the executive summary:

Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better lawyer and a good addition to your firm.

[Image by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void fame; used with permission under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 1.0 license. For more on why Hugh licenses his images this way, see here.]

the full story:

Why are you writing this post now, about this topic?

Yesterday I finally got the interview question I’d been dreading/looking forward to: “So, you have a blog…” The interview was a little rushed, so we didn’t get to discuss it much, but they seemed to think it was interesting and a potential positive.

Not all firms who find this blog are going to be so forward-thinking, of course, and some will be legitimately nervous about finding that a candidate is so far outside the expected norm. I thought I’d write this Q&A to demystify the blog and explain why it shouldn’t worry (and might even excite) them.

What is a Q&A, anyway?

A Q&A is a blog post format I borrowed from my friend Steven O’Grady, an analyst at Redmonk. Basically, it is exactly what it says it is on the label- a question and answer format. I’ve found that it can be a useful way of clearly communicating information when you anticipate a lot of questions about a specific issue- which is exactly the situation here.

So why do you blog?

There are a lot of reasons, some of which are more important than others on any given day. Among them:

• I want to follow the advice that I gave the Wall Street Journal: the best way to control your online identity is to create positive information about yourself. (It works- not only is this blog the top search result for my full name, it was for a long time the first search result for “luis”.)
• When I started blogging, it was an important part of my job description; it helped me communicate with partners and with the volunteers who I used to coordinate. This is no longer true, of course, but once you’re in the habit it is hard to break.
• I have lots of friends scattered all over the world who read blogs, and so my blog is an easy way to keep them up to date on my life. (And even my mom reads it now. Dad is still resisting.)
• I like writing in an informal but coherent manner, and getting a chance to clarify and discipline my thoughts by writing about them. I didn’t get much chance to do that in my prior life as a programmer and manager, and I certainly don’t get much of a chance to do that in law school, so this is an outlet.
• Frankly, because occasionally other people post things like this. It never hurts to have your ego boosted from time to time, and blogging gives other people the opportunity to do that ;)

What do you blog about?

A mix of things- some technology, some law, some in the overlap of law and technology, and quite a bit of personal information- anecdotes about concerts I’ve been to, that sort of thing.

Who reads it?

My logs suggest that about fifteen to twenty thousand people read the average post on my blog. While I can’t know for certain who they all are, and the numbers are imperfect, most of them are probably technologists and engineers of various stripes who are familiar with my work in a previous life, and who remain interested in my experience as a technologist moving into a new field, as well as my occasional digressions back into technology. Most of these probably don’t read the blog directly, but rather through various news sites (called ‘planets‘) which I’m syndicated onto.

A smaller number are classmates and other law students (some posts are syndicated into facebook), and at least a handful are practicing lawyers who specialize in technology issues. (At least one GC of a very large technology company has emailed me thanking me for my posts on the new General Public License and letting me know that he’d circulated them to his executive team.)

How do you find the time?

Once you’re in the habit, you can make time. It doesn’t always happen, of course- I’m sure an analysis of my posts over the past year would show that they dropped to nearly nothing during exams. But even then I can sneak in the occasional mental health post, and you’d be surprised how much you can write between 2 and 3am (most of this post, for example.)

Do you think you’ll find the time to continue once you enter the legal industry?

Now that is a very good question. I’m really not sure. I’d like to, because I’d like to think that some of my readers will be starting their own companies in the future and hence they’ll be future potential clients, and (obviously) because I enjoy doing it.

But I’m also a realist- the first few years at a firm, even more so than law school, have a reputation for stripping away your spare time. As one interviewer told me the other day, ‘when I get home, the only technology I want to use is my remote control.’ So… ‘maybe.’

It may also continue as a very different beast than it is now- probably more constrained in the topics covered (because of confidentiality and conflicts) and perhaps more constrained in the volume I can write.

Are you crazy? Lawyers don’t blog!

I don’t think I’m too crazy- lots of tech lawyers are blogging these days, so it isn’t completely unusual like it might have been even a few years ago. Certainly some of the lawyers whose careers I’d most like to emulate (like Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper and Mike Dillon of Sun Microsystems) are now starting to do it, albeit in low volume. Of course they have the advantage of being very established and very senior, which I obviously don’t, but I’m working on that :)

Aren’t you scared that you’ll say something that will offend someone, and it will cost you a job or otherwise jeopardize your well-being?

Frankly? Yes, a little bit. As a result, I know I’ve self-censored some posts since I started school, and there are other posts which I did not self-censor, but that I constantly worry I should have. On the whole, though, I think the benefits outweigh the risks- I’m not exactly a radical in most senses of the word, so the risks aren’t too high, and I hope that most firms will look at my resume and realize that I’m a professional, and know how to constrain and modify my behavior when necessary. If the firm is so risk averse that it still troubles them, well, then, we should talk.

On the whole, are you glad you blog?

Absolutely. It isn’t a magical cure-all, and it might not be something I always have the option of doing, but I enjoy it right now, and I hope it is something that I’ll be able to continue to use to enrich my private and professional life for a long time.

[I'm going to leave this pegged to the top of my blog until interview/offer season is over; apologies to anyone who reads the blog the normal way for having to skip over it to get to my regular posts.]

Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License:

For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.

Key sentence:

[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more others contribute also speaks against pure altruism explanations, because they predict that people reduce their own contributions when informed that others already contribute to the public good.

Basically, the paper argues (and justifies through a survey of experimental evidence) that a majority of people are ‘conditional cooperators’ who cooperate in community projects (voting, paying taxes, charity work, etc.) if and only if other people cooperate. If they think others are ‘defecting’ (i.e., not cooperating) then they will stop cooperating as well.

The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.

I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)

The paper is only 25 pages and fairly readable; if you’re interested in the dynamics of volunteerism I recommend it.

Those of you who aren’t into economists and their fancy ‘measurements’ may also want to look at this related early paper, which is somewhat dated (the concept of low and high authoritarians is sort of discredited at this point) but still possibly of interest in explaining some of the psychological mechanisms at work here.

(Came to this by way of this paper on tax evasion, which looks to have many other interesting citations that I should investigate once exams are done. Only Telecoms left…)

Televisions from days gone by by Neil Anderson. License:

Clay Shirky on how small wikipedia is, relative to the way we’ve spent our culture’s free time for the past fifty years:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

The whole thing is worth reading, but that particular bit just jumped out at me like a lightning bolt.

On that note, back to my cave to work on passing Corporations and E-Commerce exams.

Now, hopefully wikitravel has an Istanbul book before the summer…

Next necessary step: new hackergotchi, possibly from this picture (almost certainly not from the chinposin one.)

(And yes, I’ll get one that is slightly less swarmy/businessy at some point. If that’s what you need, you probably still want this one. :)

This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and (5) how to add users to the ‘fuse group.’ And if you know all those things, you didn’t need the dialog, so kudos for being both useless and intimidating.

The worst dialog was actually a terminal wrapped in the upgrader GUI which stalled my entire upgrade in order to ask me what my terminal encoding was, helpfully presenting a list of 28 possible encodings, of which UTF-8 was 27th and the default was some obscure encoding I’d never previously heard of. (The other times the upgrader stalled the upgrade to ask for input it told me I’d modified config files I’d never previously heard of, much less modified, but at least those had basically the same useful-ish debian config file dialog I’ve been used to for ages.)

Linux has come a long way (the upgrader helpfully offered to do a partial upgrade instead of complaining and dying like previous debian/ubuntu upgrades), but still has a long way to go too.

(These weren’t the only problems I saw; Gerv has a good list of some of the other ones, though I didn’t see all of the ones he did.)

Brought to you by the people who decided we didn’t need that pesky fourth amendment anyway.

(Why yes, this did provoke me to finally renew my ACLU membership. Read more about what they are doing to make us safe and free here.)

Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next.

Bad news: Lots of work to be done, and big questions like these to be dealt with. I can already feel my hair getting greyer. ;)

Overall: very excited, I just hope I get to sleep some next year. :)

[This happened a couple weeks ago; I keep forgetting to blog it for the record, but with journal recruiting starting in earnest this week, it was hard to forget.]