It is important to understand that our work takes place in a system. In this case, the system is shifting quickly and is not well understood. Individuals, organizations, states and countries (recall the recent e-G8 meeting in Paris) are all trying to both understand and create reality in the Internet-enabled world.  To be an effective web worker, it is vital that you think about the whole system that you work in, not just the critical dimension of the moment. Here are five dimensions to consider as you think about your own work in this system:

• People. Who are the people that you must engage with? Knowledge, skills, abilities, preferences.
• Organizational process. This includes policies, procedures, workflows, and standard ways of operating.
• Organizational structure. The organization chart/reporting structure that you work within, which is often a good indicator of what an organization thinks is important.
• Technology. Both electronic and physical, on-hand or available.
• Context. The legal environment, your organization’s strategy (early mover, follower, growth, etc.), whether your organization is local/global, etc.

To make effective decisions about your work, understand that you can never change just one thing. There is no such thing as a single silver bullet that will solve a problem. Fredrick Brooks, summarizing the issues in a classic 1986 article, writes, “There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity” (pdf). Even just changing from one email client to another has a human learning curve and may also affect your workflow.

Do a quick mental scan of the five dimensions in your situation. Focus on the two or three that you expect to have the greatest initial impact (this keeps you in tune with another piece of advice: go for small wins rather than stretch goals) and will help you understand how things are working. If you change everything at once it is difficult to track the causes and outcomes.

For California residents, our context has just shifted. The most effective web workers had this possibility on their radar well before receiving the letter from Amazon and were proactive about their options and how the different dimensions were part of those options. For example, they have been lobbying their legislators, hopefully considering multiple dimensions as they thought about how to persuade them: Understanding their particular legislators’ priorities and the organizational process to reach them. For some, moving to a different state may be an option, and again, multiple dimensions should be considered: The human costs of moving, supplier costs of moving, whether the new locale is next in line for a tax change. There will be no one right answer for the web workers affected by this change. The only “right answer” is that for this adjustment, and any other organizational decisions that you must make, you need to consider the entire system as you come to your understanding and choices. You can never change just one thing.

How are you preparing for changes in your working environment, regardless of whether or not you live in California and/or were a member of the Amazon Associate program? What were the dimensions you considered as you thought about the future?

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Contract Templates and Wizards

The hardest part in getting contracts in place is the drafting of the agreement itself. Unless you already have a lawyer who has created your documents for you, finding the best template can take a lot of time and effort. No matter how good a contract template is, it’s rare to find one that perfectly suits your situation. The good news is that there are some useful resources that can do this for you at the fraction of a cost of hiring a lawyer. Do-it-yourself solutions such as FastDue and RocketLawyer are good places to start, and we’ve covered both of these in the past.

RocketLawyer has a collection of business legal forms ranging from consulting agreements to articles of incorporation. You fill out a simple questionnaire and a document is customized based on your answers. Other features include e-signature and the ability to collaborate on documents. Google Docs users can also use free RocketLawyer templates, but you’ll have to customize them yourself. If you want to know more about RocketLawyer, start by reading Imran’s review.

FastDue also provides templates for contracts and agreements, although not as many as RocketLawyer. One advantage, though, is the variety of forms on offer, including past due notices, invoices, expense reports, and receipts. The forms also include interactive messaging, allowing your clients and colleagues to make comments directly on the document itself.  The free service offered is enough for a freelance contractor, but you can sign up for the premium service if you want something more robust.  Thursday covered FastDue’s services in a previous article if you want to learn more.

Sending and Signing

Once you have your contract ready, it’s just a matter of sending it and having it signed. Some contract creation wizards offer free e-signature functionality as part of the service, but there are plenty of other e-signature apps. Here are some of them:

• EchoSign. There are two ways to sign a document via EchoSign. Users can simply type in their initials or, if they prefer an “old school” analog approach, they can print the document, sign it and fax it in. EchoSign can also integrate with Google Docs and Zoho Writer.
• DocuSign. Just like EchoSign, DocuSign is a web based e-signature service. Additional features include CRM integration the ability to embed your signable documents within your web site. It also offers mobile signing if you want to use your cell phone or BlackBerry.
• E-lock. E-lock has signature solutions for both the web and your desktop. The desktop application integrates with MS Excel, MS Word, and Adobe Acrobat.

For colleagues and clients who prefer a written signature rather than a digital one, you could send your contracts via online faxing solutions such as MyFax and eFax. To make the process easier, I just pull up one of my scanned signatures on file and paste it into the document. Then, I export the entire contract as a PDF and send it off as an e-fax, avoiding any printing on my end.

There are a couple of disadvantages to e-signing, however. Some people might not read their contracts thoroughly. To prevent this you should attach a note emphasizing the importance of reading the entire document or even discuss it on the phone paragraph by paragraph, if needed. Also, you need to make sure that e-signatures are legally valid in the states and countries where each signatory resides.

With all these available tools, we no longer have an excuse to take contracts for granted. Getting the right document and the necessary signatures is only a few clicks away.

How do you manage your contracts and other legal documents? What tools do you use?

Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66

• Consulting agreement
• Finder’s agreement
• General release
• Non-disclosure agreement
• Non-circumvention agreement
• Promissory note
• Sale of goods agreement
• At-will employment agreement
• Intellectual property agreement

Each template is fairly basic. The consulting agreement, for instance, offers spots to fill in information about both parties, as well as nine terms (each of which you can choose to remove, as well as an option to add further terms). Each term is constructed in legal terms, but most have several spots that are filled out with something along the lines of “Insert description of services and schedule.” You can also customize agreements with your own logo.

The web site provides a service beyond simply letting you put together templated agreements. It also allows you to acknowledge contracts, effectively signing them online without the back and forth or hunt for a fax machine that a printed contract can require. The interface can also make negotiating contract terms relatively simple, including a messaging system that allows you to walk through each term with a prospective client. You can also email forms, and save them as PDFs from the interface.

If you read through FastDue’s documentation, you’ll come across the suggestion that you run any legal agreement you make past a lawyer before you sign off on them. In general, I can’t recommend anything else — the fact is that we all really ought to run any contract we sign past our lawyer. But things don’t always work out that way. For web workers, it’s not unusual to sign a contract with a client in another state or even another country. Most lawyers are very familiar with the laws in their home state, but aren’t as comfortable with how laws in other states or countries can affect your agreement. To make matters more complicated, some freelancers and other web workers take on new projects often enough that taking each new contract to a lawyer has a prohibitive cost.

It’s not a perfect solution — after all, not all jurisdictions recognize electronic signatures on contracts yet. But FastDue does make it possible to get an agreement in place quickly, making it easier for web workers to create new contracts and legal agreements on the fly. As long as you feel comfortable with handling your contracts online, FastDue is a good solution to simplify the process.

Where do you get your legal documentation drawn up?

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twi.bz: Better Name-Dropping in Shortened URLs

URL shortening is a necessity when using Twitter thanks to its strict 140 character limit. Some URLs exceed that limit by themselves, even without any context. The problem with most URL shorteners, though, including bit.ly and TinyURL, is that they mask the site of origin of the story, so you can easily be misled by tricky taglines or overlook something you may otherwise have clicked on.

twi.bz offers URL shortening that preserves the root domain name, so you can still show your followers, and Twitter users in general, where your content is coming from. For example, “http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-i-made-a-standing-workstation-for-1999/” becomes “http://webworkerdaily.twi.bz/b”. It’s great for bloggers and other people who want to promote a company’s name as well as its content. Corporate clients will be especially impressed if you’re running their social networking for them — you can preserve their branding as much as possible on Twitter.

localtweeps: Make Twitter More Relevant by Bringing it Closer to Home

The global reach of Twitter makes it a great tool for online work, but sometimes you or your client need to reach local customers in order to be effective. That’s harder to accomplish on Twitter, as geography takes a backseat. Some iPhone clients let you search for tweets according to proximity to your current location, but it’s harder to do on the web.

Localtweeps allows you to list your Twitter account in their database and attach a zip or postal code to it. Other users can then search for you using their own zip, or browse by city, state (or province). That way you can connect with other local businesses in your area, which might be very useful, depending on the type of work you do. So far only the U.S. and Canada are supported, but they plan to expand service to include other countries down the line.

tweefind: Twitter Search Un-Democratized

Part of Twitter’s appeal has been that people who are relatively unknown can become respected authorities using it. That may change as more and more celebs begin tweeting and seeking followers. But sometimes the democracy of the service makes finding useful tweets using Twitter’s search facility tricky.

Now you can run a search that takes into account user rankings and puts results from more powerful users (those with the most followers) at the top, instead of ranking results by most recently posted.

It’s not clear exactly how tweefind’s search algorithm works, or how they’re ranking users beyond follower count, but it’s a good way to see what info about a given search term is reaching the widest audience.

TweetLaw: Twitter for Lawyers and Law Students

It can be hard to filter Twitter, even using more advanced clients like TweetDeck and Nambu, but it’s also essential if you hope to sift such a massive volume of information for any useful tidbits.

TweetLaw is a specialized web-based app that delivers tweets focused at the legal community. It provides a general stream of all law tweets, and different categories so that you can drill down your results even further. For example, you can concentrate only on copyright and fair use law. It can be very handy if you’re working in the legal field, or need to take the pulse of the professional community. Hopefully similar sites will spring up for other professions.

As Twitter continues to grow, the veritable cottage industry that has sprung up around it will keep expanding, too. Chances are, if there’s something you wish you could do with Twitter, someone has or will create an app that does just that. Of course, we’ll continue to keep you up to date with news and reviews of the latest Twitter apps. Follow us at @webworkerdaily.

What Twitter apps do you use?

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When it does happen, what should you do?

Document first

The first thing you should do is to document the act of infringement itself.  Since there are so many things for you to document – from screenshots to various site stats and rankings – I’ll just point the way to other articles that have covered the documentation process exhaustively:

• Dealing With Online Copyright Infringement from MarketingDock.com
• FAQ: What Can I Do About Internet Copyright Infringement? at SEO Logic

Try to communicate

Unless the theft seems malicious or has serious consequences, it often helps to take a calm, but firm approach.  While you may be hurt initially, don’t get emotional when writing that first email or making that call.  After all, they might not have had proper knowledge of copyright law when they did it, or it might be an honest mistake (such as what happened to fellow WWD blogger Aliza Sherman a few months back).  Show them the facts and tell them what they need to do to set things straight.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should have warm, fuzzy feelings for copyright violators.  There is a huge difference between a scraper site and 10 year old girl who is a first-time blogger.  It’s perfectly fair to get web hosts and search engines to ban the former, but it would be an unnecessarily scathing experience for the latter.

The point I am trying to make is that when you communicate with the person at fault, do it formally.  Don’t send a flaming rant or make a defamatory post in your blog.  (Yet.)  Remember that you’re a professional, and everything you send out must show this.  If it is an obvious, honest mistake that can be fixed with a little communication, then it’s best to take that route.

Get help

If you’re unsure how to approach this situation, look at the legal facts and turn to a professional.  There are some websites where you can get free legal advice, which you can use as a starting point to clear up the legal aspects of the violation.  Also, familiarize yourself with the actual provisions and exceptions of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  If reading the actual text seems too tedious for you, at least read the Wikipedia page on the DMCA.

It’s important to remember that nothing beats the advice of a licensed lawyer that you can discuss all these things with.  That’s why I noted in a previous post that a lawyer is one of the most important contacts you could ever have.

This is especially important if the case is vague, such as two blog posts discussing the same subject with the same angle, or two website templates that look similar.

Copyright infringement may be rampant, but many internet users are starting to take it seriously.  There might come a day when it no longer happens, but until then, we should be standing up for our rights to our work.

Has your work been stolen online? What did you do about it?

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