The Vision of the Statewide Website
The vision of the statewide website project has captured the leaders across the nation in nearly every state and U.S territory. In a sea of information-overload, the statewide website project aimed to provide a web portal of all services, information, and events relevant to the poverty law community. The project strives to:
(1) develop one portal geared toward low-income persons needing legal help in a state. The portal aims to feature legal information, services, self-help services (online form fill-out), and answers to common questions. Instead of having to know which legal aid program to call, the statewide website would house information about every legal aid organization, court house, law school clinic, and library services related to the provision of legal information.
(2) develop a portal for public interest and pro bono attorneys who are working to help low-income persons with their civil legal problems. This portal strives to feature a repository of best practices, brief banks, trainings, events, cases open for pro bono action, and manuals that help improve the practice of poverty law.
These statewide websites engage the entire justice community and have been funded in large part by the Legal Services Corporation through a local LSC-funded legal aid organization. While founded on a strong vision, the statewide website projects face steep challenges. The technology needs to support extensive use, information sharing, and easy administration. Stakeholders from diverse sectors within the justice community need to be inspired and committed to creating, developing, implementing, updating, and sustaining the sites once up. And, local legal aid staff and leaders need to understand how to incorporate the statewide website services into current delivery systems or their daily work environment. The Circuit Rider is the national support for the statewide website projects. There are two statewide website technology platforms: Open Source Zope and Pro Bono Net. NTAP and Pro Bono Net collectively have three circuit riders to support the entire nation of statewide websites.
Open Source Statewide Website Circuit Riding
The goal of NTAP's Assistance and Circuit Riding is to help the poverty law community succeed in implementing large-scale technology initiatives that seek to ensure justice for low-income persons.
- “The existence of the Circuit Rider and NTAP resources absolutely have made it possible for [our state’s] website to come back from the dead. Without them, we wouldn’t have a website.” -- 2005 NTAP Circuit Rider Evaluation
- “The resource of having a Circuit Rider – someone we can go to for a lot of different questions on the website, grant process, and what has worked for others – has been invaluable. Great example is…generating content. Having someone in the middle [like a Circuit Rider] to let us know what results others have had has been so much help. Prevents making similar mistakes…allows us to improve on [what] others [have done].” – 2005 NTAP Circuit Rider Evaluation
About Assistance and Circuit Riding
NTAP provides circuit-riding services that support 22 legal aid programs in the development of their Statewide Website Projects. Statewide Website Projects are ambitious efforts, funded by the Legal Services Corporation, which strive to improve and expand services to low-income persons by creating an online portal that reflects all applicable legal information and resources for an entire state.
The Statewide Website Projects involve creating three online portals (a single website) for three audiences: (1) low-income clients and the public, who can go to one site to find all information across the state about legal information, services, and forms; (2) legal aid lawyers and staff, who can go to one central place to share information, training opportunities, pleadings, and research; and (3) pro bono attorneys, who have one online space to find resources, legal information, trainings, and services to support their volunteer lawyering. Statewide Website Projects are funded and/or organized through a local legal aid program, however, they are coordinated with state justice community organizations – such as the Bar Association, the courts, other social service organizations, other poverty law programs, volunteer lawyer projects, libraries, and law schools.
The Legal Services Corporation has funded 50 programs in states and territories to develop a Statewide Website Project. NTAP’s Circuit Rider helps 22 of these states to develop, implement, integrate, and sustain statewide legal websites. Each of these states elects to use an Open Source website template to house their content. The Circuit Rider travels on-site and provides remote assistance and training to these 22 states. The primary objective of the Circuit Rider is to “improve the quality and quantity of legal services for the client community.” NTAP achieves this by serving as a national clearinghouse of information for these states; building capacity in the legal aid community via training and technical assistance; and assisting programs to sustain their website projects long-term.
NTAP’s Circuit Rider project has been evaluated by a third party evaluator at Carnegie Melon University. A full report of this project’s achievements can be downloaded below.
