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A few minutes with Groklaw and The Open Source Way

Rebecca Fernandez wrote this article, “Build an authentic, valuable online community“.  In the comments Jason Hibbets pointed out that PJ at Groklaw had picked up Rebecca’s request for help in filling out the empty parts of The Open Source Way dealing with healthy community interaction, especially trolls and other poisonous people. Thus we got “What Happened to my Creative Commons License?“, which includes a fantastic story about using the open source way in legal research, called “Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development”.

I read all of PJ’s story (great stuff) of the Groklaw community and the eventual arise of trolls and astroturfers, glanced at the comments (wow, lots), wrote up an appeal to PJ to relicense, and along the way … I read something that reminded me to read the other comments first and not start my own thread if it belongs under another.  So I skimmed all the comments, leaving out all the side discussions about “Google {should,shouldn’t}” and such, and did find one where PJ explained why she would NOT be using a different license than the NC/ND for Groklaw works.  OK, fair enough.

So I wrote this comment, “Thanks, inclusion in The Open Source Way”.

This is my first time commenting on anything on Groklaw, and the reputation has me a bit intimidated. Yet, it was a fun distraction, and now I’ll keep my eye on the discussion for a while to see what else comes from it.  Meanwhile, I used this same content to stub out a page on the TOSW wiki, “Legal the open source way“.  This placeholder gives me a way to find myself again when I sit down to write the chapter, with help from PJ’s article-in-a-glass-box.