Today's training is presented by ProbonoNet in partnership with LSN TAP and Northwest Justice Project with funding provided by an LSE TIG grant. And just would like to note that today staffing the webinar, we have Brian Rowe and Kat Ng from Northwest Justice Project and on the ProbonoNet side, we have myself, Jillian Thiel and Liz Keith program director. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Liz Keith to kick things off. Great. Thanks, Jillian. And welcome again, everybody. And thanks as well to Brian and NTAP for hosting this series and LSE for their support of it. As Jillian mentioned, I'm Liz Keith and I'm the program director at ProbonoNet and we're very excited to have all of you with us today for this topic. This is the last in a series of five trainings that ProbonoNet has produced this year in partnership with NTAP focusing on the strategic role of technology in legal aid service delivery. And we're closing out this series with an exploration and discussion of new virtual and remote Probono legal services projects. And we saved this one for last because it ties in with the ABA's national Probono celebration week occurring at the end of this month. And we know that Probono is a big area of focus for many of you on an ongoing basis throughout the year, but there's a special spotlight on it this month through the celebration. So for the next 75 minutes, we'll be discussing several technology initiatives that are underway to enable new forms of Probono participation and expand the reach of services to underserved communities. And I'm really delighted to be joined today by three panelists, as well as potentially a couple of their colleagues or collaborators who will be chiming in informally, but I wanted to welcome Deborah Jennings, managing attorney with Legal Aid of Western Ohio, Fong Wong, who's the Probono director of Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and Claudia Johnson, my colleague at ProbonoNet, and Claudia is the law help interactive program manager. So thank you again to all of our panelists for joining today and sharing their expertise on this topic. And just before we get started, I wanted to provide a little bit of context to the series as a whole and this topic today. A lot of the themes that we've explored throughout the past year are inspired and motivated by the 100% access vision of the 2013 LSE Tech Summit report. And that put forth a really smart and, I think, thoughtful view of the way that through innovative applications of technology, the Legal Aid community can provide some form of assistance to everyone with a significant civil legal problem. And that part of what we're collectively working towards is the day when we don't have to turn away people without having to receive some form of assistance. And we know that in many communities, Probono engagement is a big part of this equation and this vision. So we'll be talking today about how technology can help that. And we know that many attorneys can and do volunteer, but for others, they're not sure how to get involved or maybe whether they have the right training or skills to help people in need. Or they simply face an everyday hurdle that's familiar to many of us, which is the lack of time or balancing work commitments, family commitments, maybe wanting to volunteer but not being located close to a program or having barriers of distance and able to get involved. So I think throughout the webinar today we'll see ways that programs and tools are helping to lower barriers to Probono participation and expand the pool of available volunteers through innovative uses of technology and collaboration. And in turn ways those programs are reaching more clients or in some cases assisting those who might otherwise go unserved. So within our panel we'll be looking at four initiatives. We'll be starting with Deborah, who will be talking about a chat-based initiative that Legal Aid of Western Ohio has developed to provide Probono Council on Advice to low-income litigants in rural areas. And then Claudia will be talking about a very new, recently released capacity that's been developed for Law Health Interactive called LHI Connect, which supports the sharing and remote review of online forms available on LHI. And then we'll wrap up with Fong, who is going to talk about two initiatives that LaFLA is spearheading. One is a really interesting video conferencing partnership that is being developed with local libraries and the other is a development of a statewide online Probono training institute that was one of the inaugural Probono Innovation Fund grants through LSC last year. So with that we will turn it over to Deborah, who's going to talk about Legal Aid of Western Ohio's live chat project to kick things off today. Hi, everyone. Can I be heard? Yes, sounds good. Okay, great. Well, I'm happy to have the opportunity to speak to you all today about Legal Aid of Western Ohio's live chat project. This project is a TIG-funded project and the service delivery model offers trained Probono attorneys the opportunity to provide real-time legal advice to eligible clients on relatively uncomplicated legal issues via the internet using the live person software. Before I get into the project details, I thought I'd provide you with a little bit of background on its origins. Like most legal services programs, one of our biggest challenges is how to deliver service to the greatest number of persons living in poverty with our current resources. LAWO's service area is 32 counties in northwest and west central Ohio, which you can see depicted on this slide. Okay, so 30 of those counties, and this kind of brings it in a little bit closer, but 30 of those counties are rural counties. And in our rural counties, we have about 315,000 persons living at or below the federal poverty level. Our challenge was to look at service delivery models and our potential Probono resources to assist us in serving these individuals. About four years ago, roughly in 2011, we launched a partnership with a corporate attorneys and attorney affinity groups to provide on-site counseling advice through telephone clinics, which we held at our LAWO offices. The feedback that we got from these volunteers who participated in these clinics was very positive. What they liked about them most was the personal satisfaction that they were able to achieve with the direct service delivery. And they expressed an interest in exploring the possibility of providing these services from their own remote locations. So that led us to begin to think about ways in which we could tap the untapped potential to establish and formalize ongoing relationships with these folks and others who might be interested in a convenient, predictable, volunteer opportunity. So in developing our live chat model, one of our goals was to design a delivery system that would encourage attorneys to provide Probono assistance by making the service time limited and convenient. Kind of drawing from those lessons learned from those telephone clinics and then making it possible for those volunteers to provide that service right from their own remote locations. So because a Probono attorney can provide the legal service by chatting with the client online, the attorney can provide it from wherever they are. Another goal of our live chat model was to increase the efficiency and effectiveness by offering attorneys that are located in our rural counties the opportunity to volunteer in a scheduled and predictable time limited manner without the need to travel to our office location and its associated time commitment and expense. We also wanted to offer them an opportunity to learn an area of the law they might be otherwise unfamiliar with in order to give them the possibility of expanding their own substantive areas of practice through this exposure and training. So the nuts and bolts of our project are these. First, LAWO organizes and provides substantive poverty law training for potential volunteer attorneys. We selected initially housing and consumer as the substantive poverty law areas for this training. Our experiences with our onsite clinics confirmed that attorneys who might be most interested in delivering this type of service generally had transactional practices and so we're comfortable with areas of the law that were primarily contract based. So that informed our selection of housing and consumer as our original substantive areas for the project. In addition, the attorneys are also trained on our case management system so that they can view their clients electronic file prior to chatting with the client. And then, of course, they're also trained on how to use the live person software. At the conclusion of this training series, the attorneys provide their appointment availability to an LAWO paralegal working on the project. So what we ask them to do is to provide one hour blocks of time. It can be their lunch hour, it could be early morning, it could be late afternoon, whatever works and is most convenient for them. But we ask them to provide their availability in one hour block or appointment times. They communicate what those times are to a paralegal who keeps the information on a master calendar. And then our intake staff knows what appointments are available when they have a potential client on the phone who would be a good candidate for a chat. So we have a centralized intake system with LAWO called our legal aid line. And we have intake staff who provide the eligibility screenings and determinations for our entire 32 counties service area. So the intake staff prescreens applicants for legal assistance for, first of all, financial eligibility. And then, of course, for issue eligibility, housing or issue falling into one of those housing or consumer categories for which we have trained our volunteers. They also screen for access to the Internet and for comfort level using the technology. It's important for us to make sure that the service delivery model that we might be offering is one that the client feels comfortable using. So if any of those indicators aren't there, then the determination is made that that individual is perhaps not the best candidate for a chat. So this next slide on the right hand side, albeit a little small, but if you want to see what it looks like, you can go to www.legalaidline.org. It shows the entry point for the client experience for the chat service. The client accesses the live chat window through the website on the date and at the time of their scheduled chat appointment. And you can't see it on this slide, but there is language that indicates that you must be scheduled to chat with an attorney and that if you're not, it gives an indication of how to apply for assistance. Now we use the pre-chat survey tool in the live person software to prompt the client to enter certain information, their name, their case number, and other information that will help the volunteer attorney identify the client so that they know they are making the selection of the correct client for their chat. And then from the client's point of view, the session begins. So this next slide shows on the right hand side the volunteer experience and the attorney begins the chat from the live person console and at the top, there we go, at the top you can see there's a line, several lines. Those would represent individual clients who've logged into a chat for their appointment. And then the attorney is going to match that information with the information that has been entered by the client down in that right hand corner box to confirm that they're selecting the correct client for the chat that they have been scheduled with. So after selecting their assigned client, then the session begins and the chat happens back and forth between the volunteer attorney and the client. The session is supported by customizable canned content which is available right from the console. We have created blocks of canned content that the volunteers can draw from while they're engaged in the chat. The introductory chat content we ask all of them to use and basically that pushes out information about that this is the extent of the service that we're able to provide that the attorney, if their situation involves a court appearance, the attorney will not be their attorney for that, that whatever service we're going to be able to provide is going to happen within the context of the chat and that when the chat is over that service is over. And we ask the client just to acknowledge that along the way. So in addition to that procedural canned content that we have loaded and available for the volunteers, we've also created blocks of substantive content that they can either use as is or customize based on their interaction with the client during the chat. So they operate as we kind of refer to them as cheat sheets. So they operate as cheat sheets to help support the volunteers in their exchanges with the client during the course of the chat. And then we also have one of our paralegals always on standby as while chats are happening in the event that a volunteer would need some more direct support from LAO staff during the process. So our outcomes so far are promising we think. We're basically just emerging from our soft launch. We currently offer the service for six topics in the housing and consumer area. We've trained about a dozen volunteers and we have six who regularly open and schedule chats over the course of the week. And the remaining do so more inter intermittently. We have recently added to new substantive areas and we are in the process of finalizing the scheduling of training of additional volunteers so that we can add capacity for the service delivery. So to date we have scheduled about 80 chats and we've helped about 55 people through this service delivery model and we're encouraged about its prospects for the future. Great. Thank you so much, Deborah. That's a great overview. We have a couple of questions in the chat box. One is from Michelle Han who is wondering are the volunteer attorneys anonymous or does the client know their name? So a conflict check is done in advance and the attorneys are not necessarily anonymous. Okay. Do they have the option to be anonymous? It hasn't been an issue for us because we're treating these as cases. We are running these through our conflict checking process. That might be a 2.0 or 3.0 version but right now that's not how we are delivering the service because we are treating these as cases. I definitely agree with that approach and the reason that I ask is Washington State is implementing the web lawyer forum for giving advice and we just went back and forth including with our ethics committee over whether individuals could even give advice anonymously and we decided not to do that for both ethical concerns and also just the relationship with the client. You feel a little bit better if you are actually know you're connecting with a real person and who that person is even if it's limited scope representation. Yeah. So part of those decisions were informed by our earlier experiences with our brick and mortar phone clinics with our volunteers where we really appreciated their feedback. About their level of commitment to providing the service delivery kind of grew from their connection albeit brief you know maybe just 30 minutes maybe 60 minutes you know with the client. So that's how we have structured and developed the model. Great. So we've got a few other questions here and I'll try to get through them quickly before we move on to Claudia. But Claudia was actually wondering Deborah if you know which subject area requires the longest chat and do you have a sense of how long the longest chat can go? Is it 10 minutes, 20 minutes longer? So the different topic areas that we selected, we selected based on our Council on Advice crisis stabilization service delivery within legal aid of Western Ohio. And so we tried to make selections where we thought the interaction would be at most 30 minutes because we really wanted to keep these time slots to about an hour as best we could so that that would include any prep, then the actual connection with the client and then follow up. So much of how that plays out has to do with individuals who are delivering the service but we chose relatively uncomplicated housing and consumer issues so that we could keep the commitment to about an hour. I hope that answers the question. Great. And I'd be happy to share any of that with anybody who'd like to see a little bit more. And Juliet was wondering how much time does the paralegal involved put into this project? Do you have a sense of that? That can depend as well. Initially it was substantial. Now it's more a monitoring function. You know, anytime you add a new volunteer or a group of new volunteers, that's going to require a little bit more time. But with our experienced volunteers, our regular volunteers, I would say overall it's not a huge considerable amount of time. I don't know if our LAWO director of private attorney involvement was going to be on this call. I don't know if she might have anything to add through the chat box. That would help answer that question for folks. Great. I think I see Missy here. So Missy maybe if you're able to chime in through the chat box, that would be great. And then maybe the last question for this segment because it ties in with the sidebar that we're going to be talking about next. Alex from Nebraska Legal Aid was interested in hearing a bit about the decision making process that went into using live person as a solution for this. The free services out there and I know that might be a big question and I can add a few things to that after this segment as well. Yeah, so there's a lot of components to that decision. When we originally submitted the LOI for this TIG, we thought that we were going to perhaps be able to participate in the arrangement that Pro BonoNet had with the provider. But when it came down to actually implementing the different pieces of the TIG, we realized that there were security and confidentiality issues and concerns with respect to the exchange between the attorney and the client that we were going to have to address in a different way. So it was also a time when the provider was changing its platform a bit. So we did do some research and we made the selection to go with live person for a number of reasons. Security, we were happy with what they could tell us about the security of the exchange. And the confidentiality of the exchange. And then they also had a feature which is a screen sharing feature, which I didn't go into today, but I'd be happy to talk to anyone about if they'd like to. Which we've begun to use and implement where the attorney, if they want to review a document or review a form or review a lease or anything like that can request permission to view the screen of the client. It doesn't work the other way. And then they can share the screen. That and provide some assistance that way as well. That is changing a bit as they're undergoing another sort of iteration of what you might be able to do in terms of looking at documents and another screen within the software. But that was another reason why we went with live person. So we would be happy at some point to work with you in doing a short video kind of demoing that technology, something five minutes or less. There are a lot of people who have asked about that and I haven't had a really good solution to give them as a recommendation. So that's fascinating. Yeah. It is changing and we're not 100% sure what that is going to look like. It's going to be demonstrated for us. Our current contract with live person goes through February. So that will be a change if we decide to stay with them after that date or shift to another slide. But we'll be really happy to do that demonstration and we'll be really happy to do that. Great. Well, there are a few other questions in the chat box that Deborah, if you're able to stay on and maybe take a look at any that you can respond to. That would be great. And I see Missy has chimed in as well. So thank you both. This was a really exciting project. And it is one of, to my knowledge, two live chat projects in the community now that are providing pro bono or brief advice that are not just information and referral finding services. And then I think Deborah and her program also have done a really thoughtful job in thinking through the design and volunteer support required for something like this as well as the intake and screening process that helps affirm for the client individual that this is an appropriate and helpful medium for them to get assistance through as well. So before we shift to Claudia, I wanted to just do a sidebar update about other live help live chat initiatives underway throughout the country. This is a map of, to my knowledge, to date the live chat initiatives that are underway in legal aid communities throughout the country, primarily in association with the statewide legal aid website. The states highlighted in yellow have a substantial portion of their share of their staffing done through law student and or pro bono attorneys. And the states in blue are often I think staffed using legal aid staff, but in many cases they also engage AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers as well at least part time. And as for folks who are not sort of aware of the evolution of live help in the community, it began as a small pilot in 2004 in Montana and Iowa that pro bono helped to develop and it now encompasses about 15 or so of the states that you see here assisting more than 20,000 people a year. And many of the, as Deborah was describing, her program is one of two that's now using live help for brief advice and it made sense for them to use the live person platform, a separate instance of that in order to support that model. About 10 or 11 of the other states here also have been using the live person pro chat platform. That platform existed in 2004 and has been I think a good solution for those states in the interim. One of the reasons, similar to what Deborah said, one of the reasons that many states have opted to go with that is in particular if you're using law students or volunteer attorneys having the canned chats, having robust reporting mechanisms, sort of an infrastructure behind the software that helps the volunteers provide effective assistance and then help support the supervision component of it as well I think has been really critical. However, the live person platform is at a crossroads and they are kind of rolling, they're looking to roll their current customers using live person pro onto the next generation of that that Deborah described. So Probononet has been working this year with Iowa Legal Aid. One of the original pilot partners for live help to assess and pilot a new chat platform for the states currently using live person pro including looking at Alex probably many of the tools that you've seen out there as well. So this has included doing community and product research about the needs. It will include pilot testing the new solution on Iowa Legal Aid and then sharing our findings with the community. And earlier this year there was I think a pretty extensive Google spreadsheet shared with the LS Tech listserv with some of the product research we've done so far and what some of the criteria are that are driving this based on needs. We've been hearing from the community and would definitely love to share that again and report back out when this process is further along. So great. Well we will shift gears now and turn it over to Claudia who's going to talk about a capacity that has recently been added to LHI Connect that we hope will help support more remote document creation and review by volunteer attorneys. Hi, thank you Liz. Hi all. Thanks Deborah for sharing that. It was very neat to see. I'm excited. I wanted to talk about LHI Connect which is a new backend capacity that is working in the national server for document assembly. And talk a little bit about the problem area we were trying to solve and how we think Connect is going to be really helpful in solving that project. So the problem that we were trying to address is this issue that there's a lot of people out there that have a very specific need to create a document. And the document is complex because the document is based on law and statute that is complex. It's not because it's not in plain language or poorly formatted. It's just that it is a complex process like for example expungement or another one could be a modification for child support for a family with kids. Something with assistance so it's not a document that could be well geared to somebody to do as a self-represented litigant assemble it on LHI and submit it. It's something that we need lawyer review. So that was kind of the problem area that we wanted to create this capacity about. And then the other area being that the lawyers and the clients are not necessarily in the same city or working at the same time. So as a gap in terms of distance and also an asynchronous process where if you have a pro bono lawyer they may want to volunteer but if they can't review the document on their own time and not necessarily have the person that they're reviewing for waiting for them or sitting there or coming in during business hours. So we were trying to enable a capacity where the clients and the lawyer can work together on a document but not having to be doing it at the same time. And so we wanted to create a way where people can fill out documents, share them on the back end through a secure system and the lawyer can look at what the client submits and then use an online form assuming the lawyer is not a total expert on this complex area of law to edit and produce new documents that the lawyer then completes and gives back to the person to file.  And we thought this could be very helpful for people that are setting up clinics where let's say they want to have 300 people submit for review a particular complex document and then the lawyers are going to do the review after the clinic on another day on their own time and they only want to look at those documents that have been assigned to them. And we wanted to get rid of the need for the end user to remember a password or a login or having to learn how to use LHI as a maven so that they could just answer the interview, agree to submit, and then the lawyer could go in, get a notification and review the document. So that's what the solution is and we call it LHI Connect because it's a tool that would allow people to connect through the back end. And so basically the person knows that they need to do this particular form so they know they're looking for a form and they find the form in the statewide website. And so they do the interview just like they would do any other LHI interview. They answer the questions. And what happens with Connect is that the first thing that they will get is they will be asked for permission to share their answers with legal aid staff and pro bono lawyers that are going to review the document. And actually the terms of use here, the way we've coded is that each program could put their own terms of use so that the person is disclosing it to that specific organization's terms of use. So if it's going to be used, for example, we're going to have a court, it could be permission to allow the self-help staff to review it, the self-help attorneys, and then for the filing clerk to review it. So the language here is modifiable according to the workflow. Once the person agrees and puts in their name and accepts the terms of use, they answer the interviews, they create the document, and then on the back end of LHI it's shared. So let's move to the next slide.  So the person can go and check and place the case.  Generally, you would look through your panel, see who's available, see, hey, do you want to review this? Yes, the lawyer does his conflict. None of that is done on LHI. All of that is done as just regular legal aid does pro bono placement. So once the lawyer agrees to take the case to review, the lawyer has an account on LHI and the pro bono coordinator can say, hey, give these person's answers to this lawyer. So you can assign as pro bono coordinator an answer set from a specific person to a particular lawyer that has already agreed to represent the client and has done all the requirements to accept the client on a pro bono basis according to the rules of ethics in that state. So then the lawyer is assigned the case. And so then once the lawyer or advocate is assigned the case to review, LHI sends them a notification that tells them, hey, you are now, thanks for volunteering. And here is an answer file to review and go log into LHI and these are the instructions. So when the lawyer logs back into LHI, let's go to the next question. And they go and they see, okay, so I have this answer file assigned to me and they can, hold on, so let's go to the next question. They can go in and they can decide, okay, I'm going to open it. And they can open it with the interview that the person originally did, which will be the self represented interview. Or they can open it with a new interview, which is the lawyer interview where the lawyer could be adding additional remedies and could be adding the extra value lawyer or advocate modifications to that interview so that the document that produces is either the same that the person did or a new one based on the same that the person did. So it allows the lawyer to create a, you know, let's say the person fills out a screening interview, the lawyer could then fill out the pleading. So it is very flexible and you can have more than one document that they will be working with. You could have, you know, after the default. You could have the judgment or a summary judgment or whatever, you know, whatever is in the process, you could tie all of these documents together and they would do them serially or transactionally like a lot of legal work, yes. So the lawyer would click what interview they want and then they can modify it. They can change it. And on the back end of all of this, there's a persona that we call the connect coordinator and this would be the person at the legal aid group or at the bar or at the court that would have kind of the superpowers where they would create this connect, we call them connect points and they will to add as many of the interviews as they have already on LHI that are part of that case. They will add the provono coordinators if there's two or three people in the project that are provono coordinators, they could all be connected through the back end and then they would add the lawyers so that at the end, all of them will be tied to this connect point and they can use this connect point in any way that they wish. It basically becomes just a URL that they can put in their statewide website or that they can distribute. So for example, if there's a big clinic that happens twice a year on expungements, they could create a connect point to keep everything tied together on the back end and so anybody that's part of a connect point will see when they log into LHI with that account, the LHI connect bar on the left-hand side and when they click on that, they will go to the connect points that they're associated with. So that's basically an overview of this new connect functionality and right now, if we go down this, we are piloting it. It's actually a TIC funded project that is being piloted with LASSO in Oklahoma. Margaret Hamlet is our main client in that grant and she is doing an expungement with provono lawyers across the state and it's right now in use and the evaluation of this will start in late December through hopefully March. And what we're hoping to do is also in November, we're hoping to have a court try it for purposes of using the same capacity in a self-help center where they have five self-help centers in the Bay Area where it takes three hours to drive five minutes. And so instead of having the clients drive to file, what they want to do is if somebody is in Brentwood for those who know that area and they want to get to Richmond, which is about 45 minutes but it takes three hours, the person in Brentwood can have their files reviewed by the self-help staff there and if the self-help staff thinks that it's good, then they can give it to the filing clerk in Richmond without the person having to travel to file or without the clerk having to have the person wait, etc. So this is going to start hopefully in November and then once we have these two kind of common cases scenarios, we're hoping to open it up to other groups that already have online forms in LHI with the idea that they will take the really well-tested forms where they have the capacity to do clinics and remote events and virtual events and they'll be able to set up and use this capacity to expand different types of delivery, mostly focusing on remote and pro bono and virtual services. And so that's what the hope of this project is and I would welcome questions or more information if people want, they can reach out to me and I'll be happy to share. But hopefully by around March of next year we'll be in a position to have some of the evaluation information back and get ready to see if we can start sharing this with other states that may be interested in using. And basically what we call that document co-production tool to promote pro bono and promote remote services. Great. Thanks, Claudia. So if anyone has questions, please feel free to ask them in the chat box or just jump in here. One of the other aspects of this project that Claudia and Margaret have been working on is an extensive user guide. So that will, for programs that are interested in adopting this, help provide information to the overall project manager as well as what we refer to as the connect coordinators, the people that would be setting up these kinds of events and engagements through LHI. So we're looking forward to releasing that to the community next year. Great. Okay. Well, thanks, Claudia. We're going to move on. If people have follow-up questions about LHI Connect, feel free to reach out to Claudia or ask them through the chat box. But we're going to move on to our last segment now and welcome Fang Wong from the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. Fang is the pro bono director there. And she's going to be talking about two initiatives that LaFLA is spearheading this year. One is a video conferencing partnership with local libraries around LA. And the second is the development of a statewide online pro bono training institute that I think is really exciting. Thank you, Liz. Yes, I'm going to talk about two pretty exciting projects that we started this year. And the first is the LaFLA library video conferencing project. And this is an LSE funded, LSE TIG-funded program. And we are partnering with five libraries, the LA Law Library, Long Beach, Torrance, Palmdale, and Englewood. And we've also partnered with other, we're also discussing partnerships with other community partners as well as law schools. And in the next slide, the goal of this project is basically to provide another way for us to connect with our clients, our community partners, and also with each other. So, you know, in addition to in-person meetings and phone calls and conference calls and what have you. And the reason why we wanted to develop this project in the next slide, you'll see this is a map of greater Los Angeles and where the stars are are the LaFLA community offices and where the little blue circles are are all the law libraries and or self-help centers if they're close by. And although, you know, Los Angeles is a very urban area, traffic is so horrendous that sometimes it takes more than 45 minutes just to get from one office to another, especially our more distant offices like Long Beach and Santa Monica. And oftentimes when we have clients who live in the outskirts, it takes them a very long time to reach us.  And when you think about Palmdale Library, which is on the very top of the map, it costs, I believe it's $26 now just to take the bus from Palmdale to Los Angeles. And we've partnered with one justice to do a number of justice buses to get out to Palmdale, and we always get requests to come back. And so we thought, you know, why not start a video conferencing project and be able to more easily connect with our clients that are outside of our, you know, main central Los Angeles area. So in the next slide, you know, this project is pretty basic. It doesn't involve a whole lot. These are the components of our program. Our partners and volunteers, I would say, are key to making this project successful. As I mentioned, there are five library partners that have partnered with us to develop this project where we basically are able to connect via Chromebooks. And I also want to mention that we have law schools now that are very interested in participating. We have a partnership with Southwestern right now where law students in between classes, they jump on the Chromebook and connect with our clients and do intake and, you know, chat with the supervising attorney after each of their sessions to talk about the cases and review what should be done with those cases during the intake. And in terms of technology, the bulk of the funding that we received went to purchase 30 Chromebooks, and those Chromebooks were purchased so that we could have what we call a universal method of engaging one another in our libraries. And the reason why we decided to purchase Chromebooks was, number one, they were just so much cheaper than laptops. We found that the technology at the various libraries really differed. Some of them had very old computers and printers, and so we decided to just focus on Chromebooks and distributing them between our offices and our libraries so that we could have one universal method connecting with one another. And we also developed a chaos mode so that when clients use the Chromebooks, they can easily access it, and there's a survey that pops up. They can access certain websites, but the function is mainly for connecting clients with prospective volunteers or law attorneys and, of course, being able to share documents through the chaos mode and pull up any other information related to their cases. So a quick question. What is really the difference between a Chromebook and a laptop? So I knew I was going to get that question. A Chromebook is basically like a tablet. It's a simplified version that has limited capacity. And so for our purposes, the Chromebook just seemed very practical. We didn't need to have a ton of storage because the purpose was to connect with other folks virtually. And in terms of the actual software, we're using GoToMeeting free. And GoToMeeting has an app that allows us to connect up to three people in each meeting room. So far, it's a really low-cost way for us to connect with folks. And I want to point out that for folks who want to develop a video conferencing program, Chromebooks aren't necessarily needed or necessary. Like I said, we decided to do this because our project was pretty expansive. We were partnering with our self-help center, sorry, with our libraries, with law schools, and the different organizations just have varying degrees of advance and not advance technology. But a program could easily just purchase video cameras and have used their existing computer speakers to connect with folks and use GoToMeeting free. We've been able to get by thus far with the free service. And I'm surprised that we haven't yet had to purchase the full GoToMeeting software or program. And in terms of, you know, other needs for our program, we have, you know, we've trained staff, we've trained library staff, we've trained law students to use this program.  It's a very, very simple program. We've also developed other tools to help manage this project. And in the next slide, I'll explain how we've been able to use this video, or how we've developed this video conferencing program. As you can see from this visual, we use the Chromebooks to connect in a variety of ways. I mean, we initially expected to use it with the libraries and clients. And since then, we've been able to expand. A lot of our Chromebooks we actually use for our existing clinics to complete documents. For example, at our Veterans Clinic and at our Expungement Clinic, we've been able to use the Chromebooks for volunteers to fill out documents and print out. Oh, and I also want to point out that at the library, we have a multi-function printer that's cloud-enabled so that we can print from the Chromebook at any location. So, if let's say, you know, I'm meeting with a client from, you know, the LA Law Library and at my office, I have a document that I want the client to look at. I can print it from my end because it's, you know, cloud-enabled. So that's helped us bridge that distance gap as well. And it's a very useful tool that the library folks have been very happy about. And so, so far, you know, we've been able to develop, in addition to using these Chromebooks for existing projects with the libraries. And some of those are the Expungement Clinics with the Genesee Impact Clinic that we partner with other community partners in. And other ad hoc clinics throughout Greater LA. We also use them for a project that we started with Southwestern Law School. And we basically created another intake system allowing the libraries to make appointments. And in the next slide, you'll see that we developed a Google Calendar that allows the libraries to make appointments with us so that folks can sign up and get some legal assistance. We have law students who basically do the intake for these appointments. And there are various supervising attorneys on staff to oversee or provide advice to this client and student after each of these intake sessions. And what's great is that Google Calendar sends notices to all of our partners about what appointments there are and whether they've been canceled. It does get updated. And this also allows us to find out who's using their Chromebooks. So let's say we have a large clinic and we need to use the existing Chromebooks. We could borrow back those Chromebooks and use it for, you know, a future clinic where we have lots of volunteers who need to access them. So this gives us a way to see what's being done with the Chromebooks and who's using it for what purpose. And I also want to point out that we do have policies and procedures surrounding priority uses for these Chromebooks. And, of course, the main priority is to enable clients to have access. And I do also want to point out that prior to even starting this project, we surveyed our clients because we were concerned that this additional method of connection would be difficult for them to use. And I'm not surprised, but a lot of our folks that we surveyed, a lot of the clients, said that they preferred to figure out how to use a Chromebook to connect with an attorney rather than, you know, having to travel to another office location to meet with an attorney in person. So after we got that input, we moved forward. And fortunately, we got it and were able to develop this very useful project. So in this last slide, I just want to point out that this is a web link that we developed to coordinate our go-to meeting rooms. And mind you, this is a free go-to meeting service that we use, and we develop different chat or video-compensing rooms so that each of our offices and libraries and law schools can talk to one another in separate rooms at any given time. So for example, yesterday we had a clinic with the Palmdale Library, and one of our Southwestern students, you know, went on Chromebook 1 under Palmdale Library to chat with the various clients. And on Chromebook 2, we had an attorney who's on standby to provide any advice to the student. So it's a great way for us to coordinate who's using what, and, you know, it's easier than having to send a link out to, you know, the person we need to get in touch with. So it's a really great tool that we were able to develop, and this is actually quite easy to create. And it was something that we thought of after we developed the project with the various partners. So I know I went through this really quickly. Does anybody have any questions about this? Fong, there are a couple in the chat box that I think you just answered, but Juliette was wondering how did you set the printers up off-site? Was somebody from LaFla, did somebody from LaFla have to go to those libraries and help with that install? Yes, so we did have an IT person, a contractor who helped us set up the, you know, the 30 Chromebooks and the printers. So we did have someone that we got funding to assist with that process. But I have to say, it wasn't, it was a lot because of the number of the Chromebooks and the partners that we were distributing them to, but in terms of the actual knowledge that's required, I think any IT person could probably do the work. Okay, great, and it's good to know about the free version of go-to-meeting. I'm not sure how many people are aware of that, but that's a great tip for people on the fact that it supports up to three attendees, you know, interacting from remote locations seems like a really key component to this. Great. Well, I think we can move on to the Pro Bono Training Institute. Great. Okay, so LaFla was fortunate to get another LSE-funded grant, the Pro Bono Innovation Fund, to develop the Pro Bono Training Institute. And this is a project that's in partnership with two great partners, One Justice and Neighborhood Legal Services in Los Angeles. And the funding that we received basically pays for two full-time staff to help develop this project. And before I get into what this is, I'll talk about why we thought about developing this and why the funding from LSE was just so key in allowing us to solve a great problem and persisted for a very long time for many of us Pro Bono managers. So, you know, the problem has been that a lot of times trainings are just so busy and they are often asked to do trainings on a variety of substantive topics, and developing a good interactive training takes time. I know that, you know, just me personally, you know, each year our organization does between 30 to 40 Pro Bono trainings.  And, you know, time is always an issue. And so what we often find is we get trainings that are, you know, 100% lecture with very little to no interactive components. And we also have found that a lot of these trainings are duplicative. There are different organizations that provide the same training over and over. And sometimes we have attorneys who will say, well, you know, if this attorney, Pro Bono attorney wants to volunteer my project, that attorney is going to have to take my training because I don't know what training the other organization provided and I don't know the content. So I would feel safer if they knew my system of doing, you know, whatever training for work. And we also find that Pro Bono trainings may reach out to us and say, hey, you know, I'm ready to take an unlawful detainer case, but we may not have a training available until the next month or two. And so timing is key. And then, you know, I wanted to also address that these trainings aren't universal. One training is just so different from another organization. And even though these trainings are, for example, domestic violence, even though these trainings are given throughout California on a regular basis by different organizations. So we thought, well, why not create a more centralized, efficient way of training Pro Bono's in California? And so we thought it makes sense to have on-demand online Pro Bono trainings by developing a centralized website and making the trainings more interactive and effective by ensuring that trainings that are produced have, you know, training best practices or adult learning techniques are embedded into these trainings. And of course, you know, the purpose of this is to support and expand Pro Bono in the state by, you know, making these trainings a lot more accessible and reducing these duplicative trainings so that legal services folks can use those resources to do other things, like provide support to Pro Bono trainings who end up taking on the case instead of constantly doing trainings over and over. And also, you know, I want to point out that the purpose is to also, what we call universalized these trainings is by getting legal services folks to come together and develop a uniform training that they all buy into. Folks from different jurisdictions throughout California can take these trainings and, you know, the third goal, go to an organization that's listed as an organization that has volunteer opportunities and connect, basically Pro Bono training is going to connect with these volunteer opportunities throughout California, not just in the jurisdiction in which they live or work. Because, you know, one of the problems we see too is placing Pro Bono cases is sometimes about timing. Sometimes we may have more volunteers than we have cases or we may have more cases than volunteers and being able to train folks throughout California and being able to possibly connect with them on cases that are available elsewhere can benefit everybody, not just our own organization. So the LRC grant was just so instrumental in allowing us to really get these partners together and think beyond our own organizations and see how we could help, you know, folks in need throughout California. So in the next slide, I'll talk a little about how this works. So in the middle orange bubble, the Pro Bono training institute basically collaborates with different legal services trainers to develop trainings on various legal substantive issues. And I want to point out that these substantive topics were pre-developed. We surveyed the community when the project started to get their feedback on what legal topics they thought were important to low-income folks in the community. And based on that feedback, we have been working with a number of organizations and trainers to develop a series of trainings for Pro Bono attorneys. And what's great about this project is that it's a project that's developed by attorneys for attorneys, you know, the focus of which is to produce quality training. And, you know, once we get together the legal experts in the various areas of substantive law, they collaborate to develop the trainings with help from our two staff members who help them design the training and produce it and, you know, put it online. And those are then available for Pro Bono attorneys to watch. And then there's the second component of it, which is, if you see on the bottom right square, we get other legal services organizations to buy into this project and say, you know what, this training contains all the substantive aspects that I would use in a training for my Pro Bono attorneys. And, you know, I agree that, you know, I would send folks, Pro Bono folks to this training if, you know, we're not doing an in-person training and they need support or a training. And then the second part, or the third part I should say, is we don't necessarily do the connection, but we list organizations that want to be listed as organizations that have available volunteer opportunities in that training module so that folks can connect with those organizations if they choose to then volunteer somewhere or take on a case. So there are a lot of different components and, you know, we've been able to, so far, develop, in the process of developing a handful of trainings, so far we have one component up. And if you look at the next slide, this is our website with one of our training modules up. And I want to quickly point out that when I talk about effective trainings, one thing that we are also doing is we're breaking down the trainings from, let's say, an hour and a half or two hours to smaller chunks. So let's say an unlawful container training. Sometimes it could be one and a half to two hours, but that training is going to be broken down into segments of 10, 15 minutes based on, you know, categories. So let's say helping, doing an answer, 10 minutes, doing discovery, 15 minutes, preparing the hearing brief, 10 minutes, you know, preparing for trial, 20 minutes. That way, problem-trainers who want to watch a small clip don't have to sit through an entire hour or an hour and a half training. They could just sit for that one little section to learn how to do that one little thing that they want to do so they could be more effective for them and they could save them a little more time. And these modules or little sections can also be helpful to legal services advocates who may want to do in-person training but not want to have to do an entire training. They could play these modules and talk in between these short modules about their program or their internal policies or procedures in handling these cases. So... And I also want to point out that for each of these trainings we also have surveys for not just the trainees but also for advocates who want to provide feedback. And I want to point out that, you know, producing or developing trainings is similar to writing where, you know, you write a first draft and it's not perfect and you have to kind of rethink it and do it again. So we're constantly finding that there are a lot of things that we can improve and for that reason we do have a focus group that helps the purpose of which is to give us feedback about the content and whether the trainings are useful and effective for pro bono attorneys that are watching this. And next slide. This is kind of a roadmap of what we do, what we can do, I mean. So, of course, you know, our goal is to ultimately provide a better way for pro bono attorneys to be trained and to be trained in a collaborative way with trainings that we call universal. And so part of that is to ensure that our staff help the trainees or the trainers, I should say, incorporate interactive training methods into their trainings and, of course, incorporate other e-learning best practices in the recordings, for example, multiple choice, clips of videos, true, false questions, just so that folks can have some interactive component and so that legal services organizations can be sure that these volunteers are getting a thorough training and are being quizzed or tested on the knowledge that they're being trained on. And our staff will also assist with the trainers with drafting agendas and learning objectives. Sometimes we find that, or many times, I should say, we find that trainings lack that basic component. Many times folks who do trainings just kind of jump in and jump into the substantive law and talk for an hour without any questions being asked by participants or the trainer. And that's not the most effective way of training, but having an agenda and giving the trainees an idea of what they're going to learn and what the purpose of the training is for and who the intended audience should be is very helpful. Because we also recognize in this project that there's a variety of folks that will be using the service, pro bono attorneys, advocates, paralegals, law students, and these trainings are going to be geared towards specific audiences. And also, we also recognize that an hour training or an hour-and-a-half training can only contain so much information. And instead of having a trainer try to fit as much information as possible in a training and kind of talk as fast as it can to get every fact or law in, we understand the importance of providing reference materials and teaching folks to refer to documents or other guides that they can use to supplement the knowledge that they learned during the short timeframe. And so developing organized training materials is very important to this project as well. And of course, the last part is sharing resources putting these training modules and recordings onto the probono-training.org website or any other websites of our partner organization. So in terms of the process, I won't go too much into it, but as you can see, this is kind of where, how we conduct the trainings that we do do. We usually work with trainers, handouts and PowerPoints, and then we help them provide information or support, review the training that they have in existence and provide suggestions as how they can improve it and implement any edits that they can... any other edits that can provide additional interactive exercises or what-have-you. And then, of course, after getting the buy-in from other organizations about the content, it's time to basically present and upload it on the website. And I want to point out that, although we will be doing some outreach, the purpose of this website is for legal services advocates to use it and broadcast it and share it with their probono attorneys who would be taking their cases. And this is a service for the benefit of not just legal services folks, of course, but probono attorneys throughout California who intend to take on a case and want to learn about a specific area of law. So that basically is kind of a very, very brief overview of this project. And I know I went through it very, very quickly, but if folks have questions, I'm happy to answer any questions. Great. Well, thank you, Feng. There is one question from Rachelle, who is wondering if you're using any specialized platforms or software to deliver the trainings themselves. We are... I know I didn't go into the technical part of it, and I could definitely... We're using WordPress for our internet site, and we're using some other basic Adobe program. And I could talk specifically offline about that because I know we're almost out of time, but the whole technical side is another huge component that could be a whole training in itself. So I'm happy... Here's my contact information. I'll be happy to talk more specifically about the details. Okay. Great. Well, thank you. I know this was one of the inaugural probono innovation fund grants, and I noticed in the announcements that this year's funding ran. It looked like there were a couple of states that were embarking on similar endeavors, so hopefully your approach and the way that Laughla is collaborating with other partners to get buy-in on the content and design and then help use this effort as a way to connect volunteers to probono opportunities will be useful to folks that are looking to replicate this, so thank you. Absolutely. Great. Well, we are just about out of time, and thank again all of our panelists for taking the time to join us today and share their experience with us on these exciting projects. We've shared some resources through the chat box along the way and have some other references here. There's a Colorado lawyer article that is describing another virtual lawyer in the library program that is being established in rural southwestern Colorado for others interested, in particular in the library partnership models that Fung described and other examples throughout the country. There are a range of life-help replication resources available through ProbonoNet, and we have links to some of the LSE resources here as well. So we will wrap up. We've got contact information here again, and I included Eva Cardi, who's with Iowa Legal Aid and is the lead contact for the life-help product assessment that I mentioned earlier. Brian, is there anything you want to add about upcoming webinars or additional LSN TAP information you'd like to highlight? Definitely. We've got three more webinars already scheduled and possibly a fourth coming up before the end of the year. Oddly, we have one on Tuesday next week, which is working with a new nonprofit that tries to connect individuals who are just learning to do mobile app development with nonprofits to do free development work. We've got one on the basics of Excel, techniques, tips, that type of stuff, and then one on visualizing dashboards. The one that is unscheduled so far that will probably be in December is going to be on Google Analytics. Also, if there's any other tigs or things that people want to share best practices from, we're happy to do all of the lay works, setting it up, recording that type of stuff. We've got room in our schedule and we're starting to plan things out for next year also. Thank you guys so much. This has been a really good presentation. I liked one of the comments that this would make a great presentation at EJC. I definitely hope to see some of these projects presented there. Great. Well, thank you, Brian, and thank you again to our panel and I think we'll be sharing a feedback survey as well. The one that Jillian put earlier in the chat box was an example of a feedback survey that's been created for the Pro Bono Training Institute that Fong was described. But we would really welcome your feedback on this training as well and don't hesitate to reach out to any of us for more information about any of the projects we described. So thank you all again for joining.


This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you, including Philip Les, Daniel Dorado, Howard Jermisch and Stephen Radke. On this episode of DTNS, Facebook's going to start charging. Can that be true? A new way to protect your identity online and why your attitude towards AI changes how it responds to you. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023 in Los Angeles on top merit. And from Studio Slytherin, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Wait, are you House Slytherin, Sarah? Today I am. What do I do about it, Tom? I'm just, well, I would not mess with the Slytherin. First of all, second of all, I just, I didn't know if that was like you took the house test thing and that was. Yeah, I just feel Slytherin today. It's just a vibe. Yeah, it's a vibe. Yeah, it's kind of talk of Tuesday Slytherin kind of stuff. I think I might know, I might know what causes that vibe. Or vibe, either one. The Sam Bankman Freed trial. That's probably what it is, yeah. SBF, given those Slytherin vibes. Yeah, the SBF trial over fraud accusations over FTX has started. Let's see what else you need to know in the quick hits. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has begun cracking down on violations of orbital rules in an attempt to combat space junk. Yeah, that stuff up in space that is considered junk. DISH Network gets the dubious honor of receiving the first fine of $150,000 for failing to move an old satellite far enough away from other satellites. DISH admitted liability over its Echo Star 7 satellite and agreed to a compliant plan with the FCC. I just realized this is the first space parking ticket. You can't park your dead satellite here.  You can't do that. Yeah, you got a boot on your car. Okay. FCC is like the HOA. It's like, you can't do that. That's a fine. There you go. One ongoing theme in tech news these days is the diversification of manufacturing away from China. We've covered a lot of companies moving plants to places like India, Vietnam, very frequently. But here are a couple of less commonly mentioned locations. HMD Global, which makes phones under the Nokia brand, launched its first smartphone manufactured in Hungary. It's the 5G Nokia XR21. Now, metals and components were still shipped in from China, but making the phone, assembling it all and finishing it in Europe helped avoid problems with security laws. In fact, that's one of the reasons that this is the XR21 5G. The earlier XR21 is still made in China. Another location that has to ship in all its materials is Spaceforge's Forge Star 1 set for launch to orbit late this year or early 2024. The satellite contains an automated chemistry lab for the development of semiconductor alloys. Now, this version will only test the process, but they do have plans for future versions, if the tests go well, that would have the system able to return ships it makes to Earth for use. Apple now requires new apps to show proof of a Chinese government license before the app becomes available on the Chinese version of Apple's app store. Developers now have to submit an Internet content provided or ICP filing when they publish new apps. This change brings the company in line with its local rivals, which adopted the policy some years ago to meet Chinese state regulations. OnePlus has its own foldable phone coming out. Its parent company, Oppo, also has a foldable phone coming out. They're the same phone. At least that's what OnePlus told the Verge. Oppo Chief Product Officer Peter Lau, who co-founded OnePlus, oversaw the development of the phone which will be marketed under different brands in different markets. GSM Arena recently reported that they think the names will be the Oppo Find N3, which would be sold in China, and the OnePlus opened, which would be sold internationally, though that's just speculation. None of that is yet confirmed.  Yeah, yeah, or the house brands of something where you're like, oh, that's the same evaporated milk. It's just in a different can. Google will begin a new email policy starting in 2024 to Combat Spam. Any sender who delivers more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail users must offer one click unsubscribe options and also configure their systems to authenticate that they are not spoofing their domain name. Fire letters will be blocked if they're found anyway. Google said Yahoo made the same changes for its email services well, so, you know, it's just kind of keeping up with the Joneses. Yeah, Yahoo's gonna take the filters from Google and they're gonna cooperate on this. So it's good for everybody. Let's spam for all of them. Now, for years, Sarah, we were able to say that if somebody was sending you spam saying Facebook is soon gonna charge playing on your fears that it was probably a scam email and you could safely ignore it, but apparently not anymore. What's going on? Yeah, boy, have I talked some folks off the ledge saying this is not true. This is not happening. And it still isn't in that sense, but here is what's happening. The Wall Street Journal sources say that last month, Metta presented a plan to European regulators to comply with European Union rules that require platforms to get user consent before targeting them with ads. If a user doesn't give consent, the platforms still have to offer the service. They can't just make you pay. Metta's plan would let users who consent to personalize ads continue to use the service for free. Those who don't consent would have to pay a fee. How much are we talking about though, Tom? Yeah, so the rate would be around 10 euros a month on the desktop on mobile because the app stores both Google and Apple take a cut. They would charge 13 euros. And then if you have a Facebook plan, you could add an additional account for six euros per account. At least that's what the sources are saying. None of this has been officially announced. Metta apparently called the plan SNA for subscription with no ads. And this all follows a July court decision that said social media platforms who were telling, were not getting consent for personalized ads could charge a reasonable fee to those people who wanted to continue to use the service but didn't want the personalized ads. Last month, Metta reported that European revenue was around $6 per user per month across all its apps and services. So that's below what they're charging. 10 euros a month is somewhere around $8 or $9. But the $6 per user per month includes all European countries in Facebook's market, not just EU countries. So it includes Russia, for example, where Facebook makes less money on ads. So we don't know exactly what the average is in Europe, but it might be closer to 10 euros a month. The questions here are whether this is legal, right? I know the court said it's a reasonable fee, but that wasn't a legal ruling. That was just kind of a commentary that they said. We still haven't tested that in court. And whether it's fair to require someone to pay in order not to be targeted when Metta could technically offer a free ad-supported service that just doesn't target you, doesn't personalize the ads. Oh, imagine a world where Metta did something as nice as that. So before the show, you know, I was, you know, my knee-jerk response was like, well, but lots of companies offer either an ad-supported free option or certainly a greatly reduced option or you pay to have the more sort of premium offering. Yeah, it goes Spotify does it. YouTube does it. Lots of new sites in Europe do it. Like it's fairly common. Exactly. And you rightly pointed out, Tom. Yeah, but in those cases or in many cases, maybe not everyone, but in those cases that content has to be licensed by the company. So the company is kind of eating the costs where most of anything that you see on Metta is just social network generated.  Here's some photos kind of thing. And I, you know, when I think of it that way, I go, hmm, interesting. I don't think that unless the hand was forced to the point where Metta simply had to legally offer a free option to users that was not ad-supported but also did not make them pay. And I don't really see that happening even though we're laying out something that floated by the EU, you know, for specific EU laws in this case. I don't, I don't know how that would ever work. I also, I just, Metta has such a, has such an optics problem right now for a lot of folks that were on the platform for a really long time that now have other options. They might be, you know, aging out of some of the content that's still there to say, well, hey, if you don't like ads and you don't want to be targeted $10 a month or the equivalent, you know, in euros, that's, that's insane to me. I would just stop using it. But that's also because I'm not like. Why is 10 euros a month insane? I know it's insane compared to zero euros a month but you pay that exact amount for lots of other services. 10 euros seems to be like, that's what you pay for Spotify. That's what you pay for YouTube premium. That's what you pay for all this stuff. Like, I guess what I'm arguing is if it's too much, then people will just not use Facebook. Like, if you really want to use Facebook that bad, right? To where people are saying, well, it's unfair to charge them cause they have to use it and they don't want to get, their only choice is to either get personalized ads or pay, there's also the choice of not using Facebook. Now the argument runs there is that, yes, but there aren't any other competitors to Facebook that are equivalent. At which point, I feel like the assumption here is like, well, obviously everyone has to use Facebook and it's a monopoly because there aren't anything, there isn't anything else like Facebook, but I question that. But is that, do we have to use Facebook? Well, yeah, that's kind of where I was going with this too is if it comes down to, well, okay, I'm not going to pay and so I can't use Facebook and how, you know, how am I adversely impacted by this? Well, totally depends on who you are. I'm not going to speak for anybody about myself. I don't use Facebook all that much. So it's like, I just wouldn't use it.   Like all of that, I don't want to diminish that if this is the place that you want to be. I also think that there's some workarounds when it comes to being tracked online, but of course not everybody either knows how to or even cares to use some of that stuff. So I guess it's an okay option. I just can't see it catching on that much. Again, I still stick on the idea that like, well, if it's worth that much to you, is it worth 10 euros? Like maybe it is worth 10 euros if you're like, no, but I have to be on Facebook. If 10 euros is too much, well, what about five euros? I feel like the argument is, no, I want it to remain free. I just don't want it to change. And what Facebook is saying is we won't make enough money on the ads that aren't targeted to make it worth our while. So we are going to give you two options. Either got personalized ads, which case we're making enough money to give it free or give us the equivalent. Now we can argue all day long about whether 10 euros is the equivalent or not, but I don't know if that's the government's job to set the price. I don't know if it's the court's job to set the price. It shouldn't be the market's job to set that price. And the only way to let that happen would be to let Facebook try to charge 10 euros and see if people quit. I think where my argument falls down. Your bites, you know, they might get a lot of signups. Is that a lot of people will just not pay and let themselves be tracked because they're not thinking that hard about it. And I think that's where a lot of critics go is like, yes, but for people's own good, we should force Facebook to give them another option. Well, and I think Facebook has the not great distinction of being a place where perhaps more than anywhere else, I don't know, maybe X is in the running at this point, you know, for a lot of people to say, well, you know, they're going to take your DNA unless you pay, you know, because that's, you know, that is sort of the, you know, the one side of the, you know, the conspiracy theory thing that's been going on on Facebook for years. This has always been like a weird strange urban legend that's been floating around. Oh, they're going to make you pay unless you like, you know, say this specific sentence and post it to your feed and then make 10 of your friends post the same thing. You know, it kind of feeds into something that I think is going to turn into a misinformation thing for a lot of people. Should it go forward? But yeah, honestly, on its surface, you want to pay for no ads, no tracking. Great. You don't. Okay. You have another option. Yeah. And it's not going to happen outside of the EU. That that's fairly clear from Wall Street Journal sources. Yeah. So, you know, even if you're listening to the saying shakes fist, it very well may not apply to you now. Rest easy, Australians. You're fine. There you go. Yesterday, we noted Android authorities report that code indicated that TikTok might offer also offer monthly subscriptions in the U.S. for $4.99 for ad free experiences. TikTok has clarified to TechCrunch. It's testing the feature in a single English language market outside the U.S. Didn't say which one. But yeah, it's not happening in the U.S. Yeah. That's right. Not right now. And not happening in the EU then because I don't think there's an English language market in the EU right now. TechCrunch notes that New York based company called cloaked, like a cloak, C-L-O-A-K, is out of private beta. Here's what they give you, Sarah, for $10 a month, close to the price of Facebook, for $10 a month or $100 a year, cloaked lets users create multiple identities of different email addresses, usernames, password and phone numbers that can be used at different websites. It works as a Chrome plugin, a web app, and on Android and iOS apps. It can not only relay emails to your real address.  It can also act as your inbox. If you don't even want the stuff to from a particular source to even hit your Gmail or your Yahoo Mail or whatever, you can use cloaked as the inbox, as the endpoint. In the United States, you can even create virtual phone numbers since cloaked is a phone company. They created themselves as an MVNO basically, so they are working with the tier one carrier and have phone numbers that they will route for you and it acts as a password manager too. So if you're using that Chrome extension, it can enter your passwords. It can even enter your second factor codes. It can handle your multi-factor authentication and enter those codes for you. And they say customer data is stored in separate encrypted databases from everything else to try to keep what happened to last pass from happening to them. There's lots of other interesting things about how this works, Sarah, but just on the surface there, what do you think? Well, at first, I was sort of like, all right. Well, I do a fair amount of obfuscating my email address anyway, depending on who I'm working with. And then there's sort of like the kind of people who are used to Google Voice or Apple allowing you to use an email that isn't actually your email and Apple read it to you. And I asked a friend, what do you think? Does the price point seem good? And they said, is this not different from Pseudo? I use Pseudo for this already and I have for some time. And I looked at the kind of the price point and the feature list of both and I was like, I don't know because this is kind of new to me. I don't hate this idea. I think you probably, if you are a cloaked user, you mentioned LastPass, Tom, you need to really trust that the company has its wits together as far as keeping all of your information safe. Now, not to say that LastPass doesn't, but things happen. We know that things happen. So that would kind of be my first question is like, all right, well, how much do you trust this company that you may not have worked with before? Yeah, I would like to see some vetting on them before I signed up for it. I'm not familiar with Pseudo. Is it S-U-D-O or P-S-E-U-D-O? S-U-D-O, yeah. Because from what I've seen cloaked is taking a lot of things that other folks do and wrapping it up in one service across multiple places in a way that I hadn't seen before. It looks like Pseudo, you get a phone handle that does phone, email browser and virtual credit card for 99 cents a month. So it's much cheaper. I'm going to guess what cloaked is trying to say is we're a phone company. So we're doing the phone numbers ourselves. Pseudo may or may not be doing that. I don't know. And I think they're offering more ways to use it with the web app and the Chrome plugin, et cetera. But yeah, Pseudo looks pretty interesting as well. Yeah, I got to say it all comes down to the price point. If this is something that you can part with $10 a month for and it makes you feel more secure, well, not just feel more secure, be more secure and private. I think it's great. I'm totally into this. I don't really feel like I have a need for this personally and that's probably just because I'm used to my data being collected and getting lots of spam email. And I just sort of try to circumvent that the best way I can, but this would be, I guess, probably the best way to kind of say like I declare data bankruptcy and we're going to start over and build something, you know, based on something that cloaked is offering $100 a year. Yeah, I don't know. It sounds like a lot to me. It does. Yeah, especially when you compare it to Pseudo, which I'm just learning about now as we speak. Apologies for that audience. But this is something that's much more competitively priced and offers things that cloaked is not offering yet. You know, things like credit cards that they want to offer. One of the interesting things cloaked is doing to protect your privacy is using one phone number for multiple peoples. So because they are a phone company, they can do that. They can route the calls and say, well, when the origin of the message is associated with this account will send that phone numbers call to that that person's phone. It's like a party line basically. The idea is to prevent aggregators from deducing who you are by aggregating data around a particular number, even if they don't have all of your data, they have all the data associated with that number. But this kind of so-called data poisoning will mean that people who aren't you are related to that number.  I would wonder what would happen the first time that goes wrong and they route a call to the wrong person though, because that's going to be pretty deadly for a privacy-protecting organization. So I'm not sure how bulletproof that kind of system is or isn't. Well, for all you Android users out there, we got a show for you called Android Faithful hosted by Ron Richards and Huan Tui Dao. Android Faithful is a podcast devoted exclusively to Android news and information. You can catch it Tuesday live 8 p.m. Eastern Time, 5 p.m. Pacific. Watch it live on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. Or subscribe to it right now at www.androidfaithful.com. Well, your expectations and beliefs about a chat bot might affect how you talk to it, thus affecting its responses back to you. Scientists at MIT and Arizona State University told users that a language model was either empathetic or neutral or manipulative. So Tom, what did they find? Yeah, so if they told the bot, if they told people that the bot was empathetic, those people gave it a higher rating than the people they told the bot was manipulative. And remember, they got the exact same bot. This is all their perception. 44% of those told it was manipulative though, rated it as malicious, whereas 88% of those told it was empathetic, rated it as empathetic, and 79% of those who were told it's neutral, rated it as neutral. So in other words, being told it was manipulative didn't affect your opinion into thinking it was malicious as much as being told it was empathetic or neutral affected your opinions of those. And those who believed it was empathetic became more positive in their interactions with it over time. And remember with these large language models, how you say things to it affects how it says things back to you. The opposite was true as well. If you were told it was manipulative, you started to be more upset with it faster and therefore changed how it respond to you. These results are published. They are peer reviewed. They're in the Nature Machine Intelligence Journal if you want to take a look at them. But what do we do with this? The author has suggested some ideas, but I don't know, Sarah, what do you think? I was trying to, you know, my first comparison is always like, well, if I'm at a dinner party and someone's being manipulative, but it's like, okay, but that's not how you're interacting with a chatbot for the most part, right? Also this is, the chatbots are acting the same way to everybody, right?  Like it's going to be manipulative or oh, no, it's going to be really nice to you. Exactly. I guess if I was, you know, if I'm going towards some treasure trove of data, like a library, for example, you know, if I had some sort of library bot that for some reason I thought was being manipulative, it's like, is it because you want me to buy a book or well, it's a library. So not even a good comparison. I can't really think of a real case scenario because it's a chatbot where this is to your dinner, to your dinner party example. It's not you're at a dinner party and somebody starts acting manipulative. It's you go to a dinner party and your friend goes, that guy over there is really manipulative, right? And then you start to expect it. Versus if your friend said, oh, that guy over there is so nice. The guy could act the exact same. Well, and manipulative is a funny term, right?  It's not actually the way they described it to the users here too. So keep that in mind. Yeah, yeah. But if I knew, okay, so guy had dinner party over at the other side of the room is running a horse rescue organization and is manipulating me into like giving him money. It's like, that's not necessarily something I would consider malicious. It might be something that influences me.  I think, you know, a lot of this. For the study's sake, I'm just using the word manipulative and maybe I should have picked a different word because for the study's sake, it was like expect this chatbot to be mean to you and expect this chatbot to be nice to you is kind of the sense of it, right? Well, yeah.   And I think that, you know, whether it's a bot or a human, we sort of if we have information like that going into any scenario, we might feel the same way. Doesn't necessarily mean that what you get out of it is going to be negative though. And I think that's kind of where the interesting part of this is is if people say, yeah, well, you know, it's a mean bot. So, you know, anything they say, grain of salt type thing. I mean, you can say that about so many situations where you don't necessarily come out of it any worse off. Yeah, what I found fascinating about the study is that it showed that we are willing to believe the best because when we were told, hey, this is going to be real nice to you. 88% rated it as nice. Same exact bot, by the way, let me just reemphasize that doing the same exact thing. Answering the same exact questions. When we were told it was malicious or mean, 44% rated it as malicious. So people were less likely to want to believe that the thing was malicious. And another thing that I want to point out is half of the groups across all three categories, right? So within each category that they divided up, they had 310 people. They divided them up into groups of around 100 or so. Half of each of the groups got a GPT-3 model. Half of them got ELISA, that's 60s era chatbot that is very mechanical. And they basically said that there was a lot more reaction to the GPT-3 models here, which I think you might expect because the GPT-3 model can react in a way that ELISA can't. The GPT-3 model, when you started, well, I expect this thing to be mean. So I'm going to be defensive. It changed the way the GPT-3 model reacted to you. So the upshot here that the... That's real manipulation. But the upshot here that the authors are saying is based on what they want to see and they want to do longer studies to see if it lasts or if it was just temporary. The way we think about a large language model when we go into interacting with it is going to change how it responds to us. And so how a company pitches it when you log on, what you've heard about them in the media is going to affect what kind of responses you get from these chatbots.  Just imagine if I thought that she was not very nice to me, how things would change when I asked her to look at something on Safari. It's a great example. Those voice assistants, even though they're not large language models, they're a little bit less sophisticated, we ascribe tone to them when they frustrate us even though their tone never changes. It's always the same tone. No, it's always like, was that helpful? No, okay. Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. There are a few more AI stories kicking around that we're going to talk about, including the fact that watermarks just don't work yet. Oh boy. Just a reminder though, you can catch the show live. Monday through Friday, DTNS is live. 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow, talking about the Pixel 8 announcement with Android Faithful's Michel Rahman. Talk to you later. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Ironman Club hopes you've enjoyed this bro.


Say a parent comes to you the parent says I have a 12 year old smart child shows some interest in now wanting to read What advice do you give that parent for hooking the child on reading since you yourself your whole life? You've had this extreme intense love of reading. Maybe you were born with it, but how do people get hooked on reading? What do you tell that parent? I think you want to let them loose in a book environment so in the library in the bookstore and you want to give them the freedom to Explore for themselves to make because I think reading is very much a personal thing especially in childhood And especially where parents are often tempted to well is this a book that's good for the kid? And I think you want to avoid that because the child has a completely different perspective and really has to Want to read the book and I think by letting them make their own choices their own selections finding their own way and Not really pressuring them. I don't think you want to say, you know reading is good for you. You have to read whatever this But just making it Making it easy for them to read whatever they want to read. You know what I did a few times with Yana I put a book on the table. I'd point at it.  I can imagine yeah