Telling numbers

I’m currently reading a book on modern legal drafting (read: ‘plain english for dummies, I mean, lawyers’). It is very good so far, but I think this is a telling stat about lawyers: 127 pages are devoted to why clear, modern english is a good idea. That is 22 pages more than are devoted to how to write clear, modern english.

Modern Legal Drafting, by Peter Butt and Richard Castle

This imbalance isn’t as insane as it sounds at first; there are some not-crazy reasons to re-use old language in legal documents, and explaining why they aren’t actually correct is a useful service. Still… given that some of the complaints about legalese cited by the book are over 200 years old, you would think the profession might at least by now realize that much legalese is a bad idea, even if we haven’t yet learned how to get rid of it…

(Favorite sentence from the book: “My client has discussed your proposal to fill the ditch with his partners.“)

Syndicated 2010-02-05 02:11:49 from Luis Villa's Internet Home » Blog Posts

Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read)

One of the very first things that made me skeptical about Google was their approach to censorship in China, which I thought deeply compromised their supposed ‘don’t be evil’ approach to the world. It struck me that their position- summarized as “the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results” bespoke a fair amount of arrogance about the value of Google and a discounting of the value of uncensored information. I didn’t mention that issue in my recent post about Google and reading their tea leaves, but it certainly is one of the big tea leaves to be read.

And so they’ve added another layer to the tea leaves with this announcement that Google will be backing out of censorship in China and possibly abandoning China altogether. Go read it.

It is hard to imagine any other American company having the cojones to make a public statement like it, and I have to applaud them for it. Google is different; anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand them very well. The question we must continually ask is ‘how different, and for how long will they remain different?’ Schmidt’s quotes the other day suggest they are becoming more like others, and that is troubling, and worth writing about and reflecting on (not least by people within Google.) But to even post this is a reminder that they are still very different from most of their peer large corporations. I suppose for those of us who continue to read the tea leaves the followthrough after this post will say a lot as well.

Syndicated 2010-01-13 00:06:14 from Luis Villa's Internet Home » Blog Posts

quick life update

If it matters to you, you might want to know that I have no network at home from sometime yesterday until Friday night, and I also have lousy cell connection¹, so I’ll basically be off the network when not at work for the next few days.

Otherwise, it has been a good week:

• first real paycheck in waaaay too long
• moved in to our new apartment, and slept in my own bed for the first time since August (almost making me forget that I hate this mattress)
• reactivated netflix for the first time since 2006
• discovered my new apartment has cat5 through the whole building (so I can apparently get 100Mb connection at home) and a good Thai place with a $4 thai tapas happy hour around the corner.
• began my caltrain commute (long, but 90 minutes of it can be used to work, which is great) and discovered CaltrainDroid, which is terrific.

Life is beginning to feel normal again, and I couldn’t be more excited about that.

1. VOIP suggestions that work with Google Voice are welcome, and/or a gizmo invite :)

Syndicated 2010-01-07 17:56:47 from Luis Villa's Internet Home » Blog Posts

job satisfaction

Some of the legal stuff I do at Mozilla¹ is fairly dull, routine contract work. What makes it worthwhile (besides the paycheck) is seeing that something good came out of it. So it was nice to see this blog post – I only played a small part in getting the new data center up and running (at most a couple workdays rather than months of my life), but it still gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside to know I helped out.

1. really, much of the legal work most lawyers do

Syndicated 2010-01-05 07:02:03 from Luis Villa's Internet Home » Blog Posts

software for massive document collaboration?

As part of my new role at work I’m going to be working on writing and editing some legal documents that I’d like to get both public and private feedback on.¹

real text is edited in black and green (picture: Zenith Z-19 Terminal, by ajmexico, used under CC-BY)

I’m trying to wrap my head around the available options, and none of them seem quite ideal. Some thoughts, first, on my requirements:

• ease of use: I’m going to be collaborating with (among other people) lawyers, managers, etc.- i.e., non-technical people. So the solution should be easy to use, or at least have one face that is easy to use.
• large-scale collaboration: this has to scale to input from lots of people (at least for commenting- editing will be a smaller group.)
• maintaining the canonical version: somewhere other than my laptop should hold the canonical version of the text, including revision history.
• commenting: it should be possible to open up a version of the document to the public, and to have them be able to comment on specific sections of the text- ‘I don’t like this paragraph’, ‘I suggest replacing A with B’, etc.
• editing: I don’t need a massive multi-user text editor; we want feedback from many people but only a few people will be empowered to actually do edits. Ideally, though, I’d love to be able to review public comments, delete (or respond to) the bad ones, and integrate the good ones, all within the same tool. It should also be possible to do private revisions.
• diffs/versioning: I need to be able to show the differences between two versions of a document; ideally with commentary on the reasons for the change, and with output that looks less like diff and more like an editor’s redline.

So what options do I have? These are the tools I’ve thought about so far:

• a markup language + revision control: this would give me a lot of what I want, but it totally fails the ease of use test, and it isn’t clear that it handles the commenting role terribly well. Potentially great for canonical versions and diffs, though, especially if word-level diffs are an option and if I could figure out a way to produce good-looking diffs. With a distributed RCS this approach has the bonus of allowing for some work to exist in a non-canonical branch when changes are still being discussed/debated.
• traditional word processors: traditional word processors can be great at diffs/versioning, and obviously they exist to edit, but they aren’t very good at scalable commenting and collaboration- things break down very quickly when you’re emailing around files, and expecting someone to merge them all together. odf-svn seems like it deals with some of these problems, at least conceptually, but development seems very stalled. I will also look at abicollab, but many of my collaborators will be on Mac- which AFAICT is not supported for newish versions of Abi. :/
• stet/co-ment.net: Stet was great at handling mass commenting; its successor, co-ment.net, seems to be similarly good. But they don’t really allow you to do diffs between versions, so at best it could be only part of the solution.
• wiki: no wiki that I know of can handle commenting like co-ment.net can. This is a shame, since they are great for showing revisions and (small-scale) collaborative editing. Also, doing ‘branches’ to propose changes that may get rejected is not possible in any wiki I’m aware of. Would love to be proven wrong on this one.
• etherpad: etherpad is even slicker than wikis for showing revisions, and obviously superior for collaborative editing, but no facility for commenting on texts. Also lots of uncertainty about the maintainability/supportability of the code base.
• bespin: this is so code-focused that it may not pass the ‘user friendly’ test, but hg integration is nice, and it may be sufficient for collaboration on plain text.
• wave: this is almost exactly the kind of problem wave seems designed for, but it is such a constantly evolving product (not to mention a ‘run on someone else’s server’ problem) that I’m a little reluctant to use it. And of course since it is in semi-private beta it can’t do public commenting.

So far, I’m leaning towards gathering comments via a co-ment.net instance, using hg + markup (or even plain text?) to store the canonical version and generate revisions, and using etherpad, bespin, or a wiki for collaborative editing when necessary. But that still feels like a pretty fragile solution to me- lots of file transitions where things could go wrong, especially between hg and etherpad/wiki. I’d need to find a markup which can transparently/reliably go in and out of the editing tool from hg (or just admit defeat and use plain text), and the diffs from hg would almost certainly need some processing to make them look good.

So does anyone have suggestions on other tools, or specific suggestions on how to make this toolchain more robust and/or powerful?

1. Sorry, no details quite yet on what the project is, and no prizes for guessing…

Syndicated 2009-12-29 15:06:25 from Luis Villa's Internet Home » Blog Posts