CommonAccord - bringing the world to agreement

1. Origins
   
   1. HazardJ is a lawyer from a family of lawyers and engineers.
   2. As word processing arrived, documents ballooned.
   3. Open source community seemed to have better ideas.
2. Development
   
   1. Instinct that snippets of text could be reused.
   2. Lots of playing with programming in Word.
   3. Hunch that organizing source materials could be done by "prefixing." Accidental discovery of "overriding."
   4. Own funds and own programming for first two prototypes, then a startup phase with three iterations, then totally open.
   5. Connection via MIT Media Lab and Berkman Center. Primavera identified fit with blockchain, and recoded to allow to be flat files, on GitHub.
   6. Further experience with how to work it.
   7. Recognition that this is part of a movement of radical decentralization, simplification, "empowerment."
3. The problem:
   Legal text is a mess:repetitive, ever-varying, not improving, hard to find, and hard to evaluate.How did it get this way?
4. Reason:
   Word processing
   1. "blob of text" approach.
   2. complex software, and
   3. complex data model.
   Legal profession has been pickled in proprietary formats.
5. Solution:
   
   1. Let Linus lead.
      
      1. Torvalds created git.
      2. SF made GitHub.
   2. HazardJ made Cmacc:
      Omit needless features:
      1. name the parts of an idea,
      2. connect them by name, and
      3. use HTML.
      Prefixed, multiple prototype inheritance. Hard name, easy software,
   3. Primavera redid the parser
      
      1. files,
      2. organized in folders,
      3. on your disk drive, and
      4. on GitHub.
6. Two examples:
   
   1. Privacy
      
      1. It is a mess.
      2. EU gives us an opportunity to fix it. Huge, urgent headache for Silicon Valley, big opportunity for Europe and privacy advocates.
   2. Startup
      
      1. Small companies with big document needs
      2. Very repetitive
   3. Document:
      {SAFE.0.Sec}