Congratulations to Bill Brennan of Atlanta Legal Aid, Grand Prize winner
of MIE's Six Word Novel Contest. You can read
his novel and the runners up in four categories (along with Judge Klaus Sitte's personal
favorite novel). Subscribers can read all of the more than fifty novels submitted in the MIE
Library. Look in the "Individual Artiles" section of the Winter 2009 Journal.
You may think MIE Puzzlemaster, Patrick McIntyre, to be diabolical
after you work for a while on this issue's crossword puzzle - Heaven Help Us. We won't give away the trick.
At least Pat has again allowed us to publish the solution.
You can find it here,
but try your hand at solving the puzzle first.
The Winter issue of the MIE Journal is now available in the
Library for those of you who are subscribers. The Special Feature of this issue is
"Outsourcing Inside — Alternative Ideas for Legal Aid" with nine articles
about expanding the scope and the reach of your program. There are
some other good articles, book reviews, technology features, the crossword
puzzle, and the results of MIE's Six Word Novel Contest.
Who knew that we worked in such a creative community.
As usual we have made the
table of contents and a few articles from the current issue
available to anyone. But, you're not just anyone.
If you or your organization aren't subscribers, you should join now.
MIE now provides for on-line registration and
payment for most of our training events, and conferences, as well as
on-line
membership subscription. You can use your credit card or PayPal account to either register or join.
We think it's a useful service, but we'd like to hear from you if you have ideas how to make it better
or easier.
It isn't really new, but many readers don't realize that our on-line version of the MIE Journal is
fully interactive. The table of contents is hyper-linked and you can jump directly to any article.
If an article is continued later in the Journal, you can jump directly there by clicking on the continued
link. If an article references an internet resource, you can go there directly just by clicking on the
reference.
At last look there were 3,318 documents in our Library.
Sure some of them are duplicates because we try to post many documents in
both pdf and word processing formats. Still, that represents a lot of accumulated knowledge
and expertise. Almost all of those documents were created and / or submitted by our
subscribers. The MIE Library is an awesome resource.
One great thing about on-line publishing is that it is much easier to make corrections
once publication is complete. We've posted a corrected version of the Summer Journal with
the footnotes in Gene King's article "Forty Years of State Support in Ohio: OSLSA to Ohio
Poverty Law Center" corrected. Readers of the paper version will have to wait for an errata
in the next issue (much less satisfactory).
Hey, we could use some help here. It's been several years since
we updated the links section on the MIE website. How about sending us your favorite
and most useful websites for non-profit and legal services management or fundraising.
Take a look here to see what we have
up there now. Send your ideas to Patricia Pap (ppap(at)m-i-e.org) or Hugh Calkins
(hughcalkins(at)mac.com). The whole idea behind MIE is to exchange
the benefit of our knowledge and experience with our colleagues around the country.
There are a couple of new shelves in the
Trainings and Conferences section of the MIE Library. The National Directors
Conference shelf is filled with important and useful documents whether you
attend the Conference or not. The Fundraisers Conference shelf will be filled
soon with equally important documents.
We've made some changes to the home page of our website. Since few people
give us feedback anyhow, we've converted the block that encouraged feedback
to one that highlights MIE's upcoming training and conferences.
That doesn't mean that we aren't still interested in hearing from you
about how to improve this website or the work of MIE in general.
Maybe you don't know, what an incredible resource the
archives of the MIE listservs are. You should look them over (if you are a
subscriber, of course).
Link. Here's an example. A few years ago - I can't remember exactly when -
Nan Heald had a discussion on the Managers list about Work From Home policies.
I go to the archive and search for "Heald." I scroll down a little and there it
is. I click on the topic and there is her message with the string of all the
responses to it. OR I search for "Work From Home" and there is Nan's conversation
and a couple of other conversations all sorted by relevance.
Maybe you can't see it, but the MIE website is sitting on
a newer, faster, shinier, more secure server. Depending
on the speed of your connection, it should make downloading documents
faster, and it should solve some of the email problems we have been having
lately.
Many people report having trouble downloading Word documents
from the MIE Library in the newest version of Internet Explorer. They get a
message something like, "To help protect your security, internet
explorer will not let you download files from the MIE Library. Click
here for options." When you chose the "download file"
option, nothing happens. There are two ways to fix the problem, the easiest being to
abandon Internet Explorer, the other being to fix Internet Explorer.
Both are outlined in a new help page in the library. Look for the "Having
trouble downloading Word docs from the Library?
Here's how to do it." link.
We have opened a new wing of the MIE library. Well,
actually it isn't an entire wing of the library but it has some
important documents for these times. If you are an MIE subscriber
visit the new section
Managing in Tough Financial Times and read the Wharton Papers.
They aren't new, but their relevance to today is striking.
There is a lot that's new on the MIE website, but much of it is
barely visible. For example, we have upgraded the software platform
this website sits on and installed a new search engine in the Library. You'll hear more
about the search engine (TextIndexNG) as we go along. It is much more sophisticated than
our old library search engine. Among other things it utilizes the
Levenshtein Distance. Here's
how it works in practice: Suppose you are looking for articles in the Journal by someone named
Geminani. You do a search on his name and it comes back empty. You could try a "similarity
search" using the Levenshtein Distance by putting a percent sign in front of your search word -
"%geminani." The multitude of writings of Victor Geminiani from the March 1992 issue to the
most recent issue are returned. (In case you didn't notice, you had misspelled his name
the first time. The new search engine allows you to search for similar names.)
MIE's 2009 training calendar is available in the
Training section of our website. There is something for everyone -
Fundraisers, Executive Directors, Middle Managers, and Supervisors -- Legal Aid,
Pro Bono, IOLTA, P&A, and others. Take a look.
Here is a tip: If Internet Explorer tries to protect you
from the MIE Journal and won't let you download it by clicking on the link
in the MIE Library, right click instead (use the right button on your mouse
instead of the left) and choose (in IE 8.0, anyhow) "Open," "Open in
New Tab," or "Open in New Window." It should work.
There have been lots of other additions to our Library, as well. You should
spend some time browsing the Library. In each section of the Library
the most newly submitted items appear first. By using the advanced search
feature from within any section of the library you can search only that
section, or you can search the entire library.
MIE has built quite a sophisticated database of job descriptions
for the legal aid community. When the library started, job descriptions consisted of
"attorney, secretary and paralegal." The newest additions to the Human Resources wing of
the Library include job descriptions for "Senior Manager," "Database Administrator,"
"Grants and Compliance Administrator," "Assistant Comptroller," "Accounting Assistant,"
and many more. There are still plenty of new and improved job descriptions for our
more traditional jobs.
Even if you aren't a subscriber to MIE, you can still look at the
table of contents and three
of sample articles. But you know you should be a subscriber. Take a look
at our section on how to become
a subscriber.
Every month legal services managers from around the country submit some
of their best work to share with their colleagues in the MIE Library. Some of our
newest additions
include ED performance appraisal documents from Massachusetts, Connecticut and
California and job descriptions from Virginia, Texas and the Philanthropy
Center. There are newsletters from Illinois and Kentucky and photo
releases from North Carolina, Virginia and Connecticut. There are
fundraising documents from Ohio and Oklahoma and a hotline proposal
from Maryland.
That's just part of a month.
The
Performance Appraisal section of the Supervision and Training wing
of the MIE Library has Client Satisfaction Surveys from Legal Services of Oregon in
both Spanish and English, together with the survey results.
The Library has new documents in the
Personnel Policies section of Human Resources and the Standards of Practice
section of Supervision and Training. These are the Legal Assistance Foundation
of Metropolitan Chicago's Office Attire Memo - "not a policy, just a memo,"
and Bay Area Legal Aid's case checklist for case closings.
MIE is developing quite a library on Providing Legal Services to
Clients with Limited English Proficiency. Most recently added to the
Communications and Marketing wing of the Library are the "Limited English
Proficiency Manual" of the Legal Aid Society of Mid-New York and the Legal
Aid Foundation of Los Angeles "Policy and Procedures on Providing Legal Services
to LEP Clients." These and most of the
library documents are available in both as PDF format and and word processing
format for easy quoting, cutting and pasting.
Topping two thousand documents MIE's library has twelve new submissions
to the "additional administrative policies" section. These include policies and
procedures for disaster recovery, sick leave, trust accounts and more. In the
Communications and Marketing wing of the library check out the Poetic Justice
newsletter from the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.
Diversifying Your Funding Read about MIE's Custom Resource
Development Support, a recently added feature in the Fundraising section of our website.
If you haven't tried the advanced search feature of the MIE library for a
while, check it out again. By searching from a particular section of the library, it
allows you to focus your search on just that section. For a while the feature wasn't
working, but no one told us. If you see anything in the MIE website that doesn't
work like you think it should, or if you have any ideas for improvement please let us
know. Use that feedback button at the top of the page (the top of every page, actually).
You can submit your own documents into the library, and we encourage you to do so.
The library tells the type of file by its extension, so be sure your documents carry the
default extension for its document type, e.g. ".doc," ".wpd," ".txt," ".xls," etc. The
document submissions will go to MIE staff for approval. As good as it might be, we really
don't want your recipe for blueberry pie. MIE staff will try to add a .pdf version of each
document that is submitted.
Your feedback is very important to us. There is a feedback button at the top
of this page and every page in the site. Please use it to tell us of problems you find,
bugs you run into, or ideas you have for improvement. There are bound to be problems and
bugs in a new and complex site like this one. MIE is a collaborative effort, and we encourage
your collaboration on the website. If you just want to give us a pat on the back, we'll
accept it.
The MIE website was developed by Kaivo Software,
to whom we are very grateful. It is built on an open source Zope software platform and is
part of the growing open source movement in the legal services community.
