Posts tagged: lsnc

  • Sunday
  • June 12
  • 2011

What our tech training survey tells us

In preparation for an annual managers’ retreat later this month, and an upcoming program-wide annual staff meeting this Fall, the tech team at LSNC (a k a “Team Gizmo”) recently conducted a survey to get a handle on how our 150 employees currently use technology to get their work done. Experience has taught us that we get markedly more participation in such surveys if we make the survey short (10-15 questions, tops) and relatively anonymous (identify your office location and position, but personal identification is not required.) Certainly, it is helpful to know what technologies staffers use or don’t use. More specifically, we were looking for data that would reveal major gaps in tech training and learning.

A distillation of the results can be viewed in the LSNC Tech Training Survey: The Big Numbers.

By way of background, some of these overall survey results are not particularly surprising. For example, not shown in these results is our institutional reality that, with rare exceptions, LSNC staff are required to use Gmail and Google Calendar, but not Google Docs or other Google Apps. It is not surprising, then, that users are more familiar with and feel less need for training on Gmail and Google Calendar than they do for other Google Apps. And since our adoption of the Pika CMS several years ago, staff have long been encouraged, if not required, to use the Firefox browser, which undoubtedly explains its overwhelming dominance of use at 94%. LSNC also remains flexible about what “word processor” staff use. (My apologies to those taken aback by the quotes, but I consider that term so… antiquated.) LSNC supports and staff are free to use any text editor they choose, but production of form and non-form court documents are subject to specific office protocols that include standardized pleading templates conforming to California Court Rules that work for both Word and WordPerfect.

As the survey results show, and as expected, use of Word (73%) has overtaken the still popular but inexorably fading WordPerfect (65%) in use by staffers. (Full disclosure: I am in the WordPerfect camp, but even I no longer use it except for formal court document preparation. My workaday text editor of choice? Google Docs.) The surprising number here is how much Google Docs is now regularly used among LSNC staffers: 38%. (We specifically asked whether they used it regularly, not whether they had used it at all.) Google Docs is not practical for preparation of formal court pleadings, but is now trending upward as a regularly used text-editing and document-sharing work horse among staff. The web-based work paradigm has definitely broken through across all LSNC staff. Not all staff use Google Docs, to be sure, but the vast majority are now confident how to upload files to Google Docs (75%) and share Google Docs (68%). I was personally pleased to see that 30% of LSNC staff also now regularly use Google Chrome, a much higher rate than I expected.

And what about staff perceptions of their tech training needs? Truthfully, I was personally surprised to see that 38% of staff felt no need for training on desktop applications, and even 24% did not feel the need for training on web-based applications. I would not have guessed numbers that high. But for those who did express a need, what were the big numbers? The five highest requests for tech training were all for web-based applications:

  • 58% ~ Manymoon
  • 41% ~ Google Spreadsheets
  • 28% ~ Google Docs
  • 18% ~ Google Calendar
  • 11% ~ Gmail

It is worth noting what these five applications have in common: They are all core Google Apps or, in the case of Manymoon, integrated with Google Apps.

  • Wednesday
  • June 1
  • 2011

Trouble in River City

It’s been a tough few weeks for all of the LSNC public websites. We are dealing with a very difficult security assault. It has affected all our sites, including this one, and has brought our program-wide site rebuild projects to a grinding halt. Please bear with us. We should be back to normal reasonably soon.

  • Monday
  • April 11
  • 2011

The Race Equity Project rebuild debuts

Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This last weekend we rolled out the second LSNC subsite rebuild: The Race Equity Project. The redesign elements will look familiar to those who have followed the LSNC rebuild series here that provides the core code base for the custom variations we eventually will deploy at all the LSNC.net domain sites.

The Race Equity Project rebuild directly reflects several touches first built out and tested here, namely, better use of the Google custom search API; more practical findability of archive posts by providing a browsing metaphor for visually scanning a list of posts in inverse chronological order; handy-dandy sharing improvements with use of the WordPress ShareDaddy plugin to add Twitter, Facebook, Email and Print doodads below each post and most pages; and, of course, our roll out of WPtouch Pro to provide visitors with a clean, intuitive mobile version of the site.

Widely recognized and respected for its leadership role within the national legal services community on race equity issues affecting low-income communities, the Race Equity Project has honored and supported its mission with 320+ posts since November 2006. This is the REP statement of it’s origin and purpose:

In 2003, through an empirically-based self-assessment, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) found marked racial disparities in the allocation of resources in our service area. Through further investigation and staff education, LSNC gained program-wide awareness that although the form of race discrimination has changed over past decades from predominantly overt and intentional to the implicit and institutional, discrimination continues to burden grossly LSNC’s clients and communities of color. This led LSNC to establish the Race Equity Project (REP) in 2004. The Race Equity Project seeks to address issues of race within our service area by (1) identifying race disparities in the institutions and systems used by LSNC’s clients; (2) educating clients and community agencies and organizations about these disparities and how to address them; and (3) enforcing laws and policies to eliminate or mitigate these disparities.

The REP is not a specialty unit within LSNC, but rather a program-wide broad approach to legal aid advocacy guided by the REP coordinators. LSNC implements the REP by using the following tools: (1) understanding social cognition and understanding and adopting strategies to counteract implicit bias and structural/institutional racism; (2) communications framing; (3) mapping and data presentation; and (4) community lawyering.

It will likely be sometime in May before we get the top-level LSNC Advocate feed done, but it’s coming.

  • Monday
  • April 4
  • 2011

LSNC Regulation Summaries: Variations on a Theme

We have implemented the first real iteration of the new LSNC site redesign: LSNC Regulation Summaries (née Regs @ LSNC.net), a subsite of Legal Services of Northern California’s home site. Of the LSNC sites we are in the process of rebuilding, this is the easiest to do, since it is just a collection of hundreds of straight-up post items, plus only two simple custom pages — an about page and a search result page, the latter being the content-target page for the Google custom search API. (For the record, LSNC has posted 954 regulation summaries since 2004.)

Those following the recent rebuild series of articles here will recognize the source of many of the design elements. I won’t go into those again.

That said, I do want to mention the virtuous cycle that comes with rebuilding all our sites on the WordPress 3.x multisite platform, while reaping the benefits of core web standards now more widely implemented by all major web browsers.

First, with WordPress we have been able to build a core set of new “LSNC” theme files that, for the first time, will be uniform and standardized across all of our sites, with the added advantage of a unified network administrative panel and single login for editors to all the sites to which they add content. Adding plugins and updating the core WordPress application is also now way easier since it can be done once for all our sites.

Second, because everything is being rebuilt on the WordPress platform, we are able to use the wondrous WPtouch Pro plugin, which makes deployment of a mobile-ready site quite effortless. You can view two slightly different implementations we’ve done of WPtouch by viewing Webdogs 3.0 and Regulation Summaries on your smartphone. This is a plugin that we can turn on and configure in about 30 seconds for all other LSNC sites, as we roll the new design out.

Third, I cannot overstate how much the adoption of web standards has simplified the development and made vastly more predictable the results of our CSS code. Setting aside for the moment the proprietary CSS property values one still has to use to implement CSS3 box-shadow and border-radius (rounded corner) effects, I was somewhat stunned to discover that the only other design element in the entire site that required any browser-specific change at all was the search-text input field, which is dynamically generated by the Google search API code. And even that quirk was minimal. I had to make changes to the CSS padding property of that element to make the presentation reasonably uniform among Firefox, Webkit (Chrome and Safari), Opera and IE. Yep, a tweak for one CSS property associated with one CSS selector. That’s it.

WordPress. HTML5. CSS3. Web Standards. Lovin’ it.

  • Monday
  • March 21
  • 2011

Rough cut of new LSNC site design

We’re at least a few weeks, likely about a month or so away from implementing the redesign and repurposing of the LSNC Advocate Feed and all its special project subdomains (e.g., the Race Equity Project). Click on the image to the right for a visual taste of a mock-up. Eventually you will see at the LSNC sites a lot of touches that we’ve been toying with here at Webdogs 3.0 for the last several months. By the time we get finished, all the LSNC.net sites will be HTML5, CSS3 and mobile havens for California’s legal services advocates.

We have already unplugged some of the LSNC advocate content, such as the cases summaries, which we dutifully posted for over five years, but have not updated since late 2009. (Not to worry. All the case summaries are being imported to the LSNC Advocate Feed site and you will still be able to search for them.) We are still in the process of updating or in many cases simply removing other content with long expired pull-dates. We are also adding (I think) commenting and a few other social connections.

As I like to say, stay tuned!

  • Monday
  • October 4
  • 2010

Teaching an old webdog new tricks

t-shirt

I don’t know from personal experience whether you can teach an old dog new tricks, but I’m confident it is time again to reboot the Webdogs 2.0 franchise.

Yes, regular posts will resume shortly. But as part of a much larger web architecture rebuild already underway at all the Legal Services of Northern California websites, the Team Gizmo tech team at LSNC will use this site over the next several months to alpha- and beta- test a lot of those changes. We would rather blow things up here than do it at the several LSNC flagship sites. So, forgive us in advance if we try your patience.

Over the coming months, site changes we will be implementing include: a rebuild from scratch of the underlying structural markup to adopt a handful of HTML5 features that work reasonably effectively with current versions of Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari, and at least don’t break the design in Internet Explorer (with apologies in advance to those concerned, but we have never built anything to Opera specs); similarly, a rebuild from scratch also of the CSS, with light-handed adoption of some CSS3 selectors compatible with this same set of web browsers; adoption of a more flexible web design with a view towards making the site more usable and user friendly for mobile devices; greater attention to a core set of web accessibility design that meets a basic set of accessibility principles, to be discussed here; improvements to the Google custom site search functions, moving beyond the rudimentary iframe configuration in current use toward a more effective use of Google’s custom search API…

…and, of course, changes to the site aesthetics. Nothing dramatic, but the layout and presentation layer of the site will definitely be changing. This time, we are going to redo the site design publicly. Quite soon visitors to the site will see a totally stripped down site, without CSS, as we rebuild the markup. The site will look very bland if not downright ugly, something like my kitchen remodel.

It’s going to be ugly before it looks good again. But remember, beauty is only skin deep. It is the inner Webdog you love, right?

  • Wednesday
  • June 30
  • 2010

LSNC 2011 Technology Plan

LSNC published its technoloy plan here last year when it first became an LSC grant requirement. LSNC’s latest iteration, submitted with its recent grant renewal application, is the LSNC 2011 Technology Plan, posted here as a viewable Google document.

The 2011 plan will read familiar to those who saw last year’s plan. It is essentially an updated version of that plan, and like it parallels the 12-part structure of the LSC baseline technology guidelines commonly used by Legal Services field programs to assess their overall technology needs and implementations.

Since last year’s plan, LSNC’s tech vibe focused very heavily on two major infrastructure elements: First, We cracked the code on integration of our Google Search Appliance with our Pika case management system, something we accomplished a few months back. (LSNC now targets and indexes 800,000+ Pika activity records with its GSA, and we have plans to ramp up our database targeting even further, in that regard.) Second, LSNC also evaluated and deployed a new telephone system, a process which still involves work on our end but is near completion. We never quite got around to the other five major “special attention” elements identified in last year’s plan, but you can see what those are and how they are stated in the new plan.

As the classic listserv valediction would say, HTH.

  • Friday
  • June 25
  • 2010

Shout out for LSNC PSA

The Art Institute of Sacramento recently, and graciously, produced a pro bono, professional-quality PSA for LSNC. Kudos to Joey Gonzalez, the student assigned to the project, who provided the creative drive behind the result. And for the record, that is real-life LSNC staff attorney Steliana Schmidel of our Sacramento office who allowed herself to be royally baked under hot lights for most of a Saturday to help get the project done. Bravissimo! The video is hosted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia5OJygzxaM.

  • Wednesday
  • October 28
  • 2009

Pika 4.0 ~ LSNC customization hoo-hah!

As promised, here is a set of 15 representative screenshots of Legal Services of Northern California’s most recent customization of Pika 4.0. To view a larger image, right click on it and open the image in a separate window. (Needless to say, none of the data field entries in the screenshots are real.) It shares obvious design elements with LSNC’s shared portal, which serves the “news and resource” purpose of the original Pika home page.

Yes, that’s right. Just (mouse) click our Pika home page three times and you are magically transported back home.

  • Thursday
  • October 8
  • 2009

Mapping, the essential tool

This is a cross post from a LSNC sister site, but a well worthy share at this site: Mapping Out Success, an article from the current issue of California Lawyer, features Legal Services of Northern California as an example how California lawyers are increasingly relying on mapping to better analyze data, to get the job done. “One example is when LSNC in 2007 began using maps to show how a proposed gas-storage area in Sacramento would place a ‘disproportionate environmental burden’ on a densely populated minority neighborhood. … Similarly, LSNC has targeted its foreclosure-outreach program by mapping foreclosure data.”

The examples cited in the article are both products of LSNC’s Race Equity Project. For more information about mapping, visit the LSNC GIS Mapping Resources page.

  • Monday
  • August 13
  • 2007

Citing Google for the very first time

One always remembers the “first time” and citing a Google search in an appellate brief is no exception. At least for me.

The context has to do with my day job as a practicing lawyer. One of the myriad things I do is represent a special “long-term care ombudsman” program that investigates and mediates allegations of abuse, neglect and mistreatment of nursing home patients and other long-term care residents. The investigations are highly sensitive and highly confidential, and under California constitutional and statutory law are also highly privileged. Predictably, the ombudsman investigations are viewed as a target-rich repository of potential evidence by some, and so the ombudsman program frequently gets served with subpoenas to compel disclosure.

That’s where I come in. In the normal course, discovery attempts are readily deflected once counsel and the court are appraised of the claims of privilege and confidentiality that shield the ombudsman—always a non-party to the litigation—from discovery.

But not always, and in a major way not in a recent case in which a California trial court ruled against the ombudsman program and entered an unprecedented, sweeping order requiring the disclosure of all the ombudsman’s investigatory records in a particular nursing home. Yipes! But LSNC was all over it and pursued an extraordinary writ from the appellate court to get a stay order stopping the discovery cold. Done! But it ain’t over ’til it’s over, right? As it turns out, there is no reported decision in any jurisdiction in the country on this particular type of ombudsman claim of privilege and confidentiality, and the discovery dispute has come to a head with full-on briefing and oral argument in a case of national first impression.

We had already briefed this puppy to the max, but the appellate court a few weeks ago requested a supplemental “letter brief” (code: keep it short … really short) from all involved about whether the case is moot and even if so whether the public interest character of the case warrants the court proceeding to decision. Well, not surprisingly, from our point of view as the “non-party” being dragged constantly into this case and so many others like it there was a very practical argument to be made: The issue is one of broad public impact because, among other things, there is this huge number of attorneys motivated to attempt this type of discovery. Fair enough observation, but how do we actually establish that fact as a non-party appearing before the appellate court in an extraordinary proceeding without a conventional record?

That’s where Google comes in. Here’s the single footnote we dropped into our letter brief:

There is a very large segment of the plaintiffs’ bar, not to mention any number of defense counsel, that would jump at the opportunity to compel disclosure of ombudsman records. Should the Court have any lingering doubts about the potential for recurrence of the type of discovery attempted in this case, petitioner invites the Court to do a simple search at Google using these six keywords—california attorneys nursing home abuse neglect mistreatment—and view the search results.

Ya gotta love the Google!

  • Friday
  • October 13
  • 2006

Hey hey hey, that’s what I say

Welcome to the world of the Webogs, courtesy of Legal Services of Northern California.

Basic orientation: If you are familiar with our progenitor, the now-dormant OpenPika, then you know whom and what you’re dealing with. For those who are new to the Webdogs cult, all basic aspects of its ethos are revealed by the purpose-driven Webdog.

Satisfaction is not guaranteed. It will be a slow, steady but exciting build. It’s a given that bad puns and strained metaphors will abound. Sober up and lock it down, people, because you’re about to enter the Webdogs zone. And there is no way out but to keep your head up and read forward.