CommonAccord
bringing the world to agreement
Law is public. Legal truth — a description of where you are and what avenues are open — should be available everywhere, on every screen.
This sounds impossible, but only because we have become accustomed to opacity. Map software can show you literally where you are and what traffic is on each avenue. Law should do the same.
While law is public, the specifics of each transaction should be totally private. It might sound hard to combine public law and private data, but that’s because we have become used to blending them together. In private we often reference public facts and rules.
CommonAccord is the product of years of simplification. Technically, it can be described as “graphs” that render relationships into documents, or a “distributed, agile, semantic web.” Either way, it’s info that acts the way you think it should.
There is a gap between the demonstration materials here and the ideal described above. The gap is bridgeable.
Our goal is trusted repositories of excellent legal text that render into first-class documents. Eliminating legal opacity.
If you would like to use, contribute, or encourage, please post a comment, connect at one of the groups that is working on this, notably via GitHub.com/CommonAccord/.
See the Blog.
Follow: @commonaccord
EU Commission report on “Modelling the EU Economy as an Ecosystem of Contracts.”
A universal collection of #ProseObjects – legal forms and documents
YouTube video presenting a very complex legal document as a prose object. The source for the same ABA Model Stock Purchase Agreement. Because of the extensive work by the ABA Committee on this form and its extensive provisions, it is an excellent base for codification of contract.
Site by French law students: deux.commonaccord.org.
GitHub repo for a “universal” contract form object. github.com/CommonAccord/Agt-Form-CmA/
We thank the Shuttleworth Foundation for its generous grant to CommonAccord.
Interview at: SlashDot
CommonAccord 
Sounds Amazing!
Just saw your video on Slashdot. I am probably missing something, but I’m really curious as to why you seem to have learned only half the lesson from open source software; where are your ties to students? I suggest you get the young working on this to make it the new legal norm while recruiting volunteers.
Every time I hear about (or consider for myself) some public good project, I ponder the millions of workhours expended by students, mostly wasted recapitulating the same work that the student generations before them also did.
For example: How can it be that all of the M.E. graduates over the past 20 years have not yet created a comprehensive, open-source curriculum in EVERY subject? What are these people doing? Why not shepherding workgroups of education undergrads to produce and refine social goods like free textbooks and (self)teaching modules?
Open source lives from distributed (and largely unpaid) contributors with expertise. Are you active in the Cornell Law community? Have your tried holding talks at other law schools (since your firm is west-coast) to recruit volunteers? Talked with any of your local open source projects that have already scaled successfully to learn best practice?
America has a buggy legal system, and the type of reform through excellence and standardization you propose is massive both in scope and importance. I wish you all the success in the world.
I take the point. A few points, actually. Those who are relatively young and not fully embedded have lots of energy, time and free-intelligence to apply to problems. If we work iteratively, rather than repetitiously, then we might actually reduce and perhaps solve problems, rather than rehash them. Intrinsic motivation, scratching your own itch, is powerful and self-correcting.
I’ve been a lot less social than I could have been about this up til now. Working through the thought. Many thanks for your thoughts and good wishes.