Standing Pat
I debated changing my proposal for Ignite Portland 5 to one of the many other things that have been on my mind, but I’m sticking with bridge, for various reasons:
So, there you have it. We’ll see how it goes. Good luck to everyone who submitted a proposal! And if you haven’t yet, there’s still time! Get a move on!
Legal Resources for Nonprofit Orgs
@xolotl just told me to post some links to legal resources for nonprofits. It’s a blawg-eat-blawg world out there, but after some digging, I found some clearinghouse-style resources for those who want to check out the basics:
This place is a good one to start with. It gives a decent overview of the process involved, and links to the IRS regs on nonprofit status.
Speaking of the IRS, that eldritch body has a lot of tax information for nonprofits.
I would link to the FilinginOregon nonprofits page, but it appears to be down. MLK Day taken way too seriously by the servers! Will edit when they come back up.
The main problem is that, like all things legal, there is a long-established tradition of industry-generated barriers to entry. So, for example, you can pay $200+ for someone’s bad, potentially outdated 501(c)(3) form, or you can hire a lawyer or consultant on the basis of the free information available on their site (ala nonprofitexpert.com, above). But you can’t just find out without knowing some fairly specialized search techniques, or knowing where to look to begin with. If drafting is coding, then code should be open and free. But that’s a post for another day…
Eight Days
NPR blinked on today with Carmen in the shower already, and per usual I rolled onto my good ear (the one that hears things, that is) and did my best to ignore it. But I couldn’t. I was captivated by what sounded like a standard listener call on a right-wing talk show. Lots of “uh, and, uh” sort of stuff and general rhetorical claptrap about the world opinion of the United States. One thing that got through whole was “You can do a lot of things to be popular,” followed by some talk about how international opinion is nothing more than middle school hijinks. Still I did not raise my head to figure out what was going on, because I assumed that whatever this was, it would be short, because the guy was off his nut.
But it didn’t stop. The person kept on talking. I’ll emphasize here that, with the pillow muffling sound, I could hear strings of speech, but I wasn’t getting the whole thing. And I really couldn’t identify the speaker, other than that it was a man. There was a pause, and then he started in on a new topic, with equally nonsensical results, and I wondered if Carmen had accidentally pressed the “BAND” button when she got up and we were, in fact, in AM radio land.
By now you’ve probably guessed the punchline. I lifted my head from the pillow and it was our Commander in Chief at a press conference or some damn thing.
I’m not political in the “rah rah Party X” sense. I am, however, fiercely committed to “fair dealing” when it comes to the use of language to influence opinion. I looked forward to the McCain/Obama debates on the assumption that both of them were, by and large, committed to the same. Turns out I was half right – the first time McCain returned to himself was during his concession speech. I have endeavored at every turn to avoid listening to George W. Bush, not because I disagree with his policies, but because I cannot stand to hear the man talk. He’s like the worst possible accumulation of soundbites and fuzzy logic, wrapped up in a general inability to express himself in complete sentences. It doesn’t matter what the rationale is for the latest decision, I will not learn it by listening to him. So, to the extent possible, I’ve relied on my own digging to figure out what his administration is thinking.
This means that I was totally shocked to realize that the President sounded like a mid-market radio hack. For the past eight years. Oy.
Drafting as Coding
I’m in the middle of the transition back to straight legal work, signified by a functioning desktop computer and a fetching new lunch sack. Thus far my assignments have been fairly simple, primarily document review, but my ongoing engagement with the tech world here in Portland has irrevocably changed the way I view such documents. Now, I can only see them as code.
When you read a programming manual, For Dummies or not, it typically states a set of design principles. Among these is the notion that code should flow cleanly, be organized, and to the extent that it is possible, tell the story of what’s going to happen if I compile the program. A contract is fundamentally no different, except the machine you’re compiling the program on is usually a court of law, regulatory schema, or (often) another body of code, like a default statutory scheme. The contract receives inputs and outputs results according to the scheme.
Obviously, the impact of a bug in a contract can have just as large a set of ramifications for everyone involved – you’re asking the courts to provide tech support. Not a good plan. And, just like programming languages, legalese can produce, promote, and sustain fictions (see, for example, Enron). The more creative the mind behind the code, the bigger the lie you can perpetuate. In programming, that equals awesome game experience. In law, often not as cool. On the other hand, the same capacity to exist in PretendTown allows you to duck some of the more egregious chunks of the American legal system. Creative Commons is, after all, nothing more than contracting around copyright law.
I think the metaphor has legs and want to try to document some examples as the year unfolds. If you’re a coder and want to contribute some particularly “narrative” code, I’ll try to come up with a complementary example in the world of legal drafting. In the meantime, let us all keep our code (and hands) squeaky clean.