Just about anyone with a laptop or cell phone can use free technology to create quality media and reach audiences larger than any newspaper or television network. Indeed, we are all publishers now. But are we all journalists now, too?

Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. It's not surprising; the sharp line between journalist and non-journalist is so faded that few can see it anymore.

If someone happens to be at the right place at the right time and captures a significant event on his cell phone, it will be newsworthy to some audience. At the moment he tweets the image, does he magically transform from a bystander into a journalist? If he is an employee of The New York Times, most would have little trouble classifying him as a journalist. But if it also was his very first uploaded photo, then really what is the difference between the NY Times employee and the bystander? Who is the journalist?

Thought leader and colleague Dan Gillmor insists we've been asking the wrong question:

The way we frame this discussion is important. When anyone can publish, I'm often asked, who's a journalist, anyway? That's the wrong question, I believe. The vastly more relevant issue is this: What is journalism?

In other industries, the problem would resolve itself once the technological chaos subsided and a new world order emerged. Journalism doesn't have that luxury. The Crystal Cox case again highlighted what is at stake: the special legal protections that allow journalists to do their collective jobs. At the other end of the spectrum is the charming sentiment that everyone is a journalist.

One Less Journalist

In a recent popular article, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram  asked the question: "If we are all journalists, should we all be protected?"

I reject the premise. We are not all journalists. In fact, I may be the only remaining person in America who is not a journalist, despite making some of the same motions: I've been blogging since 1995 (when the creator of Wordpress was still in elementary school); I've written and published scores of papers and articles; I've worked for a few major media companies, and spent a few years on the faculty of the Cronkite School of Journalism. Yet I am certain that I am not a journalist.

Being formally educated in engineering, business and behavioral economics puts me about as far as you can get from the field of journalism. Perhaps for this very reason, my outsider's perspective might add some unique fuel to this debate.

First, I commend journalists on one unexpected bit of subtle collective behavior: Despite  witnessing the rapid demise of newspapers and broadcast news industries,  journalists -- far more than any profession -- have been particularly welcoming of the new class of content creators and publishers. Any other industry would have branded them as amateurs and interlopers -- blogging, tweeting or uploading on YouTube. Journalists have joined the newcomers in embracing new media, experimenting and extending journalism's frontiers without any class distinctions.

Other professions, especially those being affected by new technology, typically close ranks and erect many kinds of barriers to protect their closed societies from newcomers fast-tracked by technology.

Not so, with journalism. Journalists seem to be genuinely happy that technology allows everyone to participate in their craft.

But this virtue is also the heart of the problem.

Why does it matter?

Journalism and journalist: Many argue that the definitions don't matter. As long as my activities and their effects are the same as a professional journalist, and I am "committing an act of journalism," then I too am a journalist, they argue. Sooner or later, we either must agree on definitive answers or forever throw our hands up and declare: "It doesn't matter."

It matters. The Crystal Cox case reminds us that journalists need special protections, as a part of their work, to ensure their sources remain confidential. Occupy Wall Street represents countless examples where journalists are granted special access. Do we grant self-described "citizen journalists" access to the White House? Travel along with Air Force one?

As long as there needs to be special protections and privileges, it matters. As long as there is a need for standards of quality and ethics for journalists, it matters. And because it matters, we need to define "who is a journalist," and by logical extension define "what is journalism?"

Other Professions

As an engineer, I've seen my field(s) disrupted and again empowered by technology that is cheap, available and easy to use. There were loud objections to technologies in the hands of "non-engineers" (for instance, not everyone is thrilled with the prospects of journalists coding sophisticated software and web applications).

Despite the proliferation of easy-to-use tech tools, certain fields of engineering (as with medicine and law) are still subject to rigid standards and licensing in order to determine who can represent themselves as a member of these professions. We immediately can see the logic: Few people would want "citizen physicians" performing brain surgery, nor would we want merely any techie with a working knowledge of AutoCad to be building drawbridges or passenger planes.

In most cases, the professional standards are determined by the leaders and working professionals in these fields, and recommended to the licensing boards. All the certifications require academic degrees, rigorous exams, and a track record of apprentice-like work (e.g., residency) before one is granted the special rights and privileges that comes from being a recognized professional in these fields.

Why should the qualification of journalist be any less clear cut or less rigorous?

And yet, journalists seem to pride themselves on inclusiveness and lauding the category of citizen journalist.

Gillmor and his contemporaries stress the "acts of journalism" define the journalist. Intuitively, this seems to make perfect sense, but it certainly doesn't apply to any other field. As one person (Craig R) commented in response to Ingram's article: "Journalism is a trade, one that is learned through cadetships, training and study. I just painted my bedroom at home, that does not qualify me to be a painter."

And yet another (Rick Gregory) pointed out: "Short answer? We're not all journalists. Longer answer ... if the term covers everyone with a pulse it has no meaning."  

People from all sides of the debate seem to agree at least that some definitions are needed. Today there seem to be three camps, or "theories"  for trying to define journalism and the modern journalist.

The 'Infinite Monkeys' Theory

If I take enough video or photos, eventually I might capture something an audience might find newsworthy. For instance, if I am constantly shadowing the police with my camcorder rolling, I may capture an officer treating a suspect harshly -- fodder for a "caught on tape" abuse story. For the first 100 hours, I am just a annoying stalker, until I get that 30 seconds of video -- then am I a journalist? Before the first 100 hours, how is one to know the difference?

This camp maintains that the result is the defining evidence. If an accidental journalist happens to tweet important breaking news because his house happens to be in the flight path of a rescue mission, should he be afforded the same rights and protections as the professional journalist?

The emphasis of this theory is on the relatively skill-less talent of being at the right place and time -- blogging or taking enough video until you capture something noteworthy: pretty much the same strategy employed by anyone who has ever posted a cat video.

As journalists, perhaps you can set the bar a little higher?

The 'Magic Hat' Theory

While the Infinite Monkeys Theory defines the journalist only by the outcome of a relevant journalistic act, it does so regardless of the intent, the skills or work ethic. But very often we need to identify the journalist before the start of the journalistic act, or before the result is published.

New media technology has nearly eliminated the practical requirement that someone needs an affiliation with a publisher in order to be considered a journalist. Thus, anyone with a free WordPress account can "hang a shingle" and call themselves a journalist and publisher. Once this person puts on the magic hat of "journalist," or uses an injket to print a "press badge," how does one know the difference between the journalist and the non-journalist?

Once someone puts on the magic hat of journalist -- are they magically qualified to write about anything or anyone as an expert and with impunity?

Most other professions that affect the public's well-being have a higher bar to guard against self-described practitioners -- in order to maintain a higher quality of standards and ethics.

The citizen journalists camp is often with the Magic Hat Theory -- where anyone with a business card can call themselves a journalist.

As journalists, shouldn't the bar be a little higher?

The 'Anointed Priests' Theory

Here, the title of journalist is bestowed by the government or some other authority. From then on, every journalistic action is under special protections and enjoys special privileges.

I am pretty sure my journalist friends would quickly point out the First Amendment threats apparent in the Anointed Priests Theory. The prospects of having some committee or board dictate journalism would send some of them running to the Second Amendment to prevent this from happening. But these fears would be overstated. Being recognized by an "authority" as a journalist would not prevent anyone from creating content or publishing -- it would only determine who has special legal protections. And regardless of whether anyone wants this, by default, it is the way our system works today -- except that the authority is a legislature or a judge.

But the Anointed approach doesn't have to be a court, a government or even a small committee. Many other professions have formal peer review processes that serve the same purpose. The Bar association is a perfect example. The scientific community in almost any field has peer review systems that serve similar functions. Why not for journalism? Even bartenders and auto mechanics have some official requirements to pass before becoming a professional.

I get it. Even the remote possibility of blacklisting and censorship keeps journalists awake at night. But an official designation of some kind would also serve to provide a standard of ethics, integrity and quality -- giving the newcomers some standards and the courts a unified criteria for identifying journalists. As we were reminded recently, if journalists don't re-sharpen that line that separates the professional journalist from "other," then the courts will continue to do it for them.

We already have a model for peer reviewed "certification" for journalists. Most journalism schools are accredited by a board that's composed of journalism educators and professionals. They define the standards and requirements for graduating a student with a degree that says "journalism."

I am not suggesting that the journalism degree be the official legal designation for journalist. Arguably most of history's greatest journalists never had a journalism degree, but this was during an era where the publisher defined the journalist, when working for a newspaper, broadcast radio or TV network defined the journalist.

Today, journalists are no longer exclusively defined by their relationship to a publisher -- despite the many courts still clinging to this anachronistic definition. If journalism is "in the eye of the beholder" then soon the definition gets too diluted to have meaning. Journalists are still guardians and champions of freedom of the press. You should collectively, assertively and quickly define the profession of journalism. If not you, who else?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Lichfield Live.

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal News is the longest-running publication put together with the help of people who are incarcerated, and since its first issue in 1990, it has become a critical resource for discussing issues facing these populations. It's an independent, monthly magazine that reviews and analyzes prisoner rights, court rulings, and news about prison issues. PLN focuses on state and federal U.S. prisons, as well as some international coverage. Paul himself has become a distinguished advocate on behalf of the U.S. population. Asked whether we could blog his talk, Paul responded, "Secrecy is the antithesis of publishing."

From Newsletter to National Publication

Prison Legal News started as a newsletter, in 1990, covering only Washington state's prisons. It was 10 pages and hand-typed for 75 subscribers. It launched into the publishing world with a $50 budget. The organization was completely volunteer-run until 1996. The first run of six issues ended up becoming a 22-year, 224-issue run (and still going). Some of their earliest subscribers are still with them -- a great sign for the publication's longevity, but a less great reflection of these subscribers' sentences.

PLN's perseverance has paid off: In 1990, there were 30 or 40 prisoners' rights news publications, but many have since ceased publishing. Prison Legal News has expanded its coverage as its subscriber base expanded. At one point, they realized they had more subscribers in California than in Washington, and that they had graduated to a national publication. Yet Paul considers himself one of the few people in print publishing these days who welcomes competition. He wishes there were other publications and institutions engaged in this work.

Prison Legal News is not light reading -- there's no horoscope, no advice column, just hard news and information. But that's what their customers want. An annual reader survey draws a 30-40% reader survey response, and the feedback is consistently asking for more useful information rather than lighter fare. There was a publication in the 1990s called "Prison Life," which covered prison life and the prison experience, and they were somehow surprised when they were unsuccessful, because prisoners would rather not read about this in their leisure time.

An expansion into book titles has focused on self-help and non-fiction reference books for prisoners, especially titles that aren't viable for traditional book publishers. Paul mentions books including "How to File a Lawsuit and Win," and books on hepatitis C (a dangerous health threat within the incarcerated population). There's great interest in books on health, including "Our Bodies, Ourselves," which Paul notes has been banned in some prison systems. They also provide "radical critiques of the criminal justice system", including edited volumes titled "The Celling of America," "Prison Nation" and
"Prison Profiteers." Paul notes that the books reach a different audience than the magazine, that there are people who prefer reading the long form of arguments.

Who Reads Prison News?

Prison Legal News is a niche publication. It's not trying to reach the whole incarcerated population of the U.S. It's targeting activists and lifers interested in improving prisons. Paul said they want to reach the activists, the 1% of people who make change. Men are 95% of the U.S. prison population, and make up a higher percentage of PLN's readership compared with women. Paul attributed this to the fact that women generally receive shorter sentences, and their subscribers tend to have long sentences ahead of them. Paul has found that it's the people who are in prison for a long period of time that make things happen. These are the lifers, the ones filing the lawsuits and organizing other prisoners. These are people who have accepted that prison is their life now, and who are working to do something to improve it.

There are around 7,000 subscribers to the print publication, but the reach is much broader. Reader surveys suggest that copies reach more than 10 prisoners each -- Paul estimates a readership of 80,000-90,000 readers. Additionally, the website gets around 100,000 visitors per month. The subscriber base includes judges, court officers, lawyers, journalists and academics, including Noam Chomsky, who Paul told us proudly was one of the first subscribers. All the big investment banks subscribe, Paul told us, because they follow news on the private prison industry. "I was happy when Lehman Brothers went under, but we lost a subscriber," he said. Lehman Brothers had been one of the biggest bankrollers of the private prison industry, so it was a happy day when they went down.

Publication Litigation

A big focus these days is making sure the target audience in prisons can actually receive the magazine. This requires extensive litigation. Prison Legal News has obtained consent decrees in nine states, ordering state prisons to deliver the magazine. PLN is currently litigating in New York and Florida to enable subscribers to receive their publication, both the magazine and the books they publish.

Almost every state's prison system has censored and banned the magazine at one point or another, Paul told us. The organization has won nine lawsuits, receiving consent decrees that order state prison systems to deliver the publications. The bans are generally pretextual. They're bans based on postal rates used to deliver magazines, or whether prisoners are allowed to pay for the magazine from their trust accounts. Sometimes there are arbitrary blocks on sending publications to prisoners in certain types of custody. In Washington, PLN discovered they needed to become an "approved vendor" and had a very difficult time figuring out "who's brother-in-law we had to work with" to gain "approved vendor" status, Paul said.

It's not just PLN getting banned. In one case, in South Carolina, the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue when a prison banned all books except the Bible. These pretextual excuses can get pretty absurd -- Paul is currently facing an argument that the staples used to bind the magazine might be used as dangerous weapons. While we think it's funny, these are the issues PLN is forced to litigate (marshal the resources to sue the government, and win). "Think of every magazine held together by staples, delivered by mail. TIME, Newsweek. We're the only publisher in America who routinely challenges this censorship," he said.

Many of these rules are designed to prevent prisoners from having material to read, far beyond PLN's magazine. It would help if other American publishers would join in the fight to ensure publications are able to reach prison populations. When an Indiana judge upheld a ban on gay publications "Out" and "The Advocate," Paul asked the publishers to file suit, because it would stand up better in court than a suit from a prisoner. But publishers aren't seeking the prison population. "They tell us that they're not part of our targeted advertising demographic," he said. For PLN, the core audience is prisoners, and there's no point in publishing if the core audience can't get it. In recognition of this, they realized that funding staff attorney positions was a priority.

I noted that some critics of PLN have argued that it's as much a litigation platform as it is a publication. Paul countered that "our initial goal was always just to publish the magazine. But we got to to the point where we're just consuming ever greater amounts of organizational resources just getting the magazine into prisons." Paul estimated that he can spend as much as 40% of his time focusing on being able to distribute the publication, rather than producing and editing it. "The editor should be worried about being (an) editor, not worrying about why one prison system or another is censoring content," he said. For there to be any litigation, the government has to illegally censor the magazine, then PLN has to sue, and then they have to win. "If you don't like the consequences, don't break the law," Paul said.

Isolation from Society

Restrictions on what can be sent in and out of prison harm PLN in another way: It makes it very hard to hear from the incarcerated. In some prisons, prisoners can no longer send or receive information beyond what fits on a postcard. Other layers of draconian restriction include rules that postcard communication has to be in ink, can't use a label, etc. These mechanisms tend to be arbitrary and are designed, Paul argued, to prevent prisoners from having communication to and from the outside world. His organization has challenged a couple of these successfully, with a couple more pending. Paul told us that they are trying to nip this trend in the bud before it gets entrenched.

"Part of the goal is to get prisoners information. But conversely, we want to hear from them," he said. The bulk of the magazine's content is provided by contributing writers, who are mostly prisoners, some of whom have been working with PLN for over a decade. In the hopes of ensuring widespread distribution of the information, PLN doesn't demand exclusive publishing rights -- and people are free to copy and disseminate the information.

This is an area of close overlap with one of the Center for Civic Media's projects, "Between the Bars." BTB is a blogging platform for prisoners that gets around the lack of Internet access by scanning and publishing letters to a blog, and then mailing comments back to the authors on postcards. In addition to helping the incarcerated publish to the web, it helps the rest of the U.S. population by ensuring that we are able to hear from these voices, who comprise 1% of our entire populace.

Prison News Online

The Internet has greatly improved the visibility of Prison Legal News. Paul told us he conducts 3-4 interviews a week about the publication and the issues it raises. He's fluent in Spanish and noted that there's a great deal of interest in these issues from programs in Colombia and Venezuela. One of his associate gives interviews in Russian media, which seems to have an endless appetite for stories about the U.S. prison system. Some have observed that the U.S. prison system must be pretty bad when the Russians enjoy making fun of it.

The online presence of the magazine has allowed PLN to build a publication library online, with more than 6,000 documents available in its Brief Bank. "We've got the biggest, and I would say, the best, repository of prison documents online," Paul said. As a result, PLN generally shows up in Google's first page for prison-related queries, except sometimes when the "Prison Break" program is on TV.

Prisons can be a bit of a timeless place, said Paul, where the equipment you see is 50-60 years old. PLN's print publishing business still thrives here (advertising levels for the print magazine are actually going up), and web publishing is almost nonexistent. PLN hasn't figured out how to make money online, like other publishers. Its content performs poorly with online advertising. On the site, the news content is free, legal content is paid, and these fees cover basic staff time put into the site. Advertising and subscription income and book distribution bring in about the same amount. Payroll is the biggest expense. They get some foundation funding and donations, and when all of this revenue is cobbled together, it's enough to move forward.

Staying Human

The acts of reading and writing are core to helping prisoners maintain their humanity, especially when everything else in these punitive systems is working to degrade that humanity. A publication like PLN lets prisoners connect with others, when the rest of the system is designed to isolate and alienate.

Paul is wary of the dehumanization that takes place before genocides and in prisons. We lose sight of the people in prison. We need to keep in mind that they're someone's father, someone's son, regardless of what they've done. When someone's been murdered in a prison, it's almost always that person's mother who calls PLN.

Paul closed his presentation by noting that he's now 264 issues into this project, and that since 1990, "everything to do with the criminal justice system, by objective or subjective standard, has gotten worse."

A man charged with selling drugs inside the courthouse. A woman said to have shoplifted $5 worth of barbeque chicken wings. A man charged with multiple counts of raping a child with force. A longtime Drug Court participant booted from the program for taking a non-narcotic pill (still against the rules). Everyone brought back to court owing fees or victim restitution in previously dismissed cases. A man on psychotropic medication charged with shoplifting a Stop and Shop cart full of meat and pulling a knife when confronted in the parking lot. A naked hiker in the Blue Hills whose defense to lewd behavior is being raised as a naturist. OUIs. Restraining order hearings. A wife sectioning her husband for alcoholism.

OpenCourt has been streaming public court hearings from the First Session courtroom in the Quincy District Court in Massachusetts since May of 2011. We've received feedback about how our viewers use and value the footage, and we realize it would be useful to show more of the court's daily business -- not just the cross-section that comes through the First Session.

While holding to our goal to carve a plausible model for other courthouses, we've often asked ourselves how we and other journalists around the country could do a better job shedding light on a bigger portion of the iceberg's tip, and not necessarily using as much expensive technology.

In other words, just how much business does all of Quincy District Court do in a single day? How can we more fully capture the breadth of cases heard, day in and day out?

Cooperative Coverage

To help answer these questions, last month we hosted a cooperative coverage event at the court, an open invitation to citizen and traditional journalists alike to help us gather notes about everything that transpires in the building's six public courtrooms.

Our combined notes, which you can read here on our blog -- gathered between myself, our producer Val Wang, two Patriot Ledger reporters, two Harvard Berkman interns, one State House News reporter, and three citizen journalists -- are inevitably incomplete. But we hope this coming together shows more fully the wide array of hearings before the court, the sheer volume of cases, and the fact that this is all happening every day, outside of normal public view.

We realized it's easier than you might think for loosely affiliated citizens to collaborate on a one-off project (read: Twitter + Google Docs).

There were unsurprisingly a wide variety of cases. Some rough tallies: Assault & Battery (15, of which 3 were labeled as domestic violence), disorderly conduct (4), trespassing (3), resisting arrest (1), uninsured and/or unlicensed motor vehicle operation (5), speeding (3), shoplifting (5), larceny over $250 (1), receiving stolen property (2), distribution of an illegal substance (3), section 35 (1), sealed record request (3), interpreter needed (1).

This day was exceptional not by any standard of caseload or substance, only that more of us were there to see it and relay stories. For me and Val, the longer we're in court streaming, the clearer it is that we're sitting on a relatively unchecked sociological goldmine.

Opening Court Data

These notes from last month's experiment are, at the least, a compelling glance at the river of data flowing through our local courts every single day.

At best they offer a new angle on approaching larger questions: How do we get to a place where public court data is more accessible? Why aren't the stats being tracked more extensively and automatically in the name of scientifically diagnosing societal ills?

The Boston Globe recently published an extensive three-part series on Massachusetts drunken driving prosecutions, which undoubtedly required massive reporting energy. While that energy will always be required for strong narrative journalism, shouldn't reporters and the public at large alike have easier access to court proceedings to begin with? Wouldn't the state be better off if tracking the operation of its courts didn't require the Herculean effort of a crack, paid investigative team?

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this possible. Our aim at this point, as always, is to provide a window into the everyday landscape of our legal system. Beyond that, we hope efforts like this lead to smarter methods to inform and awaken the public -- to be a better radar for a community's prevalent crimes.

What do you think? What do you see? What should we do differently if we host another event like this?

I was supposed to speak on a panel about SOPA recently with the Northeast chapters of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It was to serve as an educational discussion for local members, but at the national level, both unions have already officially endorsed SOPA. I spent the weekend preparing remarks, but the panel has been postponed, or possibly canceled, on account of AFTRA and SAG failing to provide representatives to discuss the bill. I can only hope this is an indication that they're reconsidering their public support of one of the least American bills to gain serious traction in Congress, as a number of other companies have done in the face of public backlash.

The thing is, unions should never have supported this bill to begin with. At their best, organized labor is one of the most surefire ways to create a more equal, sustainable instance of capitalism.

They are the people who brought us the weekend and ended domestic child labor, a more recent phenomenon than we might like to admit. In recent times, the middle class has been under siege for years by politicians erasing taxes on the rich while simultaneously cutting benefits for the poor. Unions have the power to make things more fair, and as a result, they're under constant attack.

But at their worst, unions can behave as reactionary organizations that respond purely to the financial interest of their members, or even just their employers' commercial interests, at the expense of the general good of society. It appears that disruptive technology we know as the Internet is putting them in this position. National unions' stances on net neutrality, and now SOPA, have created a fault line between progressives who cherish free speech and unions focused on short-term paychecks rather than long-term investments in democratic communications. The Occupy movement has worked together with organized labor, for example, but wouldn't support this train-wreck of a proposal for government censorship (see the comments on the AFL-CIO's blog post mentioning SOPA as but one example).

costs outweigh benefits

Granting the government the power to create arbitrary blacklists and extralegal censorship will cost society at an order of magnitude more than union members stand to benefit. SOPA would break the Internet and set up a censorship regime that circumvents existing legal channels to serve one industry's financial desires. Bastardizing the technical infrastructure of the Internet and forcing payment system providers and search engines to cut off service to an organization without a trial is extralegal, and a misuse of these channels. One thing that's been somewhat lost in the uproar over SOPA is that legal channels are already in place to enforce anti-piracy law. As the MIT Center for Civic Media's Ethan Zuckerman pointed out to me, U.S. law already permits seizure of domestic domain names that are used for piracy, and 150 domains were seized in November alone. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is already U.S. law, and entertainment companies have spoken to its effectiveness.

The Writers Guild of America West has realized some of the implications of SOPA, and although the group is still concerned about piracy, has since come out against the bill in meetings with members of Congress:

They discussed concerns with the bill's implications for competition and an open Internet. Although the WGAW strongly supports combating piracy, the competition, First Amendment, and due process concerns the bill creates must be addressed.

But other, larger, unions remain behind the legislation. I can't be the only person who was surprised to see several top unions, including the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), SAG, and AFTRA, on the list of organizations supporting SOPA. I'm not sure how SOPA or PIPA would help the actual members of these unions, other than further enrich their employers' CEOs. But the AFL-CIO stands up for it.

I sympathize with the members of these unions, because it's plausible that online piracy is hurting their livelihoods. But a Congressional Research Services report found that the absolute number of jobs in the entertainment industry has actually increased since 1995, and disputes some of the other numbers the entertainment companies and unions are using in their letter to Congress.

It's also possible that many of these jobs are going away because their employers have based their businesses on the sale of physical goods, and haven't done a great or timely job of adjusting to obvious consumer shifts in consumption of content. Their very industries, represented by the trade groups these unions have aligned themselves with, such as the MPAA and the RIAA, have relied for years on reselling "Star Wars" and Beatles albums to the same customers every time the physical format changes. Digital content has brought about the era of the hit single and unlimited streaming, both of which break from the "you must buy this entire album" business model. This is a natural market shift that has nothing to do with piracy. I think it's important to consider that the disruptive technology these trade groups are railing against isn't just file-sharing. They've failed to adapt to simpler, legal shifts in their customers' preferences. (For more on this point, see "Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA," recommended by my friend Ted Fickes).

Even with regards to piracy, the director of business development at Valve, which sells expensive, pirate-able computer games as convenient digital downloads, said it best: "Pirates are underserved customers.When you think about it that way, you think, 'Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'" Rather than partner with entertainment trade groups to stifle innovation at an unprecedented scale, creative unions should be working with web startups to enrich the emerging creative-as-producer business models.

how sopa hurts free speech

Besides the financial arguments around piracy and business models, SOPA could hurt unions' ability to organize and negotiate in other, more profound ways. To quote Matt Browner Hamlin, a senior fellow at Citizen Engagement Lab and former deputy director of New Media at the SEIU:

The Internet is a medium of communication and organizing that is evolving in ways we can't predict. It is a democratic medium where you don't have to be a massive corporation to have your voice heard. We should promote the ability of workers to engage in this transformative medium and empower them to find ways to use it to help themselves on the job. SOPA would fundamentally change how the Internet works and thus disempower workers from creating and sharing ideas, from organizing for their rights, and from having a counter-balance in the fight against the boss.

Another friend and SEIU veteran, Joaquin Guerra, points to echoes of this same debate from 2007, when the Communications Workers of America stood in the way of discussion on net neutrality. It was another recent example of a union standing on the wrong side of free speech to benefit their employers, and I guess, by trickle-down economics, themselves:

The topic was net neutrality, the idea that the Internet should not be controlled by telephone and cable companies. It was nowhere to be seen at the conference. The reason, according to a conference organizer, is that "the unions" have a problem with net neutrality.

"The unions" in this case is basically one union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Like it or not, CWA is the key to whether the Internet will continue to be open, or whether the telephone and cable companies will turn it into an instrument under their control. The prospects are not encouraging.

To put it more strongly, given the influence the union wields with Democratic legislators in Congress and in state houses, the prospects are downright discouraging. Democrats who traditionally take progressive positions on issues are also Democrats who don't want to cross organized labor. When there is a conflict, labor wins. And if labor is allied with the company, it's no contest. CWA and, to a lesser extent, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), could free Democrats to vote for a free and open Internet. But in a demonstration of the Stockholm syndrome, they won't.

I do sympathize, because disruptive technologies are truly disruptive. They can eliminate entire categories of employment virtually overnight. As my brothers and I emailed about what to get each other for Christmas this year, it struck us that we no longer needed to spend much on entertainment gifts. We get most of our music from Spotify, our video from Hulu and Netflix, and all of our book requests were followed by, "Used is fine. Get it for a couple of bucks on Amazon." My brother joked, "How anyone makes money in this country in 10 years is beyond me, but I suppose we can all buy handmade jewelry and chocolates from one another."

It's not clear where the next gravy train is. If I knew the answer, I'd go start that company. Plenty of people are starting these companies. But an important thing to keep in mind is that you can't un-invent technology. John Philip Sousa's railing against the gramophone and the entire concept of a recorded music industry didn't prevent those technologies from defining the 20th century. But, importantly, it also didn't eliminate the allure or the market for live music.

The answer to disruptive technology is not to employ the United States government to enact SOPA. Rather than help their companies collect collateral damage on younger companies that have made the Internet a prosperous, profitable, and relatively open creative space, unions should look seriously at alternatives to SOPA in fighting online piracy. I doubt that regulation is as viable a solution as creating compelling legal businesses around the globe, but if a law must be passed, the OPEN Act might be a better place to start. You can read some pros and cons for this approach over at TechDirt.

SOPA is good for one group, and one group only: members of Congress raising cash from the entertainment and now, by necessity, tech industries.

Members of the unions still supporting SOPA (the AFL-CIO, SAG, and AFTRA) should make it an internal issue, immediately, to persuade their leadership to take their name off this bill.

Image courtesy of Flickr user yoshiffles.

Many problems arise when your country's legislature is consistently more responsive to its donors than its constituents. One of these problems is that simple good ideas can't just be left alone to bask in their goodness.

The Internet is clearly a good idea -- not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that's happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn't know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter got an iPod a few years ago, want to go and ruin the web to benefit a few reactionary trade groups who would prefer censorship to innovation. A bill that was introduced into the House last month, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), aims to penalize or eliminate websites that have pirated content, and the repercussions for Internet users could be far-reaching.

The reaction online has been one of the largest upswells of traditional advocacy by web-native organizations in recent memory. Ever heard of Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, LinkedIn, Mozilla, KickStarter, Yahoo, AOL or Zynga? They're all opposed to the bill.

Google's fighting the good fight within the halls of Congress, where its representative was the only opposition witness allowed before the House Judiciary Committee. 4Chan, BoingBoing, and other top web properties converted their home pages to CENSORED home page takeovers, offering priceless in-kind advertising to the cause.

The result? Six thousand websites participated. One million emails were sent to Congress -- and 3,000 handwritten letters.

Tumblr takes it up a notch

Tumblr took even more dramatic action as far as getting users' attention, and redirected the roughly 500,000 daily unique visitors to Tumblr.com to a slick "call Congress" tool that dialed users, prompted them with talking points, and connected them to their representatives.

I need to take a minute and let you marinate on Tumblr's part in all of this. The service combines Twitter and blogging and has grown 900 percent in the last year. With 30 minutes' notice, Tumblr got hooked up with Mobile Commons, another New York-based start-up. And then they delivered an average of 3.6 calls per second to Congress. Because Tumblr is a blogging platform, its action also produced a sharp uptick in blog posts about SOPA.

The tool the Tumblr team built made me a little happy and a little sad. I was happy because it was perfectly executed. The interface was nice; it was blatantly clear what I was supposed to do; and it got my complete attention until the task was completed. But it also made me sad because I've been watching political technology for 10 years and have never seen anything nearly this good from the industry vendors who charge campaigns and non-profits significant sums of money for their clunky click-to-call tools.

It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology supplier could come up with in the last five years. The closest I've seen to Tumblr's tool was a short-lived but great "Whip Congress" tool built by Change Congress and a couple of Google employees. It provided a nice overview of which members of Congress to thank and which to spank for their stance on a bill.

Tumblr ended up routing 87,834 calls to representatives, for a total of 1,293 hours on the phone. For those of you who haven't worked in advocacy at the federal level, members of Congress pay a lot more attention to phone calls from constituents than emails or petitions.

But the bill lives on.

protecting free speech

Even if this bill is defeated, what has happened this week is really important for the protection of free speech online (which is, in spirit if not in law, identical to the protection of free speech in general).

We take for granted that great things like the Internet exist (and frankly, we should be able to). The problem with the U.S. Congress is that if a tiny, tiny minority of people doesn't like something (like the open Internet), and they give lots of money to key members of Congress, their opinions suddenly trump the vast majority of citizens, who didn't realize they'd have to fight for something that's so obviously great and well-loved. In this case, pro-SOPA groups like Pfizer and the MPAA have given 12 times the amount of money to members of the House of Representatives as web companies and consumer groups:

So, in addition to paying more attention and donating LOTS more money, the people who want to ruin the Internet also have the advantage of surprise. Net-savvy individuals first have to find out about the threat to the web, and then they have to overcome the counterintuitive logic that something as brilliant as the Internet is being fundamentally threatened by the people who just got around to figuring out that Facebook and its 800 million users might be a good place to rent out Batman movies.

It's vital that even consumer-level websites are getting political right now. We need them to win this battle. And we need everyone who loves the open web to be relatively engaged in protecting it, at least when ideas as terrible as SOPA gain traction.

The same problem occurs on issue after issue. No one stands up for great things we all take for granted, because who would mess with great things? There's no real money or lobby behind protecting free speech, just some ideals and financially struggling non-profits. If it weren't for the courts, free speech would be a distant memory at the mercy of some industry inconvenienced by it.

It's really, really helpful when major and relatively apolitical sections of American society suddenly pay attention and push back on Congress. Many terrible ideas are advanced in the halls of Congress all the time, but they depend on the majority of us not paying attention until it's too late and they've already become law.

The battle lines have been drawn, and those on the side of an open Internet, and free speech in general, need to stand up. This week, they have. But the opposition is heavily funded and well-organized. Preventing the sabotage of the Internet will take more than some clever Javascript site takeover code. It'll take phone calls and long-term organizing and building support and paying attention during non-crisis moments.

Fortunately, some groups have started this process. I'd recommend at least joining their email lists and following them on Twitter, as these groups are working very hard to keep the Internet the Internet:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Public Knowledge
• Center for Democracy & Technology

A video to reward you for reading all of that text:

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Web results screenshots via americancensorship.org. Bar chart via MAPlight. (More on who in Congress got that money here.)

I asked one high school social studies teacher we got in touch with, Jack Buckley at nearby Cohasset High School in Cohasset, Mass., how he would use OpenCourt in his classes. He teaches an elective called "Intro to Law" that he says is like a traditional civics class -- save for the fact that he brings police officers and legislators into the classroom and takes his students out on field trips to the local prison and court.

In the past, he's brought his students down to Quincy District Court to observe. With the live-stream, the court can come straight into his classroom.

After looking through our website, he also said that First Justice Mark Coven's interview was a "gold mine" for a public policy assignment he does during the second half of the course, after students have a basic grasp of the branches of government. He asks students to select a public policy issue and to research the government's response.

From his email (edited for clarity):

Students find the assignment to be difficult; I think I can now make it a heck of lot easier to understand by listening to Judge Coven's explanation of a district court as a place where needed human services can be accessed in balance with dictates of the law and the needs or considerations of victims. For students, he makes it pretty clear that the bulk of legal problems are rooted in social ills -- drugs, alcohol, violence, and financial problems. That's pretty easy for all students to understand, and sadly, for too many students, their personal lives are touched by these issues.

So, in short, my assignment on public policy and government response will be to listen to Judge Coven's interview, select an issue he mentions (or a related issue such as possession of a handgun) and research the problem as it manifests itself in our county, i.e., Quincy District Court! Then I ask students to begin to piece together local instances, MGL [Massachusetts General Laws] statutes, federal laws, acts of Congress, etc.

This is just what we want to hear. We'll be very happy if OpenCourt can make the abstract ideas of justice, public policy, and social services more real to local high school students. We are also working with the organization Discovering Justice, whose educational programs have reached almost 100,000 students.

If you have any ideas or feedback for our site on how we can be more of a resource for schools, please drop us a line.

Here are a few of the most interesting sources of metadata that the project is extracting so far:

Intercode Cross-References

Most sections of state codes contain references to other sections of the code. For instance, § 24.2-107 of the Virginia Code says:

Notice of each meeting shall be given to all board members either by the secretary or the member calling the meeting at least three business days prior to the meeting except in the case of an emergency as defined in § 2.2-3701. Notice shall be given to the public as required by § 2.2-3707. All meetings shall be conducted in accordance with the requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (§ 2.2-3700 et seq.) unless otherwise provided by this section.

In three sentences, there are three references to three other sections of the code, all in title 2.2, chapter 37, and all far removed from title 24.2 where the references are found. From that, we can infer a pretty strong connection between title 2.2, chapter 37 and our current section -- which makes logical sense, since title 2.2, chapter 37 is the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, and the current section is about the administration of elections.

Word and Phrase Definitions

State codes are forever defining things. Many titles and chapters begin by laying out the legal definitions for dozens of key terms that are addressed within, and codes frequently start out with a long list of definitions for the whole code. Cataloging these terms and their definitions and mapping their usage throughout the code provide some powerful clues about which parts of the code are related to one another.

Legislative Origins

The bills that establish or amend laws -- or even just attempt to do so -- frequently affect multiple titles and chapters of the code. By analyzing these legislative efforts, it can be inferred that sections of the code are related. Also, the summaries for these bills can serve as sources of keywords to identify the cited sections of code, for automatic tagging of sections to aid in searching.

Visitor Behavior

The bills that people interact with on The State Decoded also help map the relationships between sections of code. Tracking anonymized usage data reveals usage patterns, a result of people engaged in goal-oriented research. (People don't tend to casually browse legal data like this but, instead, seek out specific information.) By seeing which sections people tend to visit in a single session, it can be inferred that they are related.

Other sources of metadata are likewise useful: court decisions, scholarly articles, and attorney general opinions, for instance. These references, when connected together, constitute a powerful method of understanding the semantic relationship between different parts of a state code. This data can be shared with visitors to help guide them towards the information that they need, quickly and efficiently.

Even the most boring data structures can have some fascinating metadata structures underlying them. You've just got to know where to look.

Every time each state's legislature meets, they propose thousands of bills that would amend those laws. Attorney generals routinely write opinions about how laws should be interpreted. Law journals publish long articles exploring what laws mean. All of these sources and others still are more than many attorneys can keep up with, even with their paid access to expensive legal informatics systems. How is an average citizen supposed to figure out how to interpret the law?

It was this very problem that got me to start working on a solution for Virginia's laws. Over the course of a year, I've spent nights and weekends working on a website that would pull together all of these strands in a way that non-attorneys can understand, presenting all relevant data about each section of the law on a single page. Although I have a long-standing personal interest in the law, I am not an attorney. Luckily, I am a programmer.

When that website was mostly finished, I'd come to realize that it could be useful to folks in other states. My application to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's News Challenge proposed doing just that -- turning my code into a standard software package, identifying groups in states throughout the country that could implement it, and then working with them to get it set up. I was lucky enough to be selected to receive a 2011 News Challenge grant, which will allow me to spend a year and a half as a sort of a Johnny Appleseed of open government, spreading accessible state laws throughout the United States. I call that project "The State Decoded."

So what, specifically, does The State Decoded do that's so great? Here are a few features of note:

Embedded definitions: Essential to understanding the law is understanding the definitions of words. It's one thing to know that it's illegal to "play amplified music downtown after 11 p.m. on weeknights," and it's another to know that "amplified music" is defined as "sound that is made louder through means of electrical enhancement," that "downtown" is defined as "the area bounded by Main Street, 3rd Street, 8th Street, and Water Street," and that "weeknights" are "Sunday through Thursday." The State Decoded automatically locates those definitions within the code and displays them when each defined term is hovered over with the mouse.

Tagging: Laws frequently do not use the words that most people would expect. Somebody looking for laws on "theft" might come up short if they didn't know that "larceny" was the term they needed. By allowing people to tag the law prohibiting larceny with the word "theft," future visitors will find that law when they search for the more obvious term.

Automatic cross-references: Sometimes related laws are separated by hundreds or thousands of others, and it can be difficult to connect those dots. By analyzing which laws refer to others, share a lot of the same tags, tend to be amended by the same bills, and are inclined to be looked at by the same people, somebody looking at one law receives recommendations of others that are related to the current one.

A rich application programming interface: All the data stored within the site is available programmatically, so that website developers can use any of that information for their own purposes on their own websites.

Most of these features are already in place on the Virginia site, which is currently in private alpha testing. There's been a surprisingly enthusiastic response from groups across the country so far, and these days my nights and weekends are spent not on programming, but on helping folks in other states figure out how to prepare to implement The State Decoded for their laws. Once the Knight Foundation grant kicks in, development will go full-time, and my updates here on Idea Lab will be full of descriptions of fun, new features and interesting discoveries about the quirks of state laws. I look forward to your questions and comments about this project.

Three days after its launch, Valdis Zatlers, Latvia's outgoing president, made a public appeal to use Manabalss.lv. Within a week, Saeima, the parliament of Latvia, decided to vote on the first of Manabalss.lv initiatives, and it was adopted in the first reading. Four weeks later, the same initiative passed the second reading. Thus we can proudly say that in a month's time, Latvia had passed a new law on the online request of the nation. Additionally, a second initiative hosted on the EuroSay.eu framework is presently being deliberated in the parliament.

We believe these unique results are due to four basic principles that the EuroSay.eu creators developed over a 12-month period of research and planning:

• Development of crowdsource initiatives -- Authors of new initiatives are given council by a network of voluntary experts. Their advice helps create thought-out and useful initiatives from the representatives of the people.

• 100 percent legitimacy -- The framework interacts with Latvia's Internet banks, providing a free and reliable identity check. Saeima members can be absolutely sure that the number of petitioners is a real representation of the civic will. Additionally, the list of petitioners can be compared to the national voters' register. Personal data accessed by the EuroSay.eu framework is completely protected; its creators consulted with the best Latvian hackers on the matters of Internet safety.

• Initiative tracking -- The framework has the built-in ability to allow the media or NGOs (non-government organizations) to report on the initiatives' progress. This pushes participants to follow through on their commitment, and helps them garner more votes if greater support for a particular initiative is necessary.

• Built for the user -- The creators worked with leading marketing and technology experts in Latvia to create the ultimate synthesis of functionality and form and an interface that's attractive and easy to use. Website http://manabalss.lv/ scores high on both functionality and user interface quality.

We have figured out how to launch this project in your country and in your organistaion! If you're interested, please let me know either in the comments or e-mail me at kristofs [at] creo [dot] mobi We're looking for people elsewhere who would be interested in collaboration on this non-profit project to spread direct-democracy over the world.

It started like a side project, when sitting with colleagues we were brainstorming about our country. We noticed that even though Latvians are considered to be politically very inactive and reluctant to engage with anything, we actually are the contrary - we have done the Baltic Way and once 4 years we do Latvian Song and Dace Festival and every year we do the Big Cleanup. What is interesting, we do all those things volutarily, nobody is paid for them. So, we are active nation after all. Its just that we don't believe in Politics and we feel that we have no say, no voice, no power to get heard. That is where EuroSay.com comes in - to let every individual and every organisation get heard, gather like-minded, show the public need to authorities and get their ideas done!

In the beginning of this Summer, our president initiatied the procedure of firing our parliament, because, it didn't let investigate one of the Latvian oligarchs who is also an MP. In the end of July, people had a referendum and 95% voted pro firing the parliament, so we have new election coming this September.

The central issue at stake is a First Amendment question of whether the court can order a news organization to redact material that has been presented to the public in an open courtroom.

On July 8, WBUR, a public radio station, filed a response memo as well as a supplemental affidavit of our executive producer to the state's Supreme Judicial Court.

The documents are the latest in a lengthy legal exchange between the Norfolk County District Attorney's office and Quincy District Court judges over the redaction from the public record of the name of an underage alleged victim of sexual abuse which was accidentally blurted during a suspect's dangerousness hearing two months ago.

Two-Day Delay

OpenCourt publicly live-streams daily video of the court's First Session proceedings and posts the footage after an interim of two days. This delay is to allow reasonable room for redaction requests and to edit video in extraordinary circumstances, according to WBUR's journalistic standards and as outlined in OpenCourt's initial archiving guidelines.

We have not posted the May 27 archive episode at issue, pending the upcoming appeal hearing on Aug. 4 before a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, namely Justice Margot Botsford.

As mentioned in our filings, we would have removed from footage the name of the underage alleged victim and any information in court that would identify her, regardless of a court order. Such an order, however, represents a challenge to basic First Amendment press rights, specifically relating to issues of prior restraint. We are obligated as a press entity to clarify that our actions are voluntary and not mandated by the state.

Perhaps the most famous prior restraint case was the New York Times publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The leaked secret Department of Defense study extensively documented the U.S. government's Vietnam War history. The federal government sought to suppress the information in the documents. However, the Times' argument triumphed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the press had a First Amendment right to publish information important to citizens' understanding of its government's policies.

Preventing Harm

In another case more relevant to ours, our lawyers write that in Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart in 1979:

The U.S. Supreme Court reasoned a prior restraint was not appropriate because there were no express findings that harm would occur upon publication. Moreover, there was no demonstrative evidence that other measures would be unable to prevent those harms ... as Mr. Davidow's affidavit sets forth, OpenCourt has taken other measures to prevent exactly the harm that concerns the Commonwealth.

We have every intention of protecting the latter, and over months have constructed guidelines with our Advisory Board, the public, and an open "working group" at the court. The guidelines are a living document.

The outcome of this case will set important guidance for the future operation of this project and others like it. More importantly, it could also significantly shape the legal lens through which the First Amendment is viewed when it comes to emerging technology in general, and specifically towards live Internet video-streaming.

Photo by of gavel by bloomsberries via Flickr.

Launches are by definition difficult. To get from zero to full speed ahead is always a bumpy process. The launch of OpenCourt was no different.

Little did we know that in our first fortnight, we would be dealing with a D.A. that wanted to shut down our archive, sore backs from working out of a tiny witness box, and a week of multiple escape attempts that even veteran court staff told us was rare.

The lesson for us is that when launching a pilot project, expect the unexpected and be sure to have a foundation in place to help respond to what comes up. Our advisory board has been invaluable before, during, and after launch to help our project adapt as issues have come up.

By all measures, the launch has been a success:

• Thanks in great measure to Twitter and stories by the Associated Press, The Boston Globe, the local CBS affiliate, Engadget and Slashdot, among others, the site was viewed more than 70,000 times within the first few weeks.
• Daily viewership of the live-stream has held steady at about 100-200 concurrent viewers at any given moment.
• An editor at the Quincy Patriot-Ledger website, where our live-stream is embedded, reports that page is getting more than 1,000 hits a day.
• Our Twitter followers list reveals that the right kind of people are paying attention: PIOs, technology writers, local journalists, libraries, students, local politicians, et al.

Robust discussion has ensued online, as you'd imagine, regarding First Amendment and privacy rights.

Slashdot comments:

Username Anonymous Coward: "Court rooms should be open to interested members of the public. It should be open to the press. It should not be open to any idiot on the Internet, especially when a trial can badly damage people's reputations even if they are eventually found guilty."

Username Ozbird: "'Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.' -- R v Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy [1924]"

THE ARCHIVING ISSUE

Before our launch on May 2, we spent half a year ironing out technical and trademark issues, hearing the concerns of all local stakeholders and our advisory board, drafting guidelines for when the live-stream would be turned off, and training everyone at the court on how the process would work. Our goal was to provide transparency to the most cloistered branch of the government while also respecting the rights of defendants, witnesses, and victims.

In our many meetings, we had discussed our intention to archive, that is to provide public access to our recordings online.

So it came as a great surprise to us when on April 29, the Friday before our Monday launch, we received a letter on official letterhead from Michael Morrissey, the Norfolk County district attorney, with a request to prevent public access to our video archives.

Then when the project launched on May 2, the D.A's office, often with the defense bar, filed a motion [pdf] to the sitting judge to stay the archives in at least three cases, all of which were not heard.

We voluntarily decided to suspend posting our recordings for a period of time. We went to our advisory board with the issue and convened a small working group charged with coming up with potential frameworks to deal with the concerns raised by the district attorney. Luckily we had these avenues of communication open and had asked the hard questions early in our process so that we could address the issue when it came up.

After the final meeting of the board this week, we will soon decide how to deal with the archives.

DOES THE PUBLIC WANT ACCESS?

When the Quincy Patriot-Ledger reported about the conflict over the archives, readers hit the comment boards. Comments are verbatim.

User JCR: "Shouldn' Morrissey have thought of this before the program was ready to roll? It's not like he didn't have advanced warning."

User busta: "Possibly true but where do you draw the line. I'm no fan of Morrissey but I will applaud him for taking this step. People deserve some measure of privacy."

User StayOffMyLawn: "These are public proceedings. They occur in front of a room full of spectators. The people involved aren't entitled to any expectation of privacy. That includes victims and witnesses. Show the videos."

WORKING STIFF, LITERALLY

We're on court time now. Our day starts at 8:30 a.m. We set up the equipment from the ground up, from the camera and tripod to the WiFi network to the computers. The doors of the courtroom open around 9 a.m., and the judge comes on the bench anytime between 9:10 and 10:00.

Our office is a desk and a chair sitting inside the witness box to the right of the camera. The room is windowless, the lighting pitiless.

Then the arraignments begin (or probation surrenders on Tuesdays).

Drunk driving, shoplifting, drug dealing. Substance abuse commitments, kidnapping, assault and battery. The charges come quickly, some minor enough that they can be settled immediately with the D.A., others given a next court date.

We tweet if the case is interesting and keep our eye out for good stories. If the judge orders the live-stream to go off, we turn it off. (Eventually it'll be the judges controlling the stream, but we've had some technical difficulties with that system during the launch.)

The gallery slowly empties out and proceedings usually end around 1 p.m., though last week the recess didn't come until 2 p.m. in order to squeeze in the arraignment of four defendants involved in a big pot sting, as the Cantonese translator was needed upstairs on a case in the afternoon.

After a lunch break, it's back to arraignments until all the cases are done, anywhere from 4:15 to 5:00. Then we break everything down. It's a long day.

Judge Mark Coven said that part of his motivation for allowing the live-streaming of his court was to show the public how hard the court employees work. Even if you can't see it through our live-stream, we are experiencing it. These folks work hard out in the public eye all day.

JAILBREAK

Whether it's spring in the air or some other factor, an unusual amount of disorder has been in the court -- two attempted escapes.

On our first Friday, a defendant on a domestic assault and battery charge took off running out the back door of the courthouse, and got all the way down the street before being tackled by court officers and a nearby construction worker. He allegedly bit two officers in the process. My colleague Joe went outside and saw the court officers making the arrest. The local CBS affiliate also happened to be there.

The defendant, who allegedly broke lights and spat at people in lockup, was deemed too violent to be arraigned up in First Session, where we would have live-streamed it. Instead, all parties including us trooped downstairs for the arraignment. My request to shoot the arraignment on my Droid Incredible was denied by the judge.

Then on another afternoon, in the day's last case, a defendant with an Oxycontin addiction who was about to be taken into custody for probation violations bolted down the aisle of the gallery, which was empty, save for his father. Court officers full-on tackled him in the aisle.

He came back the next day and was held without bail until his final surrender hearing on June 7. In both cases, the defendants both got extra charges of attempted escape. The first defendant also got charges of assault and battery of a public employee and intimidation.

Just another day in Quincy Court.

Val Wang is the producer of a the OpenCourt project funded by the Knight News Challenge to increase court transparency through digital technology. She will oversee the production of the daily stream of written and video content originating out of Quincy District Court and lead the project's social media outreach. Val is an experienced writer and multimedia producer who has worked for Reuters Television, NBC News, and UNICEF in both New York and Beijing. She has also produced documentaries on sustainable architecture airing on PBS.

Photo by of gavel by bloomsberries via Flickr.

But I have the opposite fear too -- that the judges in those courtrooms will become so skittish that they'll keep turning the camera off and we'll lose the ideal of openness that is the purpose of our project and a cornerstone of that little thing we call democracy.

So this question of when to keep the camera on and when to turn it off is a complicated one that involves balancing transparency with privacy. It has provoked more controversy than any other question that we've posed.

Knowing that we had a range of viewpoints from "show everything" to "protect the privacy of victims," we asked the Cyberlaw Clinic out of Harvard Law School to put together a preliminary checklist of reasons that the camera could potentially be turned off and took the list to meetings with both local and high-level stakeholders to get their input.

We want to work towards a list of loose guidelines that could guide the judges and clerks, while causing the least amount of interference with the court's business.

First, a little bit about our setup. There will always be a producer present when the camera is on, but it will be the judge and the clerk who actually turn it on and off.

Down in Quincy

We met with the local group in Quincy District Court first. We first ruled out certain proceedings from live-streaming: any cases involving minors or the victims of sexual abuse or assault; and any part of the voir dire or jury empanelment hearings. We also won't be showing the faces of jurors.

Participants brought up the statues that protect the privacy of criminal records and mental health records and we debated how to deal with those cases.

Then came the cases that are up to the judge's discretion. First Justice Mark Coven reiterated that all proceedings were free to be live-streamed but that he would be willing to consider turning off the camera on a case-by-case basis. If a lawyer or advocate has good reason to object to a proceeding being filmed, he or she may file a motion. Judge Coven has said he doesn't want to scare women off from applying for a restraining order.

People at the meeting brought up cases that they could imagine objecting to. These cases tended to fall into three major categories: the protection of victims, of witnesses and of defendants. For example:

• A woman filing for a restraining order who won't go forward with it if she has to appear before the camera.
• A spouse or parent committing a family member for substance abuse who doesn't want the community to know about their family problem.
• An inflammatory sexual assault allegation that the defense has reason to believe is fabricated.
• An identification case.

The defense lawyers and the representative of DOVE, the domestic violence advocacy group, were satisfied with the result, saying that we can't fully know how people will react to the camera until the project really begins.

Meanwhile, back up in Boston

When we put the same issues before our advisory board, they came up with the opposite answer to the question about restraining order hearings.

We recruited for our advisory board the same constellation of diverse viewpoints as we did with the local group, with the idea that they could offer us a kaleidoscopic view of the court. When we debated whether or not to show the restraining orders, we saw their full range of opinions.

We presented one of the arguments for showing the restraining order proceedings that had come out of our local meetings: the idea that a domestic violence victim watching at home might see the process and understand that she (or he) could come down to the court to apply for one themselves.

The representative of the Massachusetts Bar Association disagreed with this, saying that there are better ways to educate the public and that showing the proceedings could both expose the victim to more physical danger and public humiliation as well as permanently damage the reputation of those who have restraining orders filed against them that are eventually denied.

The head of the D.A.'s Victim Witness Services department concurred, saying that this project "can't afford a body."

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Robert Cordy also agreed, saying that family issues are too sensitive and too fraught with peril to live-stream, at least at the beginning stages of our project.

The only objection came from a Boston University law professor and former ACLU counsel who said that if reporters are allowed into the courtroom, then our cameras should be too. (He also made the disclaimer that as an academic he doesn't really have a dog in the race.)

Justice Cordy said that in theory that's how we would like to operate but in reality there are perils of opening the court through technology. He said he didn't want this issue to trip up the project right at the beginning and that we should revisit the issue later.

These comments drove home to us the seriousness of our project and the impact it might have on people's lives. We want to proceed carefully.

Back in Quincy, Judge Coven disagreed with the advisory board's decision, saying that he believed live-streaming the proceedings would show what a big problem domestic violence is in Quincy, but that he would abide by the decision. He plans to move sensitive cases to other courtrooms rather than turning on and off the camera.

With all of this input, we'll be finalizing the checklist of guidelines soon.

On the day of the meeting in December, the First Session of the courthouse was standing room only, and included the entire court staff, attorneys from both sides, local journalists, and victim advocacy groups. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Robert Cordy was there, as well as the Norfolk County DA Michael Morrissey. Many, many people have a stake in this project, and have their eyes on what's going on. The project stopped feeling abstract the moment all of those people filled that room.

Judge Coven said he is a proponent of court openness because he believes that if the public can see what happens in court they will have more confidence in the judicial system. He also stressed that sometimes the rights of the victims of crimes will be protected over the rights of access, and that this was an experiment to find those boundaries and to create a model that could be replicated across the country.

He introduced Justice Cordy, a champion of our project, who told of a recent dinner he'd had with retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter during which they debated electronic access to the courts. Souter said he would allow cameras into the Supreme Court "over his dead body." Luckily for us, Justice Cordy has exactly the opposite opinion. He quoted early 20th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as saying that "State courts serve as the laboratories of democracy.'"

Open questions

Our executive editor John Davidow presented our project as an experiment with many open questions and opened the floor to input. And boy did we get it!

The range of concerns went far beyond what we'd been anticipating. While we were aware of the need to protect the privacy of women coming forward in domestic violence cases, we had not considered the privacy of defendants who were accused of sex crimes against children, one question the public defenders posed. Nor had we considered the possibility of confidential attorney-client discussions being caught on the microphones and broadcast worldwide.

Other thoughtful and thought-provoking questions included: How will a woman with a domestic violence case alert the judge that she wants the camera off without walking on camera? Will someone be monitoring the comments on your blog? Will you make transparent how you are scheduling what cases get shown? Will proceedings be re-broadcast at a later time? What will be the psychological impact of this project on the local community? How will you assess the project? How will we make our concerns known after this meeting?

While all of the exchanges were cordial, there were notes of resistance in some people -- mostly defense lawyers -- who felt like this project was being foisted upon them without their say. In a sense, this is true, as the court is an extremely top-down organization, but it is our aim to give everyone a voice in the project.

We came away with a list of concerns from many of the stakeholders of the process and a commitment to holding regular meetings to work through their questions and any other ones that will inevitably arise.

Many questions, a few answers

Several weeks later we held a smaller meeting. In attendance were Judge Coven, a court clerk, a prosecutor, members of the Norfolk County Bar including public defenders and private lawyers, and a representative of DOVE, the domestic violence advocacy group, along with our project staff.

Some of the topics were easy to discuss: Who will be allowed onto the WiFi network? How are we going to alert people coming into the courtroom that the proceedings are being streamed live on the internet? How will we let people know they're in or out of the frame of the video? What's your policy on blog commenting?

Then we moved on to the two most contentious issues: In what cases can the camera be shut off? Will we be archiving and re-posting the daily videos?

On the first question we are balancing the First Amendment right of press freedom with the Sixth Amendment right to have a fair trial. The Clerk Magistrate on one hand argued that what can be shown in open court should be shown on the feed, while the defense lawyers argued that there were cases where client privacy should be protected. The Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic has put together a preliminary list of cases that could shut off the camera; we've circulated it to the group and will be hammering out the specifics at our next meeting.

As for archiving, most people were opposed to it at first. Public defender Julieann Hernon was the most strenuously opposed -- she felt like people would become "unwilling conscripts into a reality TV show." But others realized it was an inevitability. That's the point that we at WBUR had come to in our discussions before the meeting -- that our definitions of public and private are changing. That our lives are going to be digitized and made accessible online. And that this will have real repercussions on people's lives. So how do we do it responsibly?

Defense attorney Richard Sweeney brought up instances where his law firm or the D.A.'s office legally froze pages from Facebook or other social networking sites because they were central to homicide cases. In light of similar possible situations with our project, he said he would prefer that WBUR did the archiving, rather than having an outside entity take it on as a business venture. And slowly most people came around to a pro-archiving point of view. But archiving still remains an open question, one of the largest.

We're going to keep talking and thinking about these issues as we near our launch.

The current "cameras in the courtroom" statute applied to what are now considered mainstream media. Media with prior notification to the court were allowed to record audio, video and still images from the courts. The statute allows for one still camera and one videotape camera in a set position in the courtroom. Members of the media pool the material gathered in court and distribute it amongst themselves based upon mutually agreed upon rules. The court is not involved in the distribution of this material.

The proposed rule takes into consideration the new technological and journalistic realities that currently exist. The rule also expands the definition of media. In addition to mainstream news sources, the new rule allows "organizations that regularly gather, prepare, photograph, record, write, edit, report or publish news or information about matters of public interest for dissemination to the public, and to journalists who regularly perform a similar function."

In other words, web news editors, reporters and bloggers would have the same privileges as traditional media outlets. In addition to electronic recording devices like still and video cameras, journalists will be able to use their laptops and smartphones to cover the state's courts. The journalists will be allowed to transmit text, audio and video through these devices allowing them to provide live coverage of the courts.

All members of the media, large and small, would be required to register with the state's chief public information officer. The registration requires that the member of the media comply with the rules outlined in the new statute and that they regularly report news in some form. The statute is intentionally broad in its definition of what constitutes a member of the media and allows the state court's public information officer to make the final determination.

h2. The Making of Rule 1:19

Generally speaking, the writing of new laws is often compared to the sausage making process. As a member of the subcommittee for the state's Supreme Judicial Court Judicial-Media Committee that wrote the amendment to the rule, I can tell you this wasn't the case.

In addition to me, the subcommittee was made up of representatives from Boston's two major dailies, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, as well as representatives from the Associated Press, WCVB-TV and Lawyer's Weekly. Representing the state's non-mainstream media was Adam Gaffin, the editor of Universal Hub, one of the city's most prolific and respected news blogs. Also on the subcommittee were state judges, clerks and lawyers representing courts across the Commonwealth.

Here are the three main topics of the discussion over the roughly six months that it took to come up with the proposed rule change.

1. Electronic Equipment
The conversation on this topic focused on the kind of equipment that would be permitted in court. It was quickly agreed that whatever technology that was introduced inside, the courtroom would maintain the decorum necessary for the judicial process to take place. That means turning off the ringers on mobile phones. Laptops are be permitted as long as the sound of a clacking keyboard is not disruptive. Also, an additional camera position will be provided for non-mainstream media so that these journalists can be afforded the same electronic access as their mainstream counterparts. The use of smartphones will be permitted for texting and photographing the activity going on in court.

2. Who is a Journalist?
This discussion was very involved and thoughtful. It was gratifying to see how important it was for all members of the committee to broaden the definition of who would be permitted to cover the courts. In my opinion, members of the court have an unfair reputation for limiting access to court proceedings. The primary concern of the court is that the public's right to be informed does not interfere with the public's right to a fair trial. All the representatives from the court on the committee felt very strongly that what goes on in court is made as public as possible.

Over the course of many conversations, it was determined that a member of the media would have to establish that they regularly cover the courts or cover news associated with court proceedings. The greatest concern on the part of the judiciary is that a party involved with one aspect of a particular case or issue before the court would present themselves as members of the media. The concern of the judges and clerks was that these individuals could potentially disrupt court proceedings. The greatest fear around this issue came from judges who worked in the family court. They have seen cases of husbands coming into the court claiming to be members of the media who attempt to intimidate or disrupt the court's business. The members of the judiciary were concerned that greater access could create an environment that could exacerbate this problem.

3. Registration vs. Certification
Most of this discussion centered around whether journalists would have to register or be certified by the court. It took a while to get consensus on this issue. Members of the legal community and representatives from the judiciary felt it made sense to require advanced certification before a journalist could report from court. They felt this certification process would increase the accountability of the media working in the courtroom. Members of the media felt it would create unnecessary barriers of entry into the courts. The members of the media were concerned with who would be in charge of certification, and the criteria that would be used to grant certification.

Over several meetings, the members of the subcommittee agreed that registration would be a more streamlined process. Many of us on the committee envisioned the process as similar to how one registers to use a new piece of software. An individual would be required to provide contact information, to demonstrate that they are acting as a legitimate member of the media, and agree to comply with the rules that preserve the rights of individuals before the court. Though the registration process seems like a distinction without much of a difference from certification, the subcommittee agreed that it would increase access to the courts, which after all was the purpose of this rule in the first place.

Now What?

The proposed rule to change Rule 1:19 now is open to public comment until January 28, 2011. You can register your thoughts in the comment section of this blog, but you should also let the courts know how you feel about the proposed rule by going here.

In my next post, I'll write about the impact the amended Rule 1:19 will have on Order in the Court 2.0. You can get a preview of its impact on the project in an interview I did with Lawyers Weekly. You can can also read related coverage from WBUR.

extrAct is targeted not only at communities and landowners but also at the journalists who cover local development and environment issues. It is a novel platform for community education and civic action.

While outlets such as 60 Minutes have picked up on both the unprecedented opportunities and health risks of American natural gas extraction, which is touted as the country's path to energy independence, Csikszentmihályi and his team built extrAct specifically to help citizens take advantage of those opportunities while mitigating or pushing back strongly against their risks.

"Land owners around the country are facing significant challenges when coping with leaking wells, industrial traffic, and air and water pollution," Csikszentmihályi told me in the lead-up to extrAct's release. "They have serious concerns about their health and property value. The extrAct tools give them ways to document, share, and communicate their experiences. For the first time, a rural landowner in Pennsylvania who is contemplating signing a lease can read about the experiences of a rancher in Colorado who has been dealing with these issues for twenty years. And an epidemiologist, journalist, or regulator using extrAct can survey a wide range of citizen's experiences."

extrAct Technologies

extrAct, like other Center projects such as Sourcemap and Between the Bars, is a News Challenge-style technology: It meets a crucial information using new technology whose end-users, conversely, aren't necessarily tech-savvy. extrAct consists of three such technologies thus far, each easy to use at the community level:

Landman Report Card (www.landmanreportcard.com) -- LRC is a review system for landowners to rate their interactions with gas industry salespeople. These salespeople known as landmen are often independent contractors who work in a loosely regulated, high-pressure environment. LRC helps identify the landmen in your area who make reasonable offers in your interest, while outing the dishonest ones. The LRC website also offers a crash course for what to do if a landman comes knocking.

News Positioning System (www.newspositioning.com) -- NPS allows anyone to map a news article in context. Landowners and community groups often have folders bursting with years' worth of newspaper clippings on gas leaks, lawsuits against industry, and more...but with no easy way to share them. NPS solves this problem. If the story is online, you can map it, along with all other local stories on the same topic.

WellWatch (http://scrapper.media.mit.edu/wiki/WellWatch) -- State agencies track and publish information on well leaks and industry non-compliance with safety and environmental regulations. But that information is often hidden in badly managed websites and poorly designed databased. WellWatch converts those hard-to-navigate state databases containing information about the oil and gas industry to the same platform used by Wikipedia. Impacted communities and individuals can more easily access data about wells and operators in their communities. And more importantly, they can then add to this repository their own considerable knowledge.

If your community is affected by the natural gas industry, try these tools or contact us for more information: extract@media.mit.edu.