On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Karsten Wade <kwade@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 09:45:53AM -0800, Luis Villa wrote: > >> process and participation fora are easy for you to find. I will of >> course continue to hang out on this list, but we're hoping we can >> aggregate >> many comments through our own tools: > > I'd like to make a relate-topic observation. > > During Richard Fontana's talk at SCALE, I heard a clear need for a > community of practice[1] for the FLOSS legal community, both lawyers > and interested practitioners such as Spot. > > I'd be very interested in seeing if some of what you learn in this MPL > refresh process would have benefited from having such a community of > practice in place already. Not sure if folks care enough to follow > through on the little bit of infrastructure needed (stand alone, > neutral space mailing list at e.g. flosslaw.org), so I'll keep beating > on this drum for a little longer.[2] nutshell: I think the basic answer to 'would you have benefited from this being in place already' is 'it already was basically in place, though perhaps not in the form you're thinking of, and so we did benefit from it. Improving the situation further will be hard.' The more detailed version: In an unstructured way, there is definitely a growing floss legal community of shared interests and relationships; when we started this process I could list at least a half-dozen people who I knew would want to be involved and would give of their time, and this list is much longer now. This 'can I call on them for help' test is at the heart of my personal test for 'are people a community', and the legal community passed the test. This informal trans-organizational community was very helpful in evaluating the early groundwork for the MPL process. In a more structured way, there already are several mailing lists/organizations for FLOSS lawyers. I am aware of at least three besides the OSI and distro lists. One such group that is publicly visible (though private membership/mailing list) and has already provided some useful MPL feedback is http://www.fsfe.org/projects/ftf/index.en.html. OSI and Linux Foundation have also started building some legal infrastructure; see, e.g., http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=421 Unfortunately, lawyers have a lot of structural and cultural impediments to forming real communities of practice, which is part of why you (very reasonably) have assumed that they don't exist. The structure of privilege, evidence, and ethics law, for example, make lawyers very nervous to discuss anything in public, helping keep those groups mentioned above quiet and out of the limelight. The billable hour encourages us (even those of us not on the billable hour) to be very skeptical of any activity which doesn't give an immediate payoff. Our occasional arrogance about the complexity of what we do makes it very, very hard to break down the insider/outsider boundary. And our habitual allergy to cluetrain-style plain language, which is so essential to a functional community that you don't even mention it in the Open Source Way, is obviously also a problem. None of this is to say it shouldn't be improved- your concern is well placed- and I hope it will improve when I rule the legal world with an iron fist. But in the meantime that improvement probably has to start with the culture rather than with infrastructure. So... does that answer your question? :) Luis _______________________________________________ legal mailing list legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal
