It’s a republication from last September but a worthy one, today’s Op-ed art on the back page of the New York Times’ This Week section - iPanic: Helping you deal with the loss of your life savings, one app at a time. “The fetish that’s a phone on the only network that’s an option gets even more practical, with apps for navigating your newfound destitution.”

Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) has posted its 2010 Technology Plan as a publicly viewable Google Doc, in solidarity with NTAP’s efforts at its technology planning portal to support legal services programs as they develop the technology plans now required by LSC.

There are a lot of different ways one can approach this task. We tried to avoid the all-too-prevalent, easily scanned, less likely read, and arguably not so well comprehended bullet-style of reporting and planning. Yes, there is select use of bullets (three sets, to be exact). In the opening paragraph we recognize that “the LSC instructions require, at a minimum, identification of any capacities the organization lacks, but encourage submission of a plan that describes current and planned uses of technology.” That is what we think we did.

We wanted to create something readable, something that helps us, the Legal Services Corporation and others interested to read and understand how we view and take advantage of technology. Conforming to the LSC baselines is pretty good place to build out from, and despite their predictably sterile descriptions of basic technology needs, the twelve basic categorizations in the LSC baselines are a reasonable way to break it all down. So we did it that way.

Like everyone else out there, we are feeling the crush of these times on our clients, the loss of any number of alternate funding sources, the unparalleled collapse of IOLTA,… oh, we all know too well the story at hand. And if that is not bad enough, our institutional resources have been further strained by the calamity of a major fire that recently took out our Ukiah Office. We are pleased to report that our existing technology infrastructure and practices helped us weather that setback, but undoubtedly would have been magnified many times over without our having essential technologies in place.

A few days ago Google pushed code for new features in Google Sites that noticeably affected some individual site customization. It certainly impacted ours, including an intranet-style content area that we customized using a fair amount of background images and inline CSS code styles.

Google has posted a helpful list of notable changes, worth reviewing if you are baffled about the what and why of your broken Google Sites customizations. For example, it states: “When you customize your site in the colors and fonts area this will override your inline html styles. Customized colors and fonts now trump inline styles.” Okay, that’s different as are several other things.

Perhaps the most entertaining five-minute Flash video you’re likely to see on a perennial (webby) legal issue: Copyright Basics - The Video.

Here’s a simple example of how we use Google Docs within our Google Apps domain to share tech solutions with all staff at LSNC:

Today we felt it was time to let our more ambitious users know how to do a bulk export of their Google Docs to their desktop or other location of choice. So we used Google Docs to create instructions on how to bulk export your Google Docs, with links to the applicable Firefox add-ons and a few basic screen captures to illustrate particular steps. The version of the document linked in this post is shared as a public web page, for illustrative purposes here, but internally what we actually do is simply make the document viewable by all within our domain, and then add a link to it to our endlessly exciting “Team Gizmo Updates” announcement page in Google Sites, plus link it to a special “Google Tools” page, also part of our Google Sites content.

All within our domain can now search for and/or navigate to the solution at our Google Sites. Fewer tech calls on this question. Everyone is happier.

Last week there was widespread media attention to Amazon’s removal of sales rankings on a number of gay- and lesbian-themed books due to a “glitch.” One of the more notable responses was by technologist Mary Hodder who in a guest post at TechCruch dissected the episode and explained Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch.

For a further take on these issues, consider How the Amazon “Glitch” Relates to Structural Discrimination and Racism. The post, by Keith Kamisugi of the Equal Justice Society, reflects insightfully on the challenges of addressing human bias and structural discrimination in areas, such as technology, where most may think it does not or would not exist. A worthy read.

You either get it or you don’t. And if you do, you gotta get it:

Last week I participated in an NTAP webinar offering a quick-hit intro to various Google applications. My segment was Google Apps specific, showing how LSNC now uses Google Sites as its “official” intranet site for what we call our “Secured Private Network.”

As a modest coda, without any accompanying audio but perhaps of interest as an example how easily one can create a presentation using Google Docs and then publish it to the Web, here are the slides I used during the presentation: Google Apps = Google Sites = Intranet. The slide presentation was created entirely within Google Docs. You should see options at the bottom of the viewport for viewing particular slides, and others options for printing the presentation as a PDF or a PPT, the latter being usable in PowerPoint if that is your druthers. Another useful action is the option to create a copy to Google Docs of the slide presentation, a feature that works in both your domain’s Google Apps or your personal Google account.

What are other ways might one use Google Apps? Among current examples I can think of within our organization, staff use Google Apps to do the following:

• The forms feature in Google Docs is used by the executive office to track compliance by local offices when conducting California State Bar approved MCLE events.
• Very commonly, individual staff use folders in Google Docs to maintain personal document collections on non-case projects, including originals created or shared within LSNC in Google Docs, as well as imported Word and PDF files from those outside LSNC.
• Google Docs and Google Sites were used in combination by one office to create individual “workplan” spreadsheets which were then embedded in a Google Site used as the office’s work plan site. As staff updated their individual workplans, changes were displayed in real time at the shared Google Site.
• Tech staff archive and share among themselves select pieces of reusable code for specific projects, e.g., the custom CSS code used for LSNC’s Secured Private Network site, Google Search Appliance configuration sets and parameters being used for The Findability Project, jQuery and other JavaScript code blocks being used for various LSNC web projects, and so on.
• Vetting of proposed policies and protocols by doing Google Docs shares rather than using email attachment loops.
• While LSNC still relies on the superb Basecamp platform for management of large-scale litigation and advocacy projects, advocates are being encouraged and have begun to create individual project management sites using Google Sites, even for projects with outside participants. For example, LSNC’s Race Equity Project has assembled an editorial team using Google Sites to co-ordinate the drafting of an upcoming Clearinghouse Review article on “framing” issues. The site is also used to archive notes and documents for the meetings and presentations that have been conducted as part of that drafting process.
• Twenty five LSNC staffers, with representatives from all offices, formed their own “LSNC Greening Project.” How do they communicate and share information? They use Google Sites as their home base, in combo with Google Docs to share documents and a private Google Discussion Group to thrash things out. (They could simplify things by using the announcement page feature in Google Sites to conduct discussions, but that’s their call.)
• Office managers use the forms feature in Google Docs to report changes to IT staff about required changes for personnel listings, Gmail changes, and additions and removals from discussion groups.
• A pro bono component in one office has created an internal Google Site with multiple list pages for tracking case vignettes, available attorneys, cases assignments, contact information, dates assigned and completed, and so on. Everyone in the office working in support of pro bono cases has access to the site.

Just a few ideas among many in current use at LSNC. If you move to Google Apps, you’ll pretty quickly discover even more uses.

An especially engaging article from the front page of today’s New York Times: As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up, emblematic of how pervasively and routinely search and social media are impacting jury trials.

This is a cross-post from the LSNC Advocate Feed but it is worth noting here as well: Today’s New York Times features Immigration Explorer, an interactive GIS map based on census data revealing settlement patterns for 20+ foreign-born groups between 1880 and 2000. The Immigration Explorer map is simply a companion piece to the NYT’s “Remade in America,” with today’s feature article about Diversity in the Classroom, which itself has a separate interactive statistical graph illustrating how student demographics break out by state and county and school district. For example, the Grant Joint Union High school district in Sacramento County, California.