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May 1, 2001
By Todd Cohen
Online Justice
Pro-bono portal in works
Poor people and their legal advocates can find help at an emerging
Web portal that aims to pool and share content provided by legal groups
throughout the United States.
The justice portal is taking shape through expansion of probono.net,
a two-year-old site backed by George Soros' Open Society Institute that
initially provided online resources for pro bono volunteer lawyers in
New York City.
Probono.net, which has added sites for San Francisco and Minnesota,
is organized both by geographic region and by area of legal practice
-- such as housing or family law -- and features materials for lawyers
representing low- and moderate-income clients.
Now, with additional Open Society funding, partnerships with grantees
of the Legal Services Corp. and support from a broad range of legal
groups and other funders, probono.net is developing technology to integrate
content provided by local legal groups and to share it with advocates
and low- and moderate-income people.
"Our mission is to use technology to both increase the quality
and quantity of services provided by lawyers to poor people," said
Michael Hertz, founder and executive director of probono.net.
Persuading hundreds of legal groups to share their content on the site
depends on making it easy for them to use the site to get materials
they themselves need, said Richard Zorza, a consultant advising probono.net
and funded by Open Society. "It allows local legal services programs
to focus their resources, both financial and managerial, on the development
and management of content, as opposed to the technological platform,"
he said.
Probono.net on average generates four visits a month from each of roughly
4,000 lawyers, including lawyers in big and small firms, members of
bar associations, and law students working in clinics or pro bono programs.
A growing number of law schools and legal services groups are asking
for access to the site, or for probono.net to add resources they could
use, said Hertz.
The site features information such as news and training calendars available
to any visitor. And lawyers who register as members get access to online
libraries of training materials, model legal briefs and model legal
pleadings -- content provided by local and national groups that host
the site in different locales and for different topic areas.
Probono.net is working with grantees of the federally funded Legal Services
Corp. to expand the site to help meet the needs of programs in other
locations and topic areas. As part of that expansion, probono.net is
developing lawhelp.org, a site to help visitors find a lawyer, understand
their rights and navigate social-service agency bureaucracies.
"Our bigger vision," said Hertz, "is a justice portal
that really has a tremendous amount of information for a diverse range
of lawyers, but also a comprehensive sweep of information for clients."
Zorza, the consultant, said probono.net aims "to get away from
the idea that poor peoples' legal problems are different from everybody
else's." Technology, he said, offers a powerful incentive for the
large and highly fragmented community of lawyers and legal groups throughout
the United States to share information with one another.
"The technology transcends the turf," he said. "Each
organization continues to control its own destiny but is part of a much
larger destiny."
Student news online
High school students can publish their own Web newspapers, thanks to
an online manual, free software and other resources assembled by The
New York Times Company Foundation.
The foundation's Campus Weblines project grew out of its effort to help
students at Stuyvesant High School in New York City create an online
version of their Stuyvesant Spectator at stuyspectator.org.
The foundation hired two consultants, Karen Freeman, an editor at the
Times' weekly Circuits section, and her husband, Steven Knowlton, a
Hofstra University journalism professor, to work with the Stuyvesant
students.
During a summer internship, eight students also helped create a manual
their counterparts at any high school could use to create a Web newspaper.
The manual explains online writing and editing, offers tips for putting
words and images online, suggests how to set up a newspaper staff and
build journalism into classroom work, and examines professional and
ethical issues related to online news.
The students also developed online-publishing software, ranging from
basic templates to applications for tech-savvy students.
The Times Foundation, which has invested about $100,000 in Campus Weblines,
has distributed information about the project to high schools throughout
the United States.
But the online kit, available at nytimes.com/learning/weblines, also
can be used by nonprofits and overseas groups, said Jack Rosenthal,
the foundation's president.
The Independent Journalism Foundation in New York, for example, will
use Campus Weblines to help young Serb journalists create online newspapers,
said Nancy Ward, the foundation's vice president and managing director.
Strategic sourcing
Some nonprofits and government agencies are starting to adopt the business
practice, known as "strategic sourcing," in which large organizations
aggregate purchases by separate divisions from multiple vendors, said
Brian Murrow, leader of the eMarkets practice, which includes e-Philanthropy,
at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Arlington, Va. Nonprofits, like businesses,
can hold "reverse auctions," he said, announcing their purchasing
needs and asking vendors to submit bids. The key for nonprofits, he
said, is to team up to pool their purchasing.
Online outsourcing
The Nonprofit Matrix, an online guide to commercial application service
providers and portals that offer online outsourcing to nonprofits, has
profiled more than 160 organizations since it was launched last fall,
including at least 10 that since have folded. George Irish, who tracks
outsourcing services for HJC New Media, a Toronto firm that advises
nonprofits and publishes the Matrix, said a growing number of firms
are moving to become one-stop outsourcing shops. Some providers offering
a single service have expanded to offer a bundle of services, while
a handful of the largest outsourcing firms are forming alliances to
offer nonprofits a full package of services, Irish said. "Outsourcing
Web services like events management or online donations has become the
usual practice now," he said, "where last year nonprofits
were more skeptical about this whole idea."
Tech briefs
A group of Silicon Valley executives have launched the Sonrisa Foundation,
which will team up with businesses and charities to deliver technology
products, services and education to poor people in Latin America…
The Cisco Foundation and Cisco Systems have joined the Southern Poverty
Law Center in launching tolerance.org to fight hate and promote tolerance…
The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute has launched a redesigned
Web site at upci.upmc.edu to provide
cancer information…
artAngels in San Francisco has created an online network at artsangels.org
to link arts groups in the region with volunteers, patrons and other
arts organizations…
Todd Cohen is editor and publisher
of Nonprofitxpress, an online newspaper at www.npxpress.com.
He can be reached at tcohen@ajf.org
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