A Quote for Thanksgiving

Couldn’t resist this one:

“A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.”

–Cicero,
Roman orator

Ending Summer on a High Note

The last two weekends have seen some great times. On Saturday, I enjoyed watching Stanford’s football team play no. 24 U. of Wash (and win—Go Card!). The game started with Stanford’s Chris Owusu returning the kickoff and running it all the way down the field for a touchdown (for the second week in a row). Combine that with a warm evening and garlic fries…good times!

And while I started this blog with my anticipation of Michael Franti’s Power to the Peaceful, nothing beats seeing Michael Franti play at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, which he did a week ago. I danced so much I couldn’t walk down my stairs for a week! Great tunes and great energy at a rockin’ venue. I have to say that Santa Cruz is my favorite place for live shows. It draws real musicians for the love of performing and engaging with an appreciative audience. The energy is always great and the venues intimate.

So on this high note, I’ll post a quote from one of Michael Franti’s classic songs:

“Sometimes, I feel like I can do anything and
Sometimes, I’m so alive, so alive
Sometimes, I feel like I can zoom ‘cross the sky and
Sometimes, I wanna cry”

Diversity as a Community-Building Tool?

At last month’s OSCON, I caught Kirrily Robert’s keynote on “Standing Out in the Crowd” in the open-source environment.  Her speech discussed how welcoming everyone who comes willing to learn and work hard has built a stronger community of contributors at Dreamwidth, an open source, non-profit organization I have to admit I’d never heard of before.   Whatever Dreamwidth may or may not be, its diversity statement was inspiring to me for a number of reasons.   First, it wasn’t  the least bit “legal,” which I take as a good thing, even though (or maybe because) I am a lawyer.  The statement was not about quotas or being politically correct.  It wasn’t defensive nor was it blaming (at least that’s not how I read it).  And it wasn’t about any one particular variable in the diversity discussion.  It was about diversity as a value in and of itself.

Kirrily discussed diversity as an important value in creating and nurturing a broad community that is reflective of the world that we strive to serve and reach and include as organizations.   These values of openness and community are consistent with Mozilla’s key values.  And Mozilla’s ability to build strong, international communities is one of its strengths (if not its most valuable strength).  For these reasons, I think Mozilla is uniquely positioned to engage in the discussion of community building and diversity as those in the open source world (as occurred at OSCON) and beyond consider what diversity means for our organizations and our communities.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Here is Dreamwidth’s Diversity Statement:

“Diversity Statement

Platitudes are cheap. We’ve all heard services say they’re committed to “diversity” and “tolerance” without ever getting specific, so here’s our stance on it:

We welcome you.

We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, religion, culture, subculture, and political opinion. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break after work. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. We welcome Internet beginners who aren’t sure what any of those terms refer to.

We welcome you. You may wear a baby sling, hijab, a kippah, leather, piercings, a pentacle, a political badge, a rainbow, a rosary, tattoos, or something we can only dream of. You may carry a guitar or knitting needles or a sketchbook. Conservative or liberal, libertarian or socialist — we believe it’s possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to come together and learn from each other. We believe in the broad spectrum of human experience. We believe that amazing things come when people from different worlds and world-views approach each other to create a conversation.

We get excited about creativity — from pro to amateur, from novels to haiku, from the artist who’s been doing this for decades to the person who just picked up a sketchbook last week. We support maximum freedom of creative expression, within the few restrictions we need to keep the service viable for other users. With servers in the US we’re obliged to follow US laws, but we’re serious about knowing and protecting your rights when it comes to free expression and privacy. We will never put a limit on your creativity just because it makes someone uncomfortable — even if that someone is us.

We think accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug. We believe in being inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of anyone who comes to us with good faith and the desire to build a community.

We have enough experience to know that we won’t get any of this perfect on the first try. But we have enough hope, energy, and idealism to want to learn things we don’t know now. We may not be able to satisfy everyone, but we can certainly work to avoid offending anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we’ll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us, and we’ll do our best to make good on our mistakes.

We think our technical and business experience is important, but we think our community experience is more important. We know what goes wrong when companies say one thing and do another, or when they refuse to say anything at all. We believe that keeping our operations transparent is just as important as keeping our servers stable.

We use the service we’re selling, and we built it because we wanted it ourselves. We won’t treat people as second-class undesireables because they’re non-mainstream or might frighten advertisers. We don’t have advertisers to frighten. To us, you’re not eyeballs. You’re not pageviews. You’re not demographic groups. You’re people.

Come dream with us.”

http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity

Lawyers as a Community?

I hope you caught the great article that appeared in Business Week about the awesome group of contributors that Mozilla has. If not, you can check it out here: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2009/tc2009071_384108_page_2.htm.

As a new hire in Mozilla’s legal group, I’ve been contemplating whether we could follow the lead of the FOSS development community and establish a community of lawyers to be a part of the Mozilla community engaged in public-benefit legal projects.

According to the BW article, “[Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations], who has spent several years researching collaboration in technology, says people tend to contribute to organizations or causes like Mozilla for three reasons: It aligns with their interests, they can get recognition, and they can meet other people doing it.”

My question is this: do these motivating factors apply to lawyers? And, if so, lawyers at what stages of their careers?

Some related questions naturally follow as I grapple with this topic: Are lawyers less giving? Too otherwise overworked to have the time? Too lacking in “free” time generally in their lives?

Or are lawyers just misperceived? Maybe lawyers are already giving in these ways, or they are just waiting for the right opportunity to get involved? Maybe lawyers are actually craving a sense of community and meaning in their practice.

On an anecdotal level, one of the Mozilla technical contributors quoted in the article mentioned that he was motivated to contribute to entities that foster community and openness.

This made me wonder: does legal training and our legal obligations around confidentiality and attorney-client privilege make lawyers instinctively averse to openness? Does the often confrontational (or at least representational) aspect of lawyering make community building amongst lawyers fundamentally at odds with how we are molded?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. My guess is that there is a group that is looking to engage in just this way. My goal is to identify and engage that group. So please tell me your thoughts (whether you are a lawyer or just have an opinion about them). And if you are a lawyer who would be interested in engaging, I would love to hear what would motivate you to get involved.

A quote

“Just living is not enough. … One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.”
–Hans Christian Andersen, Danish author and poet

No need to wait for September

It turns out that if you, like me, are craving a little Michael Franti sooner than September, you’re in luck.  There’s a fundraiser for the Power to the Peaceful this Saturday at the War Memorial in San Francisco.   Yoga at 11am (with acoustic accompaniment by MF) and then a gala with acoustic performance by MF at 4pm.   It’s not outdoors, it’s not free; but it’s a charity event for a great cause, and it includes both yoga and great live music in a great city.

http://www.spearheadvibrations.com/index.php

Poems and Quotes

I’d like to use this blog to post occasional poems and quotes.  My thinking now (which may change as this evolves) is that I will post them without commentary and without any affirmation of accuracy in my view.  Instead, I’d love to post them as a springboard for discussion or thought…and, on a good day, maybe even for inspiration.

I should also make the disclaimer (I am a lawyer after all!) that I am not going to verify the authenticity of any of these quotes or poems.

That said, I hope you enjoy them.  Here is the “inaugural” quote:

“If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.”

–President Barack Obama

Summer is peeking around the corner…I can hear the tunes already

With the start of June, it’s time to start enjoying all the great outdoor concerts that the Bay Area boasts.  One of the things I love about where I live is the chance to ride my bike to any of a number of great (and often free) concerts….Stanford’s Summer Jazz series is a good one that pops to mind.  And given that it’s almost summer, I’m feeling justified in already being excited for Michael Franti’s Power to the Peaceful in Golden Gate Park.   It’s September 12th (which is technically still summer), in case you want to mark your calendars now.  It’s also free, begins with yoga, and has in the past included–along with the inimitable MF–great acts like Brett Dennen (and I hope you caught at least one of BD’s shows in the Bay Area this past year…I was lucky enough to be at his Fillmore show in March).

So while I have seen Michael live at a number of different venues (Santa Cruz at the Catalyst, SF at the yoga journal conference, and even LA at the Nokia)…I am looking forward to my first time at PTTP…I hope to run into you there because even as September rolls around you can’t ever get too much great outdoor music!