LegalAve preview for our friends in the community

26 Feb, 2015by osaseweka

We’ve been working with our web developer and various organizations across the province to ensure our upcoming legal information website—LegalAve—meets the technical needs of Albertans and has quality family law information.

On February 4, 2015, we held a small event to demonstrate the website to organizations with whom we’ve been collaborating. We were pleased to share our progress so far with the people who have been involved by helping us review content, suggesting legal resources to link to, offering subject matter expert referral and giving general feedback. The event was an opportunity to look at a version of the final product together and have insightful conversations about how to make the website better for Albertans.

LegalAve is scheduled to become available to the public in fall 2015. At that point, it will contain information about family law, including marriage and other kinds of relationships, divorce and its associated issues, adoption, elder law, domestic violence and options for solving family legal problems. Information on the website will be organized into five categories to reflect the different legal matters that may occur under “family law”, which are:

Starting new family relationships
Issues in ongoing family relationships
Breakdown in family relationships
Family violence
Solving family law problems.

Over the next few years, we will continue to expand LegalAve to include information about other areas of law.

During the event, we talked about key features of the website and showed how some of them work such as the Guided Pathway. When a visitor to the website uses the Guided Pathway, they’ll be asked important questions to determine what information they need. Answering the questions will lead them to one or more “Information Pages”, where they’ll find information about the law, the legal processes, common questions and myths related to the specific family law topic they chose while they were answering the questions.

At this stage of the project, LegalAve is equipped with features and information that:

Allow a visitor to quickly exit the website if they feel they can no longer browse privately or safely.
Allow visitors to get to the information they need in three different ways, including the Guided Pathway.
Help librarians, public legal educators, legal information and service providers, and social workers to search and organize legal resources for their clients.
Educate visitors about how to identify quality legal resources online.

We appreciate the support we’re receiving from the community. Developing LegalAve has truly been a collaborative effort, and we hope it continues in the future to make LegalAve a successful initiative for Albertans.

NEXT STEPS

Use feedback from the event to improve the website.
Continue working on the content, design and functionality aspect of the website.
Give our stakeholders access to view the website so they can continue to provide feedback.
Attend events and activities in communities across Alberta such as the Southern Alberta Library Conference in Lethbridge, the Alberta College of Social Workers Conference in Calgary, and the Alberta Library Conference in Jasper to connect with frontline legal service providers and seize any opportunities for collaboration.
Start second round of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) in the next couple of weeks.

Visit this website regularly to read about how we’re doing. Don’t forget, we’re also on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Be our friend, like us and follow us to stay up-to-date about our project.

We hope you enjoy these photos from the event.

NEXT STEPS