This thing again? Every patent expert I've talked to has told me this is just a bait to lure developers to Twitter: the language is so broad that Twitter's IPA is no different than others. If you look at GitHub you can see that the relevant commits and issues raised have been ignored or dismissed with "it's your opinion against mine". No wonder the repo has been silent for months.
I really like the idea but, at patent law teaches us, ideas are worth nothing without execution.
The "Legal Wiki" linked in the legal section is sadly dead but Florian Fader re-uploaded most of the documents on Docracy (that also hosts pretty much all the free funding documents available)
I love interviewers' tips, upvoted. However, it's not clear to me how Kevin is able to "ask a question early in the 5 minutes that is a complete tangent and has little to do with their goal" to see if they "say no". As much as you want to test the candidate's confidence, you have to ask a relevant question. Maybe an example could help?
Here's a good example... one candidate chose to explain how residential firefighting works. They got into explaining why water is really important. I asked them about halon and they indulged a little bit. Then I asked them to explain how halon works. And so on...
If they haven't shut me down by the 3rd question, it's a sign they're never going to, and I stop distracting them.
For junior candidates, I usually don't even bother with this, because I am not going to stop myself from hiring just because they fail this question. So it's usually better to see if they can do well at just the core question.
Wow, I didn't know of Docracy [1] yet. It looks interesting, but doesn't seem to provide version control outside the web interface. From that perspective, GitHub might be a better place for this.
It's just classic workplace envy. The primitive instinct of hate that humans feel when they see colleagues (or, worse, bosses) walking out, apparently done for the day, while they are stuck at work, instead. These people makes us feel as losers, and we react by despising them.
Sandberg is obviously right, both in leaving the office according to her personal priorities and criticizing the practice of sending late emails to show off workaholism like it was a quality. It's very naive to think she works less just because she leaves at 5:30. She's probably just more efficient, better in setting priorities: and that's the best quality for a startup person. Plus, I'm pretty sure that she'll pick up the phone even at 4am, if necessary.
There will always be people who are jealous that you work harder than them (Take it easy buddy!), or less than them (Must be nice!).
It's veiled resentment. Avoid these vampires full of so much doubt they believe it's insurmountable and look to bring others down to their belief, to justify their own belief that doubts are impossible to overcome.
Innovation and creativity resides in possibility, not doubt. I like having a healthy doubt balanced with healthy dose of possibility.
We think about this stuff a lot, of course. There's no doubt that the "perfect document" is really hard to find, and some documents are way too complicated to be executed without a lawyer. Nevertheless, as some reader said, sometimes you just want to see how a contract looks like, what other people do. For example, few people will sign a termsheet without a lawyer, but they could benefit from seeing the different standards and use Docracy's comparison feature to spot the differences, and distinguish the boilerplates from the juicy clauses. In other words, learn, and understand better what they end up signing, and what their lawyer says. We use the blog and other initiatives (we're organizing a series of free legal workshops here in NY, taught by startup lawyers to entrepreneurs) to inform and educate users, so they can tell when it's time to DIY, and when it's time to go to an attorney.
Interesting. For those reasons, it could be valuable as well.
However, I think your statement indicates I didn't quite communicate my point clearly enough.
>>There's no doubt that the "perfect document" is really hard to find...<<
In most areas, there is no such thing as a perfect document. Trying to find one is a fool's errand. A document is only perfect in that it protects as many rights as possible for a particular client. Because different clients have different needs, wants, and rights, no document is going to be universally "perfect".
Again, this is not to say that your idea isn't great, and doesn't have the potential to provide a lot of value. I think it is/does.
I'm in charge of content here at Docracy and here are answers to some of the initial questions:
1) All content is user generated, and we just started so please be patient if something is missing! We hope to get a solid library of US document to start, and then hopefully spread enough to cover also different jurisdictions/regions.
2) As pents90 said, rating system is pretty tricky for legal content, but we do track signatures and data to help people identify the most used documents. There's a discussion page for every document, where you can share questions and opinions, tell us if you need a specific version, etc
3) We'll co-host a legal hackathon next month, where people will use Docracy to branch the current draft of SOPA and PIPA and make it better. More info: http://legalhackathon.blipclinic.org/
Not to bug you with feature requests, but I think it would also be helpful to know which editors/users are verified attorneys - but I understand the complications and overhead involved with implementing that.
That said, terrific job. I could see myself being a paying customer (assuming you go that route). I think I'd just need some usage stats or perhaps testimonials from trusted parties to actually use a document.
I'd think most attorneys (or whomever) wanting to participate in a site like this might want to upload something such as a photo of their JD. There could be some way to offload the work of the site owners and give at least some credibility.
Anyhow, this site looks pretty awesome and I am going to check it out. As someone hyper-bootstrapping his first startup (poor), a halfassed privacy policy or something may be better than nothing anyhow. Maybe I can get some idea what I will be looking at before I take the dive and hire a real lawyer too.
Yes, we are planning a verification system for lawyers' profiles, although you can already tell a lot by looking at their profile information (website, twitter, etc)
Almost all states' bar associations have public profiles indicating the license statuses of their lawyers.
California, for example, requires a public email address -- verification can be accomplished by sending a Docracy verification email to the bar-published email address.
Having a JD doesn't make someone a licensed attorney, and I'd seriously question the competence of any attorney willing to participate in a site like this, as doing so would be insurmountably fraught with professional responsibility and legal ethics issues. This is not legal advice.
You nailed it: it's not legal advice, but you might need legal advice from those lawyers, and it's definitely helpful if Docracy helps you contact them. I don't see anything unethical in this, also considering that the service is free for all users, lawyers included.
We actually have pretty reputable contributors, like Gunderson Dettmer LLP. Lawyers who realize that lawyering skills lay beyond standard templates are also generally better (or at least more human) than those who charge you $500 for a template they've been using for years.
The question is how do we incentivize politicians to start using this. This will not gain any traction if meetings and discussions are held in secret (like ACTA).
Maybe as a start, we can just track what has changed throughout the different revisions of ACTA. Maybe this is something you could do as part of your hackathon.
I'm picking ACTA as it's something that is relatively current and at the forefront of people's minds right now.
