Legal Research

PovNet

By Simon Fodden

There are times when, in this age of rapid technological change, I’m tempted to think that Slaw’s five and a half years of life make it a veteran. Some research I’m doing has led me back to one of my root interests in poverty law and to a true legal veteran on the web, PovNet. This anti-poverty group gives legal advocacy a central role, which should make it of interest to Slaw readers. From their website:

PovNet began in 1997 with a meeting attended by community representatives from all over British Columbia. Not a computer in sight. Advocates talked about what they wanted this “new” technology to do and whether or not we could use it to communicate with each other cheaply.

Turns out they could. PovNet does an admirable job of keeping up with the times, offering to update us via all the usual suspects: RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s not as clear as I’d like it to be, though, what exactly the various “feeds” provide. From what I can tell, for example, their RSS feed pushes some but not all items from their informative News Page. By contrast, their Twitter feed seems to contain more items than appear on the News Page, so that’s the feed I subscribe to.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 16, 2011 (boomark / email).