Comment by htsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htsh | Hacker News Reader

transitioning away from my legal work back to startup work, learning rails while working on 2 early ideas and 1 underway.

the 2 ideas i'm at will to share:

1 - .org - wikipedia-style database of case-law commonly used by pro-bono lawyers -- create something that would assist legal clinics manage their information locally but also something that stores that data and shares it with other clinics doing similar work. caselaw is supposed to be free and without copyright but somehow its come to be locked up by the lexis/westlaw duopoly. I understand they add value, but we believe there is room for a simple database of opinions & briefs, even w/o the shepherdizing.

2 - .com - brainstorming site for early stage startup development, using principles from Covey & Napoleon Hill. i.e. weekly meetings with small groups of founders discussing multiple ideas, voting immediately upon disagreements, etc.

I'd love to discuss the last idea as its the one I'm actually working on coding right now but the folks I'm working with want to remain hush-hush for now.

I'd be fascinated to hear folks' ideas for startups with a broad focus on the role technology can play in community development, government & regulation & even stuff like troll regulation / comment scoring. If anyone wants to IM or chat, hit me up at hitesh@gmail.com.

Forgot, something I sometimes do on the side is work on my fake Sean Hannity fan-site @ http://www.fannity.com. This is a intentionally ignorant joke that attempts to fool people, both liberals and conservatives, with sometimes hilarious results. A story of mine was posted on blackplanet.com and it led to some hilarious comments left by a few thousand visitors from that site over a weekend.

Also, at one point the fake news site 23/6 thought my fake news site was real (and actually advocated that Sikhs put flag pins on turbans). This is perhaps the most hilarious thing that happened on the site: http://fannity.com/?p=553&cpage=1 . The users "backdoorman" & "gacracker" were in on the joke and pretending to be Hannity fans.

Your .org sounds like a possible .com

I can see that. We thought we'd keep it wiki-style at the beginning, possibly setting it up as a foundation. we think its more likely that legal clinics & others are more likely to trust it & use it that way. We would start as narrow as possible, possibly focusing on mental health working with the clinic I used to work with and then expanding outwards.

I started to write a comment on how/why this could easily be a business. I have recently been involved in this area.

But then I remembered some interview with the founder of betterworldbooks.com: "This idea would be best embodied in a company." In this case, maybe it's not. Lowering the barrier for a non specialist lawyer to work on the kind of cases that attract pro-bono attention is good work.

I think there's something to be said about the indication users of the site will get from knowing that profit-maximizing will never be a goal of the software. It may pay some salaries (as wikipedia does) but it will never sell out its purpose first and foremost as a collaborative tool.

to clarify #2 - the question is whether businesses can be crafted somewhat similar to how open source software is crafted, which is democratically. Somehow, entrepreneurs could get together and butt heads and form small idea-groups that go off and talk on their own, with features like the software figuring out how much each person's contribution is worth, etc.

With free software, say someone has a good feature they want implemented, they have a means to affect that change in theory in a way a user can not do with closed source software. If they can't win the project over, they can fork the idea and start their own variation. the theory is that these kinds of mini-democracies lead to the most efficient software, could this work for businesses as well?

htsh - would like to get in touch. give me a ping - me at euwyn.com

excellent. will email after my breakfast & coffee this morning. -hitesh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com