The Housing Pilot project

The Housing Pilot will provide a fully-functional core FreeLegalWeb service focussed on the needs of those who require access to and guidance on housing law matters.

Why housing?

Housing has been selected as better access to housing law will serve a very wide-ranging public and community interest purpose.

  • It will benefit the public sector by supporting its Access to Justice, Power of Information and Housing agendas
  • It will benefit the third sector which provides substantial advice in this area on modest budgets
  • It will benefit private sector housing lawyers who tend to be less affluent
  • And it will benefit the public themselves, providing a readily accessible information channel complementing the above services

Content

The Housing Pilot will concentrate on building a meaningful corpus of materials directly related to housing law. It is expected that the pilot citations database will reference almost all available UK primary law sources (ie not just housing-related materials) since there is no significant additional overhead in providing comprehensive coverage.

Scope

The Pilot project will be designed to achieve the following goals:

  • To establish a functioning technical infrastructure for the service
  • To establish and meet requirements across the range of users envisaged
  • To ascertain the effectiveness of the architecture in generating ongoing contributions
  • To establish effective methods of promoting the service to potential users and contributors
  • To scope out the implementation of the full project which would be many times larger in scale.

The pilot will deliver:

  • A technical infrastructure for the pilot, built such that it could easily be expanded into a full project
  • A set of content describing housing law, linked to primary law and other relevant resources on the web

In order to deliver a technical infrastructure, we will:

  • Develop and deploy the site's content analysis system, the Citator, which will connect related legal documents
  • Develop and deploy a front-end for the FreeLegalWeb, which allows articles to be created, edited and managed by their authors, which is accessible, usable and suitable for its intended audience

In order to deliver a set of content, we will:

  • Work with the legal community to establish a core group of contributors
  • Spend our marketing budget on raising awareness and support within legal organisations which regularly deal with housing law, with the goal of recruiting new contributors
  • Establish a presence on social media sites, and use it to create and extend our community of users and contributors
  • Work closely with the Bar Council and the Law Society, who are in a position to assist us by recommending producing content for the FreeLegalWeb as a way to earn Continuing Professional Development points.

Duration

The Housing Pilot Project is currently under way and we expect to deliver a Beta Service by the end of January 2010.