The day I got on a plane for an extended trip to Europe, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) was notified it had been awarded funding for its 2007 Technology Innovation Grant (TIG) application. As it turns out, I was pretty much the last person to know. I spent the month of September without a phone or email or other contact with the office, and so I only heard about the TIG thing and many other developments once I got back to Sacramento.

There was a brief summary of all this year’s TIG awards released on September 12 by LSC but the description there of our project is, well . . . neither apt nor accurate. For those interested, we actually call it the LSNC “Findability Project” and its core purpose is to create a program-wide, highly user-friendly, enterprise-level knowledge-content management system. Here is how we stated the technological challenge in the first three paragraphs of our TIG application:

The structural scale and geographic reach of and substantive range of advocacy by Legal Services of Northern California exacerbates a fundamental dilemma all legal services field programs suffer: How does one make it fast, easy and intuitive for program staff to find and access all the different types of “knowledge content” within the four walls of the organization.

Within this organizational structure there is a wide range of substantive advocacy and administrative expertise, specialization and skill sets, all of which are sources for shared information and knowledge. By “information” we mean that the organization has a variety of documents and other digital data types—word processing files, databases, text files, PDF files, spreadsheets, XML files, presentations, images, video, and so on—that have content the organization perceives as valued and useful; by “knowledge” we mean that the information exists in a context that offers understanding. Random words identified in a document are only pieces of data; words in a document that makes sense and has apparent value is a document that has purpose and is useful; a “usable” document offers the promise of shared knowledge because it brings understanding of the information it contains from one person to another. And knowledge content that can be shared throughout the organization promises that the clients are inherently better served. (The converse is obviously an impossible case to make, i.e., the less the staff knows the better the clients are served.)

But there’s the rub: What does the organization do to assure its staff can find all the knowledge content that should be available to them? Why is this is a practical and technological challenge for LSNC? And what does this have to do with more effectively serving its clients?

So, how do we propose to do this? Our approach has three core components:

Hardware and Software Infrastructure

At its heart, the Project will be built on the enterprise-level Google Search Appliance. This will provide the core hardware and software infrastructure for a single, secure, unified tool for accessing all the usable institutional content available to LSNC staff from any internal or external location. By design, it will enable LSNC users to exploit all the familiar features of Google-based search technology to locate with exceptional relevancy any and all types of knowledge content wherever it may be within any and all organizational zones defined by LSNC. Once implemented, it will enable users to search for up to a million content records within the system. Additional layers of the knowledge content system will be the design and implementation of Google One-Box modules tailored for retrieval and interpretation of particular types of data most commonly valued and useful within the legal services work environment, plus integration of select Google APIs that fit into the larger project goals, including Google Analytics.

Standardized Methodologies and Protocols for Managing the Knowledge Content

Partnering with GSA technical experts, LSNC will work aggressively to formulate and finalize standardized methodologies and protocols for management of all the organization’s valued “knowledge content.” This process will include assessment of a range of techniques and practices to enhance and optimize search results for users of the system: institutional protocols and standards for identifying and tagging knowledge content; effective use of metadata; record naming conventions; vertical and hierarchical organization of data; and so on.

Project Transparency

The LSNC Findability Project will be a public project. LSNC will create a public web-based workspace to document in detail: the planning process for the Findability Project; identify and evaluate resources for the larger legal services community on searchability in general and the Google Search Appliance in particular; and create technical and tutorial content so that those who are interested can more readily understand and replicate the Project. This public aspect of the Project will provide a highly practical way for the LSC and others in the legal services community to monitor and evaluate the Project, i.e., see what is planned, what choices were made and why, how things were designed, what is the pertinent technical information implicated by the Project, what works and what doesn’t, and what has been accomplished.

Hey, we’ve been down this road before. The Pika people will remember our initial foray into this approach toward tech project transparency three years ago with Project Claire: Redesigning Pika, where we put it all out on the table to see what we were doing with Pika implementation at LSNC. So, we’re going to create another Project-specific web development site where you can follow the progress and all the nitty-gritty detail of the LSNC Findability Project and perhaps learn a few things here and there about using modern search technologies to get the job done. Call it the good, the bad and the ugly but whatever it is we’re going to share it all with you as we work our way through it over the 18-month life of the project.

Why do it this way? We’re Webdogs. It’s what we’re all about.