I’m unpacking all my notes from my time spent at the MIT Media Lab this last weekend. One of the byproducts of hanging out with so many smart people is I end up with all kind of great ideas, and I know better than to think I can do them all myself, so I put my ideas out on the web for anyone to run with.
My project from theHackathon this weekend was #ReclaimYourDomain, which I’ll write about in detail separately, but the overall project objective was to educate people about:
- Owning Their Own Domain
- Taking Control Of Their Cotent
The project is focused on empowering people in these areas by providing not just tools, but also education. I will begin educating people about these concepts by showing them how to start a blog, and move into other service areas later.
One service area that would be further down on my roadmap, but I would like to put the idea out there today, is the concept of a personal legal storage locker for terms of use(TOS), non-disclosure agreements(NDA) and the other common legal arrangements we all encounter with on a daily basis.
We all click on those checkboxes, agreeing to the terms of use in the growing number of cloud applications we are depending on everyday. In my world, I’m similarly bombarded with numerous non-disclosure agreements that I’m required to sign before most companies will talk to me about their API strategy.
It would be nice to have some sort of application that would help me manage these legal relationships that I enter into every day. This app would also extend to my browser(s) and record a copy of each TOS that I agree to, as well as record any NDA I receive, sign and send back.
My storage locker for these legal agreements would not just keep track of each legal arrangement, but also track when I signed, the company I entered into the agreement with, help me know about any future changes by pushing me updates, and keep me in tune with when the agreement expires.
This is something I would like to have integrated into our vision of #ReclaimYourDomain, but for now it would be awesome if someone would get to work building a central storage system, complete with API, desktop clients and browser plugins. :-)
If we are going to start empowering people to take control of their worlds, the legal layer to all of this will be essential.
