We’ll be offline this coming week, July 11th through the 15th.

Update: We’re back.

The central issue at stake is a First Amendment question of whether the court can order a news organization to redact material that has been presented to the public in open court.

Troubleshooting network problems is an inevitable challenge when livestreaming video all day every day. What’s surprising is when the problem isn’t, say, the protocol for how your router is assigning IP addresses, but a GIANT CRANE.

Today we are launching public access to the video archives of our court live-streams. It’s been a long road here.

We see so many people every day in the court whose lives have been ravaged by drug and alcohol addiction. Drug Court is the one feel-good session of the week, and I suspect the graduation will be both heart-warming and tear-inducing. We’ve also heard that there will be cake.

WBUR has decided to extend our voluntary suspension of posting the project’s archives past the May 18th date we had originally set, pending a full meeting of OpenCourt’s Advisory Board.

All of you legal eager beavers who tune into our live stream right when it goes online every morning may be wondering what exactly you’re hearing as the judge rises to the bench.

We are entering a new world. Digital technology and social media are changing how we view privacy, public records, and the permanence of what used to be ephemeral. We believe this is the future and that news media and the court system need to work together to find a way to ensure the public has access to public proceedings.

We are happy to announce the launch of OpenCourt, a pilot project which aims to open the workings of the justice system to the public using digital technology. Today is the first day we’ll be live-streaming the proceedings from the First Session of the Quincy District Court south of Boston.

One of the most shockingly difficult parts of our project was getting adequate broadband into the courthouse, which was built in 1972 and had the IT infrastructure to match. Project Director Joe Spurr recently wrote a post on the PBS MediaShift blog on our travails and the lessons to be learned about how essential broadband access is.