Introducing the Legal Self Assessment and Learning Tool (LSALT)
Who this resource is for: Non-profit societies in BC.
Who created it: This resource includes a recording and transcript of PLEO’s “Introducing the LSALT” event that took place on May 12, 2021 as part of the National Network of Legal Clinics for the Arts National Forum. This event features a presentation by PLEO Technical Director Anju Singh on the Legal Self Assessment and Learning Tool (LSALT) that is currently being built for use by non-profit and arts organizations in the BC and Yukon, offering modules in privacy and records, the Societies Act, Human Rights, and more in compliance with the BC Societies Act.
Future iterations of the tool can easily be adapted for use in other regions of Canada.
Disclaimer: This is a transcript based on a conversation between the participants in the event. As with all conversations sometimes things are said that ought not to be taken out of context. None of the comments found in the transcripts are legal advice and should not be relied upon.
Anju Singh: Okay, we're going to talk today about PLEO’s LSALTS, you know, that's an acronym that you may not know exactly where it came from, so the acronym is “Legal Self Assessment Learning Tool for Societies”. And the important pieces are there: there's the legal self assessment piece which is about ensuring that we can empower folks who work for nonprofits and in the arts to understand where they're at when we're talking about legal matters as organizations and individuals and practitioners in these sectors. But also a learning tool. So it's about knowing where you're at and then being able to find resources to, to increase your learning. And we're talking about societies, which is we talk about nonprofits as societies in British Columbia, but anyone here from other provinces may or may not use that language but it's really interchangeable for the purposes of this presentation, interchangeable with nonprofits. There will be times when it won't be and I’ll mention that.
So this is a sneak peek, we're not quite ready to launch this, but we're really excited to launch it, but we are going to be officially launching in the fall. In conjunction with the opening of PLEO’s legal clinic. So it's a really exciting tool that's meant to support the infrastructure of the legal clinic. And so today we're going to give you an advanced view into it again. While your feedback and your input is super important and your questions are important to make sure that we're launching the right tool.
My name is Anju Singh, and I am the Technology Director for PLEO. The primary responsibilities of my role were really to get this tool kicked off and moving ahead.
Then we have Novak. Novak, would you like to introduce yourself?
Novak Rogic: Hello everyone, I'm Novak and I've been involved with PLEO, I guess, since the days of, I guess, the initial proposal, where we try to understand what exactly technology means in this sort of world of legal information and helping nonprofits, and then also trying to kind of inventory all the requirements and things that people could, you know, use this tool for.
So last summer, we tried to go through all these things and come up with some sort of framework for development of the application, and it's been now, I would say just less than a year, between six months and a year, and it's really exciting to see these things materialising. So today you'll sort of see where we are at the moment, and you also learn a bit about the ideas for the new features and new development. And I guess most importantly for us to hear back from you and see what you think and what you'd like to see there.
Anju Singh: Great, thanks Novak. You can see Novak and I are smiling ear to ear here because we're really excited about this project and I think we're making some really amazing progress. We're proud of it and we're excited to see it launch, and to have people use it. So, to start today's session, I think it's best to start with an introduction to what is the LSALT and a little bit of the history, which is really best provided by the CEO and creative visionary of this tool, Martha Rans who is the legal director of PLEO, and she spent lots of time, many years, and has put a lot of effort into the concept behind the tool, so I'm gonna hand it over to Martha now.
Martha: Great. Thanks, Anju and Novak. And Angela for the introductions.
So, this tool started as, after a conversation with the City of Vancouver Culture Director of Awards, Cherryl Masters, some of you may know her. And it arose out of a conversation around how we could better support grantees of the city to be legally compliant, in particular, with things like making, filing their annual reports, and her, that single conversation got me thinking, well, gee, wouldn't it be great if we could take the combined knowledge of all of the people that are working in this area, and put it into some kind of a, of a tool that would support them identifying gaps in their legal knowledge, and then we can help them fill those gaps. That was the idea. And my co-conspirator in this was Allison Brewin, who many of you may know as the executive director of Vantage Point, or as, in our prior life, West Coast Leaf, and as a consultant to the nonprofit sector. For many years, she is partly responsible for this because we decided that we would try it out, in five areas of law, starting with Society's Act compliance, privacy, employment, human rights, and CRA compliance. It lived for about five years in a Survey Monkey format.
After getting some initial seed funding from the city of Vancouver and the VanCity Community Foundation. And, unfortunately, we did not. We weren't able to get any further funding, until we were able to convince the Digital Strategy Fund of the Canada Council for the Arts that this was a good idea, which I have to tell you when we got that grant with the assistance of Made in BC, I was a little taken aback because I kind of thought, well this is an interesting turn of events. And we had the students from the Centre for digital media here in Vancouver, support us in the development of a prototype. We decided to start with privacy so for those of you who are interested the prototype is up on our website, and it will be merging into what we're about to see today. And then we let on to, we received some additional funding from the Vancouver Foundation, and most recently another chunk of funding from the Digital Strategy Fund to build this out even further. So apparently there's a bunch of funders who think this is a really good idea. Now we have to actually test it and figure out if you think it’s a really good idea. I’m hoping that it is. Because it involved the heavy lifting of people like Margaret Mason who influenced the first version. Clea Parfit who assisted on the employment and human rights side of development. Dave Baracarow and a whole host of other people, including Novak, who sat on my roof talking to me about what the hell this technology could be in the first place. And, Tim Brae who told me that Google has a small army of people who figure out how people search for things, so don’t be so ambitious, and Lauren Wood who also gave ongoing feedback for the first year of the development of this into the prototype. Without all those voices, and many others, we wouldn’t have been able to get to this point.
So I'll nervously hand it over to Anju and Novak, with great gratitude for all of the work that you've done to make this strange little dream of mine and Alison's into reality.
Anju Singh: Great, thanks so much Martha, that was a fantastic background and covered a lot of ground of how we got here, and I think this need for the nonprofit sector, to have a tool like this, I mean, this is my sector, I've worked in this sector for over 16 years now and I can attest to the fact that we needed this so the idea that we need this in our sector, that we need these kinds of resources and tools is super important. I actually experienced it with an organization I worked with about two or three months before I came onto this project where we really needed some privacy support, and it was very, very expensive to hire that out, and we're weren't even sure what questions to ask, so I guess that's why I'm also especially excited about the project.
So just diving into this project here. So this is a screenshot of where we're at right now. We're in our beta phase, I would actually like to call it like pre-beta, because we're still learning and we still have user testing to do. So one important part of our process has been to listen to our community and to listen to our users, and just gonna throw this out there that if anyone's interested in becoming a user tester you can get in touch with me, or perhaps with Angela, or whoever at PLEO whose contact you have, if you are interested because we'd love to test with all of you to understand what your needs are. So, at this pre-beta phase we've come up with this so far. And so the important pieces of the tool that we're really seeing are the legal self assessments which is how we started out with a tool, a resource library so you can have learning in education, providing us with feedback so we can keep improving. We want to keep listening, and the legal clinic, which is how everything ties in together into the next level of support.
So moving forward. The next things that I think we really need to think about is what does the LSALTS do. So, the prototype that Martha talked about, which I'm going to show you screenshots of in a minute, is, you know, it was really focused on legal self assessments, and we really saw that this, this tested well in our community, people were like, “Oh, I'm so glad we have this, this is so helpful.” I share it a lot myself with organizations I work with, and so you know the self assessments are in the new version of the LSALTS are short assessments to help you determine what you need to do next and what you're missing. And so really it's about doing this evaluation, gauging of where you're at, and we understand that that's super important.
Beyond that, I'm actually going to jump to the third bullet point, we realise that, beyond just knowing what you're missing, we realise you also need some learning opportunities. And there was actually quite a demand for learning in our sector of legal matters because, you know, when you increase your education and how things work, it's going to get easier and easier so the resource library was something that we saw as very high value and that's a piece that we're developing as part of this tool as well. And so that would include learning opportunities and having information at your fingertips, glossary, like “what does this word mean?” you'd be able to find it. And, you know, on that note, there is the open learning concept, so we didn't want to have a special login required. This is not behind a paywall, you don't have to pay money for this. This is free for everyone to access. And while the target audiences are nonprofit and arts sectors, really anyone could go and use this information and this was a really, I think, a very generous thing that PLEO is offering, which is just free information for everyone and I think that, in the spirit of how we're all working together, it makes sense.
And so those are really the big things that the LSALT tool does. And at the end of it is an important piece of it, as we're preparing to launch the legal clinic in the fall, is the triage piece with the legal clinic so, you know, we really want to empower our users to, you know, approach the self assessments, explore learning, and then go to the legal clinic with really specific questions, so that you can get the most value out of the support that we can provide. And so really this tool is to prepare you for conversations that you have with lawyers or student lawyers to get the best advice and support that you need in the end.
So, one thing I want to kind of throw in there that's, that we're playing around with is the LSALTS if you recall the name was “Legal Self Assessment and Learning Tool for Societies”, we realise that this tool is much more than a legal self assessment tool that it's actually doing all these other things and has so much more value. So we're exploring the name as well so in the future you might see the name look like, look slightly different, and the URL we'll be using will be the legal clinic to share the tool because we really feel the digital tool and the legal clinic are so closely connected. We want to make sure, if you use the digital tool, the support behind it is not far off, and that distance between doing this work and going, “okay, but now I still have questions and I don't know where to go next”, you'll just know where to go in your next step.
So, who is this for? So, nonprofit and art sectors which, for me, the art sector is part of the nonprofit sector, very often, because we are, we're all often under a nonprofit model. There's also collectives, there's also artists, so I think some of the information will have some of the content will be translatable for arts organisations that are not nonprofits but primarily we're focused on nonprofit and arts sectors. And, you know, I think it's important to understand what our goals are, and so that's why I created this list here, which really influenced a lot of our decisions, technical design and conceptually for the product. So affordability was super important to us because the thing, the reason that this tool is needed as Martha mentioned is that you know, one of the reasons is organizations in these sectors just don't have the funding to just immediately go to a lawyer. And it's not even so much that they don't have the funding just to go to a lawyer, but rather, they don't even sometimes know what questions to bring. This tool will help with that. And so the affordability of not just the tool being free to use, but also the affordability of the long-term impact of being able to go and have a consultation with the right background knowledge is going to be really helpful. The knowledge and learning, so sector wide, we have a gap, there's a learning gap when things turn legal and I've done this myself too, we sometimes want to run away. And so I think with a little bit of knowledge and background in the concepts and the basics of these legal matters related to our work.
This is a super important piece that we want to include. Low barrier access is really important to us, and for that reason we have, kind of, for now shifted away from having logins and what, other things that we think might have been a little bit restrictive in terms of access. Low barrier access also means this is free, right now so you can access it, as I mentioned earlier, with no barriers, and all the information and the rich resources are available to everyone. Plain language. This is super important for people in our sector. Legal language can be a little bit scary and intimidating. And also, just time consuming, especially when a lot of us are maxed and stretched in our workloads, plain language will help us get through our work faster. And so, that's an important value we have for this tool. And we actually went a step further, it's not just plain language it's also a friendly language. So it's not just about, “oh you don't know this, well you should have known that”, it’s, you know, we're trying to be friendly, we're trying to make sure that people who use this tool are supported to understand that it's okay if you don't have this, it makes sense, you don't have this, but how can we get that information to you.
And then the multiple support mechanisms, there's multiple already built into the tool, there is the legal self assessments, there are, there's the glossary of FAQs and articles in the knowledge base, document templates which we'll be offering as well, but then there's also other support mechanisms which are related to the legal clinic as I mentioned, you could finish a self assessment, and you're like, “I don't know what the next steps are.”, the tool will guide you towards the next step. So, the support mechanisms, it's not just about getting you info, and then not following up, but rather helping you get to the next step.
So here is the prototype, so the history, Martha did a great job so I'm not going to go too far into the history but the CDM Centre for Digital Media students which is BCIT, SFSU, Emily Carr, and UBC conjoined programme, they’re masters students who created a prototype for PLEO. Which actually is, I loved it. They built this in a technology called react, super fast, as per its name, and there were lots of positive things about the prototype that we wanted to bring into the tool that we built, as the final version. The students did a fantastic job. The PLEO team did a great job to really ensure that user, the user’s experience and needs were really met and we saw this successfully happen in the prototype. So, you know, personalization, so there's like these characters, the characters, it was really important to make sure that they were gender ambiguous and that they represented everyone, so that you can see yourself in that support, and the tone is friendly. Another thing is, you know you're going to see this as we talk later about what we built, the design is also very clean.
And so when you go into the prototype, which as Martha mentioned is on the PLEO website under the Resources section, you can find the prototype there, and you can try it out. And you'll learn a lot.
You enter the prototype, and there's a character here who helps you walk through this process, and they just show you everything that you need to do, you answer the questions, they're meant to be very, very easy to answer and they're meant to give you information as you go. And as you go, it sets up your do now/do later. So I took some screenshots of me going through here. And so, it asks you questions that are really relevant to our sectors, so it's not asking you about things that are not relevant to the work you do. And, at the end of this you get your final results page, which tells you what you need to do, and the do now/do later, which we'd be open to your feedback on those titles as well. The do now/do later is essentially just meant to identify to you, as users, what is super urgent and what can wait. And I think this is a really respectful way to acknowledge again the stretched workloads of nonprofit folks.
Angela looks like she's posting the link for the prototype there. So that was the prototype, and again I really highly encourage everyone to test the prototype and if you have feedback. We'd really love to hear what you like and don't like. And if you do opt to become a tester with us for the final product, it would be really interesting to see how it compares.
So, here it is, this is what we built. So, you saw the screen at the beginning, we've decided to go again with a really, really clean design. Some of this copy is changing, you're going to notice a lot of lorem ipsum because as I said we're in the middle of, we’re still in pre-beta phase. But we're really trying to make sure when you land here you can know what to do and where to go.
So, there were some technical choices, privacy and security choices that really influenced our build. So the technical choices and goals, usability was pretty much like right at the top, UX or user experience was really, really important to us, and Martha really stressed this because, Martha works with lots of nonprofits, and I work for nonprofits and we know that in our sector, if things are really super dense with lots of copy or lots of clutter, it would not have high adoptability rate, so we really wanted to make sure that the usability and the experience was comfortable for our users, which led to the fact that we wanted clear and uncluttered design, so we didn't want the million things coming from every direction, really just focused moving you forward. So we imagined a lot of use cases where a nonprofit would be like, in a crisis situation, so they would be, you know, going to stress states and we tried to replicate these stress situations or stress states, which during COVID was probably pretty easy to replicate. And so then when you arrive at the product, that if you're in a stress situation and you just need the information, you can just get there and it can tell you what to do so you can act.
There are really avenues to action. Being scalable was really important for the way we built the tool so we wanted to make sure that the tool, while we have those five categories that you saw on the last screen, we really saw that it was foreseeable that this might grow, that this will grow, I think. And so we really wanted to make sure that when we built the tool in this technology that we made sure that we can expand, grow, add things, which made, made it necessary for us to make sure that this tool is revisable based on our learning. So when we work with our developer, it was a really crucial part of our development that we need not rely on a developer to go back and make changes. So if you have feedback if you say “wow, this question was really not working for me”, we can make that change. That was a super important part of our decision making around the tech was to ensure we can be highly responsive to our community.
Privacy was important to us. Our main server and backup servers are all based in Canada. We're hosting with a company called Fullhost, who are based in Victoria. Our main servers are in Vancouver and our backup servers in Montreal, which, while we don't have things logged-in, and you don't have personal information going into the site because it's only an external visiting based site right now, we imagine that in a future phase we might have logged-in users, and that they might, we might have document templates that you actually edit and fill in. And so we wanted to make sure that the privacy considerations were in place in advance so that we can grow again scalable and growth focused, and the technical choices that we made were also based on concerns security considerations we use a technology called Drupal we're in version nine, and we knew that Drupal was, was a CMS that was really good with security, and we could depend on it to deliver our product.
So what we built. This is the tool, so, again there's lots of lorem ipsum here but you would land on the self, the legal self assessment, and you would be able to pick a topic, so there could be multiple topics, per topic area, and there could be multiple mini assessments. The mini, you'll notice on the prototype, it's one big long privacy assessment, a piece of feedback we got and we heard and we responded to was people had wished that the assessments were shorter, so you could go really focused and dive in on a specific theme. And so we did that.
And this is how our final version looks like design-wise, so you'll notice that we took elements from the prototype that were successful, we have our character back here. And, you know, clean, clean concept, the to-do list and really uncluttered. And the character has different personalities now. So the character has like the warning like, “uh oh”, with the uh-oh face and then the okay this is the character who's asking the questions and then they'll oh no the red, the urgent, something's going wrong, and then the good, the yay, the yay guy, or yay person.
And then finally at the end when you finish your self assessment, you have the opportunity to see your results, and something that I'm really excited about is that the PDF prints out a really nicely designed version of this for you, and you can email it to other folks, and you can print it. One other thing that we're thinking of adding in a future, future phase, I don't know when, is potentially being able to directly send this to a law student in the legal clinic. So if you fill this out you could go, “oh I still need help”, and it'll send, and you'd be able to get support following that.
The other thing that we built was the resource library, so the resource library was really intended to search all of our resources where you can filter by topic area, or filter by type. And you can also search by keywords so it shouldn't say type your question, it should say type your keyword there, but you can imagine, you can start a keyword of, you know, records, you start typing R-E-C and it will pop up everything that has those letters and words in them. And this is an example of one of the pages you could land on, I need a meeting minutes template, boom, you land here, you can download it and you can use it. As I mentioned for security and privacy reasons for now you will not be able to edit documents in the system until we have a logged in view. For now you can download and that makes sure that your privacy and your information is not collected until we feel ready to collect it, or feel like we can do a good job of maintaining that. So what's next is the resource library development is the next piece of work. So we have FAQs, glossaries, lots of document templates, self assessments, I’m curious what we're missing, so if you have ideas, please provide those. The next item is creating content for upcoming modules, so the societies act module is the first module we're going to be populating and then the privacy module will follow. And the legal clinic triage and support is also a big part of this tool.
So how does the digital tools support legal clinic work and vice versa? And they are very, very connected. This tool helps you get to the legal clinic and it helps the folks of the legal clinic. Anyone who is going to offer you support to understand where you are and what you might need, so you can really use that time well and to triage that support.
One final thing I just want to mention before I hand over to Novak about future features, potentially, is that I just want to acknowledge the fantastic work that Justice Education Society did in building this tool for us. So Justice Education Society has an internal development team, which has been fantastic to work with. And they have helped us really see the vision that we have. And having been set in a nonprofit legal context they have really been a really great partner for us to make sure that we're really building an appropriate tool for the sector.
So up next is we're going to talk a little bit about, there's a couple of things that are going to happen, we're going to talk about other potential features and ideas. I just want to be clear that these are things that we have not yet built, but these were ideas so Novak was part of the team, early on and had had a few ideas that were included in our RFP that we decided to take out for a few of the reasons I described earlier, usability, technical limitations on ensuring we can ensure privacy and security, and also just building out the scope of the project. So, Novak is going to kind of start to dream about what we might want in the future, and we just thought it would be kind of a fun thing to share with everyone, of what we have next coming up. So I'll hand it over to you, Novak.
Novak Rogic: Hi again everyone, so I guess this perspective is more from the development of the application, or the application online, and it kind of refers to things that may or may not happen.
So, when we were originally designing the application, we of course, tried to accommodate most of the things I'm going to talk about now, but then for the reason that Anju already sort of clarified and especially for the privacy reasons and just other technical reasons we were not sure, or we didn't implement most of this. So again, at the kind of drawing table, we would love to talk about what we see as things that you would like to work on, and hear from you whether this makes sense, and what else would you like to see. So, when you look at the sort of typical lifecycle of the web application, you want to kind of think in terms of some common elements or some features that you always want to get better at, or keep improving. So when you for example look at the content that we have. One of the questions for us was how do we know that the content is, you know, is good? How do we know that users are happy, and how do we make sure that the content can be continually improved. A slightly changed perspective is how do we better the user experience, how do we enhance the UI and interaction with the application? And I think those two things collectively sort of brings us to the third point which is how do we, you know, become a hub? And how do we develop a community and become the place to go for nonprofits and for arts organizations? So you know, so that they know that there is a place where they can find the answers, ask the question, get knowledge, get started, and get all the support they need.
So, again, back to the web application, there are some things that we are sort of discussing and hoping to implement in the future based on the feedback on the application as it is now, but also based on the roundtables and seminars, such as this one.
In the three broad categories. We believe that users' feedback will give us, of course, a lot of this. So the question is what are the mechanisms of the user feedback, how do we get it? How do users connect with us, and between themselves? Personalization is another big one, and we do have some relatively simple ways of doing that right now, like for example when you finish your assessment there will be, as Anju was mentioning, there will be a PDF, or kind of an online summary of what happened that you can sort of store locally, but there is no personalised information, as in, you cannot go back and sort of, you know, have your identity online. So we're hoping to work on that, and there will be a lot of benefits, obviously, of doing that so we'll see kind of, some ideas in a moment. And then again, becoming a hub, contributing to public domain was always a goal, and we'll try to use all of the kinds of things we've mentioned to do that. So now we can kind of, you know, move forward and just take a look at what does it mean in practice and what are the kind of practical ideas we have in mind that we'd love to hear back from you on.
So this is let's say, a typical page, as it is now so there is no sort of your online identity, you just look at the flat content so there is a page, you know, under let's say, access to record section and you can read the content there is no interactivity with the page. So just with the sort of simple fact of being logged into the system, you can get some immediate benefits, so, if you just move to the next slide, for example, you can bookmark this page so you can have your identity, and this page can be in your repository of your favourite pages or bookmarks that you can share within your organization or for your later use. If you move forward to the next slide, let’s say this was a knowledge-based article that describes, let's say the basics of the access to records. We may get the feedback from the user in terms of from the technical perspective, how was the content was. We can even imply some sort of competencies phase learning principles, where we could say for each of the, our sections we could say these are the key things that you need to understand, and then we can get a feedback on whether the user actually gained the understanding and the knowledge that we're supposed to gain by doing the either assessment or reading the article. Also we could have a, let’s say, a text field where users can say what worked and what didn't work, and all these things kind of will help us learn quickly about the quality of our materials and make them better.
So if you move again to the next slide, another very popular way to discuss the content is actually commenting or asking questions. So, again, with the ability to create profiles online, and to interact, you can not only provide, you know, a critique or a comment on a given text but you can actually ask a question where others in community can sort of, you know share their experience, or reply, as well as the people in PLEO. So again, all of these things are going to not only to enhance the user experience but also to position this as a hub and place to go to find your legal answers.
So if you kind of push this idea a little bit more, we can have an example of how this could look in practice, and again these are just ideas that you would like to test for you, and work on but this currently doesn't exist. But if let's say I'm interested in, for example, access to records section, and also in privacy, I may have covered a lot of it, or I completed all of the learning materials online and the application should give me that information. One thing that you can also imagine here is that if let's say I've completed all the privacy module here, but then, you know, in some future time some of the, legal requirements or laws have changed. So wouldn't it be great that I have a notification and get an email from PLEO saying “hey, you've completed this and you created your privacy policy, and you created all these documents, but you know what, there are slight changes so please make sure to read what has changed, and please see if you still have to do anything”. So that's kind of another place, another way to build a hub and have people kind of being involved, and staying connected because as we all know things change over time. And this will be one way to kind of keep people in the loop. In addition, so if you had the profile, if all of your questions or comments were scored and any replies, then it would be there for you. You can get them either in an email or also by looking back to this portal, your bookmarks will be stored, but also your documents. Anju has shown an idea where you can actually see the template and download the document. So, in this parallel universe that we’re hoping to achieve at some point in the future, you will be able to actually edit those documents right within the application. So if you move to the next page, so this is the idea where you can actually see the document as a template, but also if you check it out. You can customize it, and you can work on it right here.
So those are basically some of the ideas. And again, we'd love to open up this now for discussion and see what you think.
Anju Singh: Thanks Novak. Yeah, so the section that Novak just went through there was really where we could go next. But, so either you can comment on any of that, or we can move into a combined Q&A and what you want to see in the tool so it's really nice for us to have, you know to start dreaming about what's next, because it really helps us figure out what direction that tool needs to go. So we're really ready to open up the floor to questions. There's quite a few in the chat and perhaps we can start with those. I'm a little bit behind here as I'm going to try to catch up.
Perhaps we can start with Kelsey's question here. “So is the LSALTS for individuals and societies or is it feeding from this tool, thus being only for organizations?“
And Martha, would you like to answer that or would you like me to answer that?
Martha Rans: Sure, all after that, and I'll also answer the next following question.
There will be two doors into the clinic, there will probably three. One will be artists, individual artists, the other will be arts organisations, And the third will be other nonprofits. For now, Kelsey, hold on to your questions. We're still in the process of sorting this out, and why don't you just wait until we're ready with those announcements later this summer.
Anju Singh: Great, and Martha you're going to answer Nick’s question as well?
Martha Rans: Yeah, so our colleague in Manitoba has asked a question that I'm sure others of you may have as you're from outside of BC. I'll just read it out: “As not every artist or arts organization is a nonprofit or charity or creative entity VC societies, can this tool be used for nonprofit entities incorporated under the Canada not-for-profit and Corporations Act, it’s a federal statute for nonprofits or a for-profit entity under the CBCA or another under provincial jurisdiction for either an artist or arts organisation that is not a non-profit or a charity?”
So, first of all, many of the, so, we started this particular module that we've been, there's two modules, one is privacy and the other is the societies act. The societies act is indeed provincial legislation. However, many of the concepts that underlie the Society's Act have analogues in those other statutory regimes. And while I can't say you can simply apply it, Nick, there, when you have an opportunity to go through it, you'll realize that there are some areas that are quite analogous and the kinds of questions that we ask, are ones that are also directly relevant, no matter what the legislative regime is. Once we have this phase of the development of this tool done, we will be starting to look at with this new funding from the digital strategy fund. Some ways of addressing how to handle people who will be coming from out of province to use it. I think, I don't think we're going to be able to address that at this stage in the development. I would hope that it would be something that we could address early in the next phase, which probably won't begin until September. But, you know, it's definitely been on the back of my mind for sure. And with respect to the privacy issues again, most of them are what I would call generic, our personal information and privacy act is based on PIPADA which is the National privacy statute, Alberta has its own, but most provinces have PIPADA, so there's a lot of carryover. It is intended as a general tool, it's not intended to give legal advice, it's a legal information tool. So I hope that we'll be able to look at some of those issues moving forward, and an answer to your follow up question, “Would we be interested in considering licencing the tool for use in other jurisdictions?”, absolutely yes. This is a national project for a reason. There's a national funder, we will be looking to you, Nick, and Nat, and anyone else in any other jurisdiction to help us to make a case to other aspects of government, like, innovation, science, and economic development, to support the next generation of these tools so that they can be most widely available. There's no question that what we're doing here has applicability in a number of different contexts, and we hope that other funders will come in to make this sustainable because right now the only significant funding we've received, having not received a single dime from the Law Foundation of BC, are almost entirely arts. And that's all I'll say on the topic. For now.
Anju: I also want to add something here, so this is why I love these kinds of sessions when people ask questions and give feedback and share ideas, Nat, your comment in response to Nick's comment, “I wonder if there could be some triage questions at the beginning to confirm corporate status”, or I'm actually just going to expand that and just say regional, what region you're from, has my brain’s thinking there's actually ways for us through conditional logic, that the self assessments are set up to ask questions like what region are you from, and then have appropriate questions to follow. So I just want to thank you for that because that's something I didn't think of right away. And as Martha said she hopes to do that in the fall and I can say Martha it looks like there is an avenue I can see there.
I'm just going to jump ahead to the next questions, the comments are really great, really nice too. Somebody said that the design was soothing, I've never expected to hear soothing around legal content so that's great.
So just jumping to the next question, Nick again, “In your research development design, did you find there's any other applications or platforms that are functionally similar?” I want to echo an acknowledgement that Martha made to Benjamin Miller from CLIO, who is based in Ontario for his support on our work and the reason we brought Benjamin Miller to advise on this project is because he did build a bylaw builder. So that is a somewhat comparable product to what we've built, Martha or Novak, do you know of any other comparable product to the LSALT?
Novak Rogic: Well, there are tools online that in a kind of functional sense are similar, but I'm not really sure, in the world of legal information, it’s just more kind of generic tools there are quite a few that are to certain extent, similar to this.
Anju Singh: Yeah, one of my user testing, and this is why user testing is such an important part of our process, was with a nonprofit representative from a nonprofit in Vancouver here, who said, “Yeah, I can find stuff like this online and I Google but then I end up in this like document that I have no idea what it means and it has nothing to do with the work that we do as an arts or nonprofit organisation.” So I think the content and the delivery of the plain language is what makes this tool really unique.
“Moving forward, will the tool be or become national?” So Nancy, I feel like that question was answered but if you don't feel like it, feel free to expand in the chat.
“Will this program provide a secure database for board policies with different user rights to ensure only authorised people have access?” So, Kathy, what you're describing is more like the future visioning that Novak was kind of going towards. And our biggest concern here is the secure database, we do not want to jump in and provide that level of access, there's a lot of work involved with privacy and security, especially when it comes to cyber security and server security so we would only offer this in the future, potentially, if this became something that we heard a lot of demand for, and if we could ensure that we could lock down that security. I hope that answers that question.
“What age of information in the tool is generic?” Louise, I’m not.
Sheldon Falk: That’s percentage.
Anju Singh: Percentage! So I think Martha kind of spoke to this Louise, that a lot of like the privacy stuff is generic and the prototype, I feel like 100 times, and so I feel like I know the content quite well, it feels not province specific. The societies act stuff, I mean just even in the title, it's specific to BC. Martha, do you have anything more to add there about the province specific content?
Martha Rans: Nope.
Anju: Great. So thank you for your nice comments, Susan. Kelsey, “When this is ready, would you recommend using it to see where legal gaps are in organisations or just problem solving?” I see it as both? And I think this can be used in a number of ways. I think it can also be preventative which is something we haven't really talked about in this session. We've talked a lot about like the problem happened and then you're in reactive mode but I think it could be preventative as well I think that, I know I'm working with somebody right now who is starting a nonprofit, and I sent her the prototype link, just so that she can get ready in advance, and so I think it could be really preventative. Yeah so, Angela answered that question very well. Martha just added our ethos is prevention. Any other questions or comments or things you want to see, was there anything that you saw on the tool that you felt like “Oh, we're really going to need this or we kind of need this”?
Martha leaves the call.
Thanks Martha.
Novak, do you have any final comments that you would like to make before we part with the group?
Novak Rogic: Well, just to kind of get a call for you to get in touch with us for your ideas and your thoughts and your feedback. We'd love to hear from you. It will be a huge help for our future development.
Anju Singh: And there are still some more comments here, “it would be helpful to get some collaboration partnerships with non lawyer consultants who could set up privacy related settings.” Yeah, it is a tech, definitely Nat. Nat’s point is that sometimes it is a tech issue that prevents the privacy thing from happening. I think Novak and I with our development and tech backgrounds are very hyper aware of this. In particular, as you may have noted, the reason we’re not doing logged in users yet is because we’re not ready to handle the privacy and the tech around managing that privacy. So Nat, we’ve kind of modeled the concerns with that as well.
Great. And the slideshow Angela will answer if the slideshow will be circulated. Thank you everyone for your time, I’m just going to close here. I want to thank Novak for being such an excellent collaborator and consultant with us. Without Novak, I would not, I would not have been as far as I have been. Really, really grateful for your support. Thanks everyone to the PLEO team for organizing this, and thanks everyone for being so engaged and asking really good questions.
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