I came across a post on Lexblog over the weekend titled “Niche bloggers could threaten legal publishers” which I found pretty interesting. The post referred to another post by Ron Friedmann where he pointed out that publishing tools like blogs, wikis and podcasts enable law firms and other publishers to publish legal content very easily and potentially to a pretty big audience, thus potentially threatening legal publishers.
This is pretty much what the Open Law Project is - an initiative to harness the knowledge of the community and publish legal content using these publishing tools. This is a threat to the legal publishers who tend to publish their content behind a walled garden. Of course they have quite a bit of legal content at their disposal but as independent publishers start to publish content of a similar quality and perhaps even quantity, legal publishers will start to lose their grip in the market, especially if the independently produced content is free.
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Published April 8th, 2007
in OLP news.
I just realised how big the Open Law Project can become. I was in the bath thinking about the OLP (I do my best thinking in the bath) and I realised that the scope of the OLP is quite a bit bigger than I initially thought - assuming it is going to be all it can be. I am working on a proposal at the moment to help me obtain an initial round of funding to develop enough content on the OLP’s wiki to hopefully cause the project to tip and entice people to start contributing to the body of content on the wiki. The content will be in English and will really be a representation of the vast amount of legal content that could possibly be developed for the OLP.
It occurred to me that the majority of this country do not speak English as a first language. Going further, we have 11 official languages in South Africa and for the OLP to become a worthwhile resource for South Africans, it must be presented in a language the majority of the population understand, at the very least. I am therefore beginning to see that the work I am seeking to fund is really just the tip of the tip of the iceberg here. Down the line not only must a comprehensive body of legal content be written and published on the wiki but that content must be maintained on an ongoing basis and translated into the major languages spoken and written in South Africa, if not all 11 official languages. That is a pretty big project and one which is likely to require substantial funding. The upside is that as the OLP develops, it can create work for legally trained people who are interested in sharing their knowledge and using their writing skills. The end result will be a body of content that is accessible by and intelligible to the vast majority of South Africans.
Who wants to help?
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