Building National iSchool Collaboratories with the Legal and Nonprofit Sectors

1. Building National iSchool Collaboratories with the Legal and Nonprofit Sectors Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. J.D., LL.M. Executive Director, The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. executive-director@ieuc.org http://www.ieuc.org All opinions expressed herein are those of Mr. Wasilko and have not, at this time, been formally adopted by the IEUC’s Board of Directors.

2. The Legal Sector • Legal reasoning & analysis skills are timeless. But, the Half-Life of substantive legal rules mastered in Law School is plunging so after a few years the most of what one memorized for the Bar Exam has changed. • This has led to the emergence of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) requirements for the practicing bar, but such courses tend to be too shallow to effect employment dynamics and serve more to enrich CLE Providers. • Some, legal employers try to minimize their overhead by dropping ‘on the job training’ (which today’s clients are no longer willing to subsidize) and by replacing more seasoned associates with less expensive recent grads freshly versed in current rules. • This leaves many lawyers with no mid-life career path making them ideal iSchool Ph.D. recruitment targets. • Likewise, as the economy has worsened, increasing numbers of recent college grads and displaced older workers have flocked to Law Schools leading to an over saturation of newly minted J.D.’s that is outpacing market demand. • In the past, LL.M.’s served as an advanced law degree that would lead to academic employment and coveted niche positions. • Today the LL.M. has been transformed into a shortcut entry degree allowing foreign lawyers to sit for the Bar in many jurisdictions without committing to a full J.D. program leaving current law students searching for a modern alternative often in the form of some sort of Joint Degree Program. • Vendors and Legal Publishers dominate technology advances since firms are highly risk averse and won’t develop new tech in-house. • Firms limit collaboration with academia due in large part to privacy concerns and fear of lost billings — they will veto any clinical offerings that might service otherwise paying clients.

3. Legal Education’s Blind Spot • In the real world, IT skills are the key source of service quality and economic viability of the firm. • But for the most part, Law School Deans and Faculty view Technology Training as a library science function most often delegated to some mix of TA’s, non-faculty staff, and vendor/publisher reps. • Law faculty lack interest and expertise in Legal IT beyond basic vendor/publisher supplied research tools. • They firmly believe that there is too much substantive law to cover, that there is no good legal informatics text, that they lack the resources to develop a standard IT curriculum to teach to, and that pursuing the study of legal IT wouldn’t help them maintain their accreditation. • Moreover, Legal IT is Not Seen as a Subject Worthy of Development in the Law School Proper. • Perhaps more troubling, students can specialize in Intellectual Property Law and the regulation of IT without having any substantive understanding of the nature of the technology, or the processes & economics under which it is created. • Only after lawyers experience the real world do they begin to see the down side of law schools’ institutional bias for overregulation as evidenced by a subtle shift in attitudes expressed within the Intellectual Property Law Section at recent Annual Meetings of the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA). • These observations led me to champion a call by my subcommittee of the NYSBA Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar to initiate a survey of (1) the use of IT in teaching law, of (2) any extracurricular offerings related to substantive Legal IT & IT in general, and of (3) any efforts to develop new Legal IT within New York State Law Schools. (All topics worthy of Ph.D. level investigation.) • Sadly, the proposal was soundly rejected by the Law Deans and the members of my IT subcommittee were subsequently rotated off of the Legal Ed Committee under a standing NYSBA policy of limiting the terms of committee service, so we won’t be able to revisit this issue in that venue.

4. What iSchool Ph.D.’s Should Know About Law • They should Understand The Different Sources of Law and The Processes through which Law is created and changed. • Statutes & Legislative Histories • Administrative Rule Making — Both Policy and Science-Based (e.g. spectrum allocation and Cap & Trade Environmental Law) • Common Law and Litigation Mechanics • Private Contracts • More importantly, they need to understand the Types of Legal Reasoning employed by legal professionals and How to Formally Model Them. • Black Letter Rules amenable to Expert System Treatment or representation as an And/Or Graph • Balancing Tests & Classifications amenable to Fuzzy Logic or Scientific Argumentation • Complex Case-Based Reasoning calling for a mix of techniques in a Full Featured Decision Support System • They should be familiar with Prophylactic Law :: The basics of Contracts, Dispute Resolution, new Venture creation, and Corporate Governance. (i.e. How to use Law to make things happen and avoid legal problems in the first place.) • They should have a high level grasp of those facets of Substantive Law that govern information :: An Overview of IP Law, Regulation of Electronic Communications, Privacy, Electronic Discovery, eMail policy, State Law treatment of Library Records, Computer Crime, National Security Law. However, the detailed rules and study of past case law that make up the bulk of law school content in these areas can be safely elided. • They should have a solid grounding in Legal IT :: Case & Matter Management, Legal Information Retrieval, Hypertext Applications, Bibliometics, Past Academic Work (Sutton’s LEX), ‘Law Office, Courthouse, & Government Technology’, Intelligent Tutoring & Simulation Systems for Legal Ed, Legal XML and Semantic Web applications to law and government.

5. The Nonprofit Sector • The top two tiers of the sector consist of a handful of nonprofits that are massive enterprises equivalent to modern multinationals with all the accoutrements thereof and a slightly larger mid tier of smaller established national & regional charities and major Corporate or family Foundations respectively. • Regulatory and Funding dynamics heavily favor these groups. • And there is a much larger third tier of much smaller, largely struggling, Community Based Organizations and emerging players that are massively understaffed and underfunded. Among these are the new breed of volunteer driven Virtual Organizations like The IEUC. • On top of this there is a vast Quantum Foam of nonprofit startups most of which die a relatively quick and often painful death. • Training in this sector is far less formalized than in the Legal Sector since there is no equivalent of Law School and The Bar Exam and most new players flounder on their own. • A number of graduate programs do focus on professional fundraising or nonprofit management, but they are mostly structured as after the fact Executive Training for individuals who have already established themselves in the upper tiers of the sector so they have little impact on most small organizations. • For Virtual Organizations and Nonprofit Startups emerging from the Quantum Foam, regulatory overhead costs can easily exceed 80% to 90% of their budgets and Online Fundraising and Traditional Grant Writing are highly ineffective due to their lack of name recognition and full time staff. • Nevertheless, they have the lowest overhead costs in terms of absolute dollars and often tackle problems no one else will. • How these organizations deal with information foraging and networking is the key determinant of their survival and efficacy. • iSchool Ph.D.’s should master these dynamics, the basics of non-profit governance, and focus on the sector’s use of IT.

6. National Collaboratories Centers Without Walls: “In operational terms a collaboratory is a distributed computer system with networked laboratory instruments and data-gathering platforms; tools that enable a variety of collaborative activities; financial and human resources for maintaining, evolving, and assisting in the use of computer-based facilities; and digital libraries that include tools for organizing, describing, and managing data, thus enabling the large-scale sharing of data. A collaboratory provides a technological base specifically created to support interaction among scientists, instruments, and data networked to facilitate research conducted independent of distance.” National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research p.7 • From the 1990’s through the early 2000’s a number of highly successful National Collaboratories were founded in the physical sciences to share Data, Software, Instruments, and Personnel. • They covered areas like Oceanographic Research, Space Physics, and the study of Worm genetics. • Projects would often start with a ‘Collaboratory of One’ and evolve into Group Iniatives using CSCW facilities. (i.e. A lone researcher pooling data from multiple sources would communicate a thesis to colleagues who join in exploring it.) • We learned that a system must be able to educate its users and offer a gentle learning curve so it doesn’t get in the way of their substantive work. • Most importantly, data, content, and code should be maintained in standardized modular formats that are both importable and exportable from the platform so they can be used in other contexts— I call thisThe Principle of Severablility. • This way any end-user work product will be guaranteed to be able to outlive the system — otherwise participants will be less likely to invest time in radically tailoring or extending the platform and over time it will die likeMIT’s MediaMoo.

7. The Big Question: Can the Collaboratory Concept be Applied to iSchool Ph.D. Research into the Legal and Nonprofit Sectors? • While the Social Sciences don’t entail apportioning access to networks of scarce ‘physical instruments’, they do generate lots of Data, in the form of statutes and case law, and citations in the Legal Sector and in the form of financial data, open source software repositories & change logs, social networks, and traditional scientific data in the Nonprofit Sector. • These data sources offer rich subject matter exploring the formation, sharing, use, and organization of information in group & organizational settings where information overload is a major contributor to burn out and missed opportunities. • Data analysis, organization, and visualization tools like geographic information systems from the hard sciences could be applied to these data sets, but in both sectors most existing databases are controlled by private interests (Westlaw, Lexis, and GuideStar). • Collaboratories help channel scarce resources and in these sectors such scarcity applies to (1) funding for research (junior law faculty have a hard time finding support for IT research and startup nonprofits have little chance of winning funding or drawing public support unless they partner with established players) (2) support for forming research communities, and (3) the identification of real world organizations that would be willing to participate in academic collaborations, to have their people interviewed, or to serve as project test beds. • By consolidating access to these scarce resources and mediating access to information sources that are too voluminous to be readily located and absorbed, National iSchool Collaboratories would open the door to a wide range of dissertation projects at participating institutions that aren’t feasible today, and the systems & findings coming out of those projects would directly benefit the public at large. • Moreover, by focusing on the support of non-scientists, projects in these sectors would have to address HCI issues at a much deeper level than previous generations of collaboratories, which would drive improvements to the collaboratory infrastructure which could then be fed back into the design of future systems developed to advance the Hard Sciences. This potential research dividend should make iSchool Collaboratories attractive to the NSF.

8. A Common Opportunity for iSchool Collaboratories • Both Sectors Share a need for introspection into how they manage information resources internally and how they can tie their systems to those of external stakeholders while suffering from a lack of the “system building culture” found in HCI. • They also suffer from a great Diaspora of people interested in their iDimension since those individuals are scattered internationally across institutions and disciplinary lines. • The systems provided by their “vendors” be they commercial suppliers of legal tech or open source efforts to build nonprofit tech, have low levels of interoperability and severability. • Their differentiating characteristics, past academic surveys, and current automation frameworks lend themselves to encapsulation as Ph.D. Program Modules following the Maryland Modular Method (M3). • They are relatively untapped rich environments suitable for Qualitative Research and System Development. • Knowing What to Read & Who to Contact to facilitate such work is the scarce resource that cries out for a National Collaboratory. Likewise, a collaboratory could serve as a funding conduit to bring law grads and emerging nonprofits into the loop. • iSchool Ph.D.’s with specialization in these sectors will be in the ideal position to form new organizations and take on exciting leadership roles in existing ones and that expertise would also position them to pursue careers in the Public Sector or Politics. • Thus, Offering Law and Nonprofit modules tied to such collaboratories may attract underrepresented groups to the Ph.D. Program, particularly if such work is seen as a way to ‘give back to society’ by discovering new ways of increasing government accountability, improving the delivery of legal services to the poor, and enhancing the effectiveness of Community Based Nonprofits while working with organizations already serving and based in such communities. Moreover, iSchool intervention & research could save many charities in the Quantum Foam that would otherwise be destined for failure by helping them assess and improve their methods. • This approach offers a Color Blind path to initiating Jaeger and Franklin’s ‘Virtuous Circle’ to further increase iSchool diversity by grounding Masters and Ph.D. study in matters that matter most to underrepresented groups — without the risks of legal exposure, public relations problems, and staff animosity that race & ethnicity grounded admissions, hiring, and career advancement decisions can entail, should they be characterized as a form of reverse discrimination.

9. Future Directions • Focus on Technology Integration. Since We Know How to Do Collaboratories in Technical Disciplines, The Challenge is to Transfer that Knowhow to the Social Sciences. • Such collaboratories need to subsume a lot of existing functionality and make it orders of magnitude easier for End Users to work with it and customize it. • Deploy to The Cloud so each collaboratory’s “Virtual Data Center” can be cheaply cloned and retargeted to serve real world organizations. This would obviate the need to have dedicated hardware under the operational control of any individual participating institution and dramatically reduce technology transfer barriers. • Such systems should be Open Source and support a Federated Data & Knowledge Sharing Architecture allowing for their hierarchical decomposition and the organization of their resources and facilities along multiple dimensions using a facetted classification scheme. • Then a user could request ‘decision support systems related to accounting for small nonprofits’ and when a critical mass of researchers and potential users & research-subjects caring about that subtopic arose, the emergent group could ‘spin up’ a dedicated sub-collaboratory of its own that would employ Prototype Inheritance to leverage the master collaboratory while enjoying the freedom to customize their interactions with it. • Set up a mailing list for anyone interested in this topic. • Apply to the NSF for funding to Organize a Follow Up Workshop to assess the feasibility of and tentative design parameters for such systems as a prelude to major grant writing.

10. References on The Legal Sector,The Nonprofit Sector, and NationalCollaboratories Alltop — Top Nonprofit News. (2009). [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://nonprofit.alltop.com/ Ashley, K. D. (1990). Modeling legal argument: Reasoning with cases and hypotheticals. MIT Press. Assoication for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2008, December 14). AI topics / law [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/Law Bender (2004, November 23). Rules of the collaboratory game [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.technologyreview.com/business/13899/ Biermann, A., & others (1997). More than screen deep: Toward every-citizen interfaces to the nation's information infrastructure. National Academy Press. Flynn, N. (2009). The e-policy handbook: Rules and best practices to safely manage your company's e-mail, blogs, social networking, and other electronic communication tools. New York: American Management Association. Government Technology: State & Local Government News Articles. (2009). [Web page]. Retrieved May 25, 2009, from http://www.govtech.com/ GuideStar USA, Inc. (2009). Guidestar nonprofit reports and forms 990 for donors, grantmakers and businesses [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.guidestar.org Jones, Y. P. (2008). “Just the Facts Ma’am?” A Contextual Approach to the Legal Information Use Environment. Drexel University. National Center for State Courts (2008, December 24). High tech courtrooms resource guide [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.ncsconline.org/wc/CourTopics/ResourceGuide.asp?topic=CtRoom Committee on a National Collaboratory: Developing the User-Developer Partnership(1993) National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research. National Academy Press. Nonfprofit Academic Centers Council (2004). Member centers. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.naccouncil.org/members.asp NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network (2009). NTEN original research [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.nten.org/research Overly, M. R. (1999). E-Policy: How to develop computer, e-policy, and internet guidelines to protect your company and its assets. New York: AMACOM. Richards (2009). Legal information systems & legal informatics resources. [Web page] Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://home.comcast.net/~richards1000/LegalInformationSystemsBibliography.htm Rose, D. E. (1994). A symbolic and connectionist approach to legal information retrieval. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Susskind, R. E. (2001). Transforming the law: Essays on technology, justice, and the legal marketplace. New York: Oxford University Press. Sutton, S. A. (1991). Managing legal information: A model of institutional memory based on user cognitive maps. University of California at Berkeley. The Center for Technology in Government (2009). CTG home page [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.ctg.albany.edu The Foundation Center (2009). Catalog of nonprofit literature — previously known as literature of the nonproft sector (LNPS). [Web page] Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://cnl.foundationcenter.org/ The Foundation Center (2009). Foundation center — knowledge to build on (the foundation center homepage). [Web page] Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://cnl.foundationcenter.org/ University of Michigan School of Information (2005). Bibliography of collaboratories [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.scienceofcollaboratories.org/Resources/biblist.php University of Michigan School of Information (2005). Collaboratories at a glance [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.scienceofcollaboratories.org/Resources/colisting.php?startDate+asc University of Texas School of Information (n.d.). Legal applications of artificial intelligence [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/project98/ailaw/ailaw.htm Volunteermatch — Where Volunteering Begins. (2009). [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.volunteermatch.org/ WCS (1995). Worm community system summary [Web page]. Retrieved May 26, 2009, from http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/projects/wcs/index.html