By Jason Wilson
Over the last couple of weeks, particularly the last two days, some interesting news has been released that is making me question how we might one day create analytical materials for the law.
First, 48 Hour Magazine was launched and managed to obtain, curate, edit, layout, and publish content for an entire magazine in 48 hours. It was remarkable watching the utilization of Twitter, Facebook, and the crowd to create an amazing amount of content. The model is worth studying.
Second, CALI announced the eLangdell Electronic Casebook Stimulus Project, which will pay tenured or tenure-track professors $500 for a chapter for an electronic casebook to be donated to the the project. In a sense, CALI is crowd sourcing the creation of casebooks to compete with the established casebook vendors.
Third, Publish2 announced the launch of Publish 2 News Exchange, which seeks to challenge the “Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers.” The system will enable newspapers to republish high quality Web content in traditional print format and allow creators of that content to build their brands in print.
Lastly, Demand Media has announced that it will be providing some content (i.e., articles and videos) for the Hearst Publications’ SFGate.com and Houston’s Chron.com. If you are unfamiliar with Demand Media, I suggest you go read last year’s Wired article. It has perfected the art of crowd sourcing content and content curation.
In the context of legal analytical material, I’m trying to imagine what the crowd sourcing model could look like and whether it can scale. I think these recent developments are giving us some ideas to think about and could present some serious challenges to the established methods for writing and selling law books.
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Jason: Thanks for this very helpful post. Some ideas about crowdsourcing legal analytical material: Cornell LII's Wexhttp://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex shows how crowdsourcing can be used to create legal reference sources; Staffan Malmgren describes how crowdsourcing can be used to create commentaries on statuteshttp://j.mp/9zECLi in connection with the lagen.nu Swedish free access to law servicehttp://lagen.nu ; and Olivier Charbonneau suggests how legal commentary can be generated via blogging by attorney-users of an online legal service:http://j.mp/cUgGmN .
Rob,
Thanks for the suggestions, and the suggestions offered in Charbonneau's piece, particularly CDMF, are going to be part of a larger system for creating and verifying legal content. Open access? Not if it is a for-profit publisher. But that doesn't mean the barrier to entry has to be high. There are trade-offs, but I think we can come up with a workable solution in the next year or two.
Note: A thread on this post was started on Vicki Szymczak's Facebook page here:http://www.facebook.com/victoriajean?v=wall&s…
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