Lektor

Legal knowledge exchange accelerator

YOUR INFORMATION SOURCE FOR LEGAL ISSUES IN E- BUSINESS

What is LEKTOR?

LEKTOR provides easy-to-understand information on legal topics important to e-business, which have been selected by SMEs like you. These topics are discussed in an online database where visitors can contribute their own knowledge and experience. In addition, interactive tools like blogs and forums are available for online discussions.

Why LEKTOR?

Legal questions are probably the least popular issues in e-business. For many organizations, legal issues equal high costs for lawyers or law suits and complex, time-consuming study of legal texts written in a strange language. The general complexity of the law and no access to easy-to-understand explanations of legal issues make e-business even harder. LEKTOR is designed to help remedy these problems for e-business SMEs.

Who are the users of LEKTOR?

LEKTOR is designed for businesses that do not have the luxury of their own legal department or in-house lawyer, so easy access to reliable legal information is critical to their success. LEKTOR uses knowledgeable qualified professionals to provide legal information that is easy to understand and useful for running a business. These contributors are legal professionals or intermediaries that have in-depth knowledge of legal issues for a specific sector or geographical area of e-business and thus, guarantee the accuracy of the content. Furthermore, LEKTOR uses contributors that submit additional comments and real-life examples throughout the platform, providing a richer body of useful information. Finally, everybody interested in e-business legal issues such as spam, copyright, Open Source licenses, etc. can access LEKTOR.

How does LEKTOR work?

The LEKTOR platform consists of 3 tools that allow easy access to legal information: • a Legal Wiki in English, with articles on legal topics which are written and up-dated by legal experts. • Blogs cover crucial topics for a sector or a country and are run by legal experts in a local country’s language• Forums can be created by any registered user and serve as the main tool for discussion and exchange. All content on the LEKTOR website can be searched using a full-featured search engine.

What can YOU DO at the LEKTOR platform?

You can visit the website and read all texts and rate the content for its usefulness without having to register. If you want to be more interactive, you can register for free. Registration allows you to respond to blogs and forums, comment on Legal Wiki articles, create a forum on a legal issue that you want to share or for which you want to get feed-back, and add tags to any text. If you are a lawyer or legal professional, you can apply to become a contributor. For this you need to register, then go to the special contributor's page, submit a short CV, and apply for the status of contributor. By using qualified contributors, LEKTOR can guarantee a minimum level of accuracy for the information presented.

Why should you become a Contributor to LEKTOR?

Sharing is the Internet buzz-word but not necessarily in an e-business context. By sharing information with others, LEKTOR gives visibility to its contributors via the "contributor's webpage". You can up-load your profile and photograph, as well as a contact address if you wish. That allows people who are looking for an expert to find you easily. LEKTOR is a non-commercial website, thus, your contribution is not on a commercial basis, and your profile is not considered advertising (This may be useful where certain professions are restricted from advertising.).

Why should you as an Intermediary or Association want to promote LEKTOR?

The LEKTOR interface has been designed to allow easy customization of the appearance of the website. Thus, you may want to include LEKTOR as a service to your members and clients on your own website with your own design. The overall LEKTOR content will always remain free, but you will have the ability to add "private spaces" on your own version to provide customized services to your members. This service will be available starting in June 2008.

What is the current status of LEKTOR?

LEKTOR is a project supported by the EC IST programme of FP6. Currently, a project website gives overall information on the development and allows for registration to receive regular up-dates on the progress of LEKTOR: www.ubqiue.org/lektor
For potential contributors and for demonstration purposes, a beta version of the LEKTOR platform is internally available. This address is not open to the public at this moment as the website is still under development. www.e-accelerator.net/lektorservice

http://www.ubqiue.org/lektor

For more information on LEKTOR, please contact:

Dr. Margaretha Mazura, mm@e-multimedia.org, Tel +32 2 219 03 05

Dejan Pestotnik, dejanx@kibla.org, Tel +386 2 252 44 40

If legal issues jerk your brain, lean back and click LEKTOR again!

1 The legal, technical and business issues featuring on the LEKTOR platform stem from a research that involved 58 SMEs form Europe and 34 enterprises from India, South America and the USA, to determine what companies perceive as main legal issues. The full report is accessible at: www.ubique.org/lektor/study.pdf