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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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/
Docracy is the GitHub for legal documents. We are disrupting legal services for good by open sourcing contracts and allowing everyone to branch and sign them. You can have a look for yourself here: http://www.docracy.com/
We are a diverse team of 2 senior devs (Docracy's MVP was built in the time of a Hackathon - and won) and a fully recovered lawyer. VC-backed, working of the new NYU incubator in Dumbo.
We are looking for a seriously good front-end dev with a sense of design to create a document editor that will put MS Word to sleep forever, and a Java developer who will learn from the best of the best. More info here: http://www.docracy.com/application/jobs
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Squarespace (http://squarespace.com/), popular for portfolio sites but also good for blogging, and really powerful suite (not free, though).
A geekier alternative is Calepin (http://calepin.co), amazing concept: you write your posts in multimarkdown, in a Dropox folder, and you publish by clicking a button that automatically checks that folder for new stuff (no template customization yet but Disqus integration). I am seriously thinking about switching to Calepin, Tumblr feels heavy on the browser.