to use the system in the first place.

Categories
Ideabook Integration into Community

Client Control over Data, Portable Client Data

access innovation ideas - portable client data

As the client goes to a 2 hour consultation, the lawyer takes notes straight into the client’s portable data point. It means that the client can then take this with them to all other care team members — and very easily & quickly show them what’s going on, with the lawyer’s notes presented in the standard fields.

We would need to have consistent fields among the service providers. A consistent way to read it.

The litigant would be able to see it, take it with them, share it with others.

It could be used to pre-populate forms and court documents.