 We're good. Hi, and we're live at the MIT Media Lab where we're hacking the law in a good way. And this is the beginning of day three of the MIT computational law course 2019. Welcome to the opening plenary. Oh, we've got 10 viewers already. OK, that's good. So let's give a little time. I think we're expecting quite a few more. We'll just give a moment for people to log in. And what we're going to do now is go over the day and give you some options for connecting and also some interesting extra credit exercises that you can participate in. Here we go. One moment. Agenda. Pigeon hole. Perfect. I'm going to do a little screen share. Here we go. Present everybody. Oh, hold on a second. I just realized. And I'm like, OK, perhaps this audio is a little bit better now. Let's just check the check one, two. Yes. Great. So first of all, taking a look at what's going to happen today. From now on for the next approximately 30 minutes, perhaps a little bit less, we're going to go over the breakout sessions later today. And we've had some adjustments and updates there. So you can select the ones that are the best fit for you. And we're also going to do a little preview of the all-class block of time at the end of the day. But we're calling the closing plenary. Excuse me. One moment. OK. And so if you join me at the class website and click the Agenda tab and scroll down a little bit, you may already be here streaming the opening plenary. Just below that, we have inserted a pigeon hole for the opening plenary. If that's not appearing on your screen, I would invite you at this point to actually go ahead and refresh your screen. And you may need to then re-invoke the livestream to do that. But we'd like everybody to be joining us in the pigeon hole for your feedback for this live session. OK. So first things first, we'd like to do a sound off with everybody that's on the line so far. And the question is, what are you curious about? Or what would you like to learn or experience today? And what do you think, Brian? Oh, so yeah, do I need to? Brian's right here. Do I need to steal your microphone? The one thing that we had kind of mentioned to last night and a little bit today was just kind of leveraging the Media Lab ethos. And to that end, we were going to see about producing creative works quickly and effectively. And that's kind of the extent to which we'd covered this. I think that's the extent to which we'd talked about that. OK. Perfect. Thank you. So I just kind of did a little approximation of what Brian said. Can we do projects together? So it looks like we've got about 20 people online or 15 people. I'd like to just hear from everybody that's following along with us. And we've got more of the speakers entering the room. Welcome, everybody. Have a seat. Be relaxed. If I can invite the people that are speakers in the room and your clans to join us on the class page and follow along in the pigeonhole, it'd be grateful. Can I join in the hangout so that I can show it from up here? Yeah. So we'll give people a moment to jump in the pigeonhole. And the prompt question is, what would you like to learn or experience today? Again, go to the class page, probably, where you're viewing this very hangout from. And if you could please add something in here. You're now going to see my email. So if you have any suggestions on who I should email back or anything like that, feel free. But I must now get a piece of information to Brian. So now you're watching behind the scenes exactly how we hack. Compose, compose, compose. OK, you should have it by email. Yikes. That's how pigeonhole works. OK, we're not seeing any more things in pigeonhole, but that's fine. So another thing we wanted to go over today is we got some feedback from people in the class. Some of what people were interested in was doing some more hands-on scenario-based discussion. So you could have a sense of context. So to that end, we have linked and sent everybody a link to some vignettes that we posted into the wiki page of the GitHub site, which you're seeing right now, I think. Join? Good. And let me just do a quick preview of one of those. We have a mergers and acquisition vignette and a negotiation bot vignette. We linked the negotiation bot one. So we're going to ask people to rather we're going to do a bit of a hands-on design-oriented session at the end of the day where we look at this scenario and we're going to pull out the legal parties. We're going to maybe identify some of the roles of the parties and their rights and obligations with respect to one another. Also, while the actions and the information flows that would occur in a technology system, and then we may play some scenario games and ask questions like what would be the likely legal results for some permutation of, in this case, I think it's insurance contract. We have another interesting one that's another take on this for mergers and acquisitions, which I think would also be of interest to some people in the room who have dealt with that. And there's a lot of data. And there's a lot of, frankly, there's like a lot of cruft in a way and a lot of overhead and complexity in doing these types of transactions, corporate transactions, and the use of artificial intelligence and some better well-tailored automation in the workflow for these types of transactions could go a long way to transforming them. We're not so flexible to get pages time over. So another thing that we'd like you to think about which we basically have done on the fly in response to terrific feedback from people in the telegram channel was that people wanted some more hands-on exercises. And Brian's going to tell you a little bit about something we'll be doing at the end of the day after the break out so you can start thinking about it. Kind of a bake off for rapid development. Brian? So the idea is that GitHub Pages makes it relatively easy and straightforward to build and deploy websites. That's what the course website is structured in. And then we've been able to make some pretty big changes to it in very small windows of time. And so one of the ideas that we had was we can show you how to create a website like this in approximately 10 minutes, including linking to the, if you want to, linking to the advanced DNS settings and actually getting a proper domain name set up and routed to your site. But also we have some kind of little hacky ways that you can set up a Google Forms embed code on the site and maybe get some information. And then from there, link to a different embed code on a different tab of the page that allows you to see a spreadsheet of that information or turn even that information into some sort of visualization with a pivot table or something like that. And so we think that could be useful in several different contexts. I know last year we talked about the idea of maybe having something like a carbon registry set up that way where you ingest the data through a form. It's stored in a proxy database of Google Sheets. And then you can kind of have something like a zero-ish knowledge proof based on how you set up the visualization to determine compliance standards. You could also do that with a few different compliance scenarios. And that kind of is a hacky legal use case that we think we can do pretty quickly. So I hope that is appealing. Agreed. Thanks. Just realized I'm getting a lot of like beard static. So I might just hold this here. So just to bottom line what Brian was just saying, what we might do is kind of do a walk along with you through a screen share of how to create a website very quickly, like in minutes. Get a domain name, like from GoDaddy or some registrar, point it at GitHub Pages, which is where we'll do the website. Have it up and running. And then we'll get a YouTube video. You can embed things very easily. And one of the things we can embed is a form. And then we can also embed the results of that form just using another web service with an easy to integrate interface using iframes and stuff like that so that we can actually kind of monitor the results of the form. Not so different from what we're doing in Pigeonhole right now, but what's interesting about it is we're basically decoupling the services and then composing, not composing them even, but we're just orchestrating them on a page. And then by putting them behind different tabs on the website, it could be a rapid way that you could actually apply that to all kinds of different business scenarios. Like if you're working with a big team of people trying to put together a complex multi-stakeholder contract and you're just trying to figure out what each team's going to be doing and or if you're trying to get feedback from giving a talk at a trade show or a bar association, you have 300 people and you'd really like to know what each of the committees is doing in real time rather than doing it in a serial way one after the other where it could take weeks or months to orchestrate things. You could do that almost at the speed of thought by having form-based input and then showing the results of those forms and sort of massaging, exploring the data in another tab on the same website, that kind of stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, we were joking around earlier when we were trying to get organized for this day that, you know, as a joke that I think in tables now and to a certain extent if you start thinking about legal information in tables you can do a lot of cool things with it like identify trends and so this can be kind of one of those stepping stones, those early stepping stones that better understanding how to get into more of a computational mindset and then really like use that as a launch pad into kind of bigger and more robust projects that maybe actually have a database instead of Google Forms and maybe they have some more sophisticated computations that are going on instead of just kind of rendering a pivot table and doing some conditional formatting that way and so to that extent I think this is hopefully a little teaser and then we can set you up with some more information through our resources page, through perhaps even something of a journal and then use that to move forward in a meaningful way. Should I preview that? You can. What do you think, Mila? Should I preview this journal thing that? Okay, certainly. So another thing that we're working on right now and that we'd like to let you know about and also invite some feedback on and we'll talk about it more deeply at the big session with everybody, the plenary session at the end of the day is launching a new journal, a Journal of Computational Law and it would be modeled somewhat after the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy or words of that effect in some order and but this would be focused more on computational law and we like Stanford would use this open publishing system called PubPub. Here's an example of a different one on open oceans and oceanography, an open space that we kind of like as a model, a little bit less stuffy than a law journal allows for more projects, more reviews, more kind of events, kind of proceedings of events in real time. This was a good event we hosted. We kind of clicked. So we're in the mad throws right now of kind of roughing out and rapid prototyping the kind of the broad information architecture for Journal of Computational Law and our thought is, we like the contributions of the lectures, the invited lectures so much this year and we actually think a lot of that content would be very good input for articles in the first issue in the first volume of that journal. So starting with their videos and their slides and building it out to short, maybe like good blog post length articles would be a terrific format and mode to share that information, start collecting it also making it available to more people and yeah. Yeah, and I think this also helps demonstrate how useful kind of the participation scheme that we've got going with pigeonhole can be because your contributions can directly inform and be linked to in a journal like this. And because of the kind of creative comments way of working on this, we can get attribution to you for your comments. We can make sure that the feedback is actually more than just feedback in a kind of like a very small way and that it actually is opened up so that more people can learn from it and be exposed to it and derive value from it. So with that in mind, I just want to say thanks to everybody for all of the contributions that you've had so far and really excited to see how we can kind of keep this momentum, leverage this to keep the momentum going a little bit more and really come up with hopefully some pretty cool things. Right here, oops, very quick sneak preview, but more on that later, more on that later. It's still very much a work in progress. The best time to hack something into existence is always right now, I reckon. Oh, and in case you haven't seen enough of my email, let's just display that a little bit more. Okay, let me get back to the, what the heck is going on here? I just maybe close that, okay, that's better. Okay, so taking a look at your feedback, it looks like the winner by a bio vote is, oh, it's Brendan, hi Brendan, how to model legal jurisdiction by country. Dot, dot, dot, if you know what I mean. And so that's an interesting question and then we do sort of get at some of that and some of the breakouts and we can come back to it in more depth at the end of the day, but I see someone waggling their eyebrows, what does that make you think of Brian? That just reminds me of the Brian and Brian United Computational States lecture from yesterday that piggybacked on Kristoff Pereira's lecture, which could potentially result in very cool outcome in as far as a computational legal consortium of states and burning man camps, if that ever comes to fruition. Right, consortium of states, also known sometimes as a jurisdiction, for example. Do you have a spatial ontology of jurisdictions? What do you do when you know? Brian, you listen to these commenting that Brendan, Brendan might actually mean more of like a computational, what is it, like depiction of legal jurisdictions? Right, so if you know this. Sorry, I'm asking him to come up so that I don't need to just repeat what he's saying. With the magic of a microphone, you can hear it from the man himself, Brian Ulyssany, Thompson Reuters Labs. So I'm just trying to interpret what the question might mean, but I've run into this issue. So if an event takes place at a certain lat long, to understand what jurisdictions are actually involved there is like super non-trivial and modeling that, but of course, everyone needs to know that, right? So having like, there's this, what is it called, the geo, there's like a standard geo ontology now that kind of represents, oh, you know, the city of Rio de Janeiro has this lat long, is it centroid and it's an entity of this type and it's a part of these other entities, which so it's part of Brazil. So you can do all those kinds of inferences. So if something happens in Rio, it happens in Brazil. It happens in the state of whatever Rio is in. I don't know why I picked Rio since I don't know anything about Rio. We've got a growing and vibrant Brazilian. That's right. That's right. That's what spurred it on. Where are you at, Loki, Durand, Durand fans? Oh God. More like loci. So don't go anywhere. So some standards that come to mind that you can Google along with us are, Well, oh, geo names is a good one. I'm thinking foam, which goes to geo hashes, which is another way to express every square meter of the surface of the earth with a small, like alphanumeric that itself is hashed into a bunch of information and that is accessible at an interface you can work with. And foam is a blockchain based layer on that. So you can start to do some transportation things or kind of build that into other systems. And then there's different ways to express polygons for things like tax assessments, which is absolutely huge, what tract and parcel we're talking about, but over and then you've got like KML and other things like that from Google. It's kind of a tangled mess in geographic information systems now and finding something like this geo name standard where we can start to maybe identify and select some existing resources that we could build upon and share across for the legal layer of geographies big and that would be how we could start to address the jurisdictional layer, right? Right. And think about, so named locations are one thing, but think about like maritime jurisdictions. So you pick a lat long in the ocean, what laws apply there? I'm not an expert there, but that seems like a pretty unsolved problem. It's tricky. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, so let's take a look ahead. Now, well, maybe I should skip across some of the other feedback quickly. How do we do projects together? We'll show you in the closing plenary and Michelle Gitlitz's session as well. We may do a little rapid prototyping and some of the other sessions I'll come to in a moment, but we're working on ways to do projects together online. And that's the real trick this time, but we think we've got some tools and resources to make that possible. Vanessa asks the question. Oh, yeah, here we go. It just got voted to the top, so that's great. How does one find people that would be interested to code writing projects in the law? Well, there's one way is by doing a kind of a simple RFP and then having different teams been on it, and there's lots of places you can find and places where you can solicit bids from development teams. More interestingly, when you're looking to collaborate more and maybe do sort of a value exchange that is not monetary, where you're paying for a scope, at the other side of the spectrum is this group Legal Hackers, which we had a terrific session on with James and yesterday. So getting involved with in the United States groups like Code for America, there's Civic Hackers and others and finding projects that they are interested in to work on with you would be ways to find people who are interested in coding with you. So you'd have to find something that they would be interested to work on and then find, frequently having it be open source is a good way to develop something where there's not a payment for it, where everyone that's working on it is kind of getting something out of it, like they're learning to code or we all have a shared interest in having software of that type. I think growing internationally, the meetup community, so meetup.com has a lot of great, you can set your location and say, hey, I'm looking to find a meetup here and they've got all sorts of fun meetups. So they have like geeks who drink and stuff like that, but they also have more serious if you're looking to get into different programming languages. I know for Kansas City, at least they're like Python meetups. They're like different meetups for all of the various computer languages that are hot at the time. And so you can kind of use those as a way to at least network with the people that you're looking for. And so that is probably the best way that I can think of is that you can do that. Right here, can you hold that for us? Yeah. So let's take a look at what's coming up next and how you can participate. Thanks. So we've got three breakout sessions that are gonna be starting in just a few minutes. One with Beth McCarthy and Warren Agan on basically exploring the value and the rights and obligations with respect to tokens like blockchain tokens and using the legal framework in a bankruptcy context to explore that. And bankruptcy does provide a lot of terrific tools and methods for not just identifying the value of assets in this case, digital assets in the form of tokens but also who has maybe superior rights to other people if you owe them money. And that's not a bad framework we could extrapolate from. Another one we have coming up at the same time, the ones that are starting first at 11.30 or maybe a couple of minutes later are integrating interoperable apps and services from a legal platform, e-discovery platform in this case and they're gonna be going deep into Slack today which is a terrific example of an integration for your legal documents and workflows where people can, where it's more human centered and allows for more real time and asynchronous collaboration. So it's kind of called human and conversation centered as opposed to document centered. That session is gonna do a good job of breaking out legal information into objects that you can then kind of dynamically call upon and configure in such a way that allows you to better derive information and turn that legal process into more of a human centered process. Here, here with a miracle of technology, the magic. Smart contracts for music licensing with Michelle Gitlitz is something that's actually going to, now we have some that are starting a little later. This session will start at 1.15 p.m. Eastern time and among other things we're gonna take forward some good design work that happened in a side workshop in person at the media lab yesterday with the Open Music Initiative. And so we'll do some rough but wrap and rapid prototyping of smart contracts for music licensing in that one and have a chance to talk to Michelle about her excellent lecture on the law of smart contracts and then starting at, oh, we should, oh, also starting at 11.30, although he's not here. So it may be starting a little later will be collectivization of knowledge and the urgency of now. And you can check out, this is a relatively late added breakout, but you can check out the excellent flipped classroom video with Christina who is a director at Uni Global Union which is kind of an umbrella group of a bunch of unions and you're talking about basically, what is this big transition to a data-driven age with Amazon and Facebook and others aggregating a lot of data in the workplace, there's a lot of data about we people that work there and workers, even in the gig economy, the Uber drivers and others are very much subject to data systems and the collection of data and inferences made about the data that have a big effect on our lives as workers and consumers and citizens. Are there other models that other than this ever strengthening centralization and aggregation in the hands of a few that could possibly allow for more beneficial flows and frameworks for this data? Are there collective models, for example, which are very popular with credit unions and with labor unions and with other types of collectives? So they're gonna be taking a look at that. And then finally, competing legal frameworks for basically identity of humans in the data-driven age, identity and personal data, similar to the last session, but a more of a legal analysis of human rights and civil liberties legal frameworks and property law based frameworks and applying each one to personal data and identity and seeing which ones fit and when a given framework might be the best fit for a certain situation. And again, definitely join us at two, I think I may have said two o'clock earlier, 2.30 p.m. Eastern for the closing plenary where we all come back together as a big group and we'll have a number of the speakers up here with us and joining us by hangout. And we're going to do, we'll hear of what happened in the report outs from the sessions and there'll be some interesting presentations of projects that they worked on and insights and questions they raised. And then we're gonna have a deeper discussion with you all where we're looking to do, among other things, like the bake-off where we can show you how to rapidly prototype websites for projects on the fly and where we can do some work analyzing a legal fact pattern and a technology scenario and some other good things. And then basically synthesizing everything that happened over the last three days, taking your feedback, wrapping up and looking forward to computational law and blockchain festival and it's coming up through the entire month of March and the very soon to be launched, like a few hours from now, MIT Computational Law Journal, which we'd like input and help and contributions from everybody in this class to help us really get off to a good start. So there you have it. Let me stop my screen share, boom. Okay, so we're going to stop the broadcast now and then we're going to start the broadcast in the breakouts that are starting at 11.30, right? Let's push the, I say we could push the start of the breakouts back to maybe 11.40, that way that gives everybody time to get up, figure out which breakout session they wanna choose, hop in the right breakout session, and then go from there. Sounds good, okay, so see online everybody and as always in the meantime, hit us up on Telegram if there's any emergent questions and also to keep the dialogue going across the whole class. So see ya after the breakouts.