Help Build Legal Sidewiki

Renee Lloyd is good at breaking down a site’s terms and coditions (TC’s) and saying exactly what they mean in plain English. Most are contracts of adhesion, which means they adhere to you simply because you use the service. Most, of course, also very one-way, favoring the company.

Pete Touschner recently proposed something he called “Legal Sidewiki” where people like Renee can comment on a site’s TC’s right on the site and anyone with the extension installed can see the commentary when before they click the “I agree” button.

This is a perfect task for KRL and browser apps. I’d like to see someone build it. If you’re a Kynetx developer, consider this as a side project that’s good for everyone. We’d need two modes:

Author mode would allow Renee and others like here to comment on the TC’s of a site, edit past commentary, etc. The comments would need to be positioned relative to specific paragraphs in the TC.

Reader mode would show people comments. Most people would run in reader mode. Being able to hide commentary would probably be the only real interaction people would have in this mode.

Let me know if you decide to do this. I’d love to kibbitz and help where I can. And I’m sure we can get people in the VRM community to talk it up.

Posted by Phil Windley on August 15, 2011 11:11 AM