Section 17.1. How Did It Happen and How Does It Work?

17.1. How Did It Happen and How Does It Work?

When I began, it was just l'il ol' me. I had read Slashdot enough to know that while there was a high level of technical knowledge in some of the site's readers, the level of legal knowledge was low. I also saw there was a hunger to understand the law. Technical information that could influence the outcome of a lawsuit was available there, but it was not reaching the attorneys. And legal information that could help techies know what to dig up and helpfully provide was not readily available to the FOSS community.

At the beginning, I was trying to learn how to blog, because I had a job interview for a freelance assignment helping an attorney with his legal blog. You have to write something if you are blogging, so I decided to write about what I knew best, which is legal research. It felt private, like a diary, and I didn't think anyone would find what I was writing about or care much if they did.

I wrote to the air, thinking no one would read it anyway, and I horsed around, finding funny graphics for as many of the entries as I could, but it was just for fun, just to learn. I eventually chose to focus on the SCO v. IBM case because it appealed to my sense of humor and stirred my hatred of injustice, and because I knew quite a bit about the GPL, as it happened, and I knew SCO was going to fail on that part of its claims. I was also quite confident that Linus was not going to infringe on anyone's code on purpose. So, every day I'd add a little bit more to the story, as I saw news stories about the case and SCO's claims. I wrote as though I were talking with a good friend over dinner who asked me, "So, what's this SCO case all about? Is there any chance they could win?"

I didn't dumb anything down, because I wasn't thinking about an audience anyway, and I went into the research I was finding as deeply as possible. It did occur to me that I might find some things that would be helpful to Linus and to IBMI figured IBM might have a service that scours the Net to find IBM-related storiesbut that was the extent of my ambition. I knew most attorneys don't know a lot about computers or Linux or the GPL, and I knew a fair amount about them all, so I felt like I was throwing a message in a bottle out into the ocean, just hoping someone would find it and it would be useful.

After a couple of months, I got an email from a stranger, asking if I could please make the graphics smaller, because he was in Europe on dial-up and the blog took forever to resolve. He sent me instructions on how to do it.

Until that email, I had never bothered to read the stats on my site, even though Radio Userland, the software I started blogging with, provides them. I come from a family that has very little interest in computers, and I was used to people being emphatically uninterested in things I find fascinating, I didn't expect even my mother to read my blog. So, when I got the email, I was floored. I wrote back that I didn't know anyone was reading what I was writing, and he told me that lots of people read Groklaw, and that the community appreciated very much what I was doing. I was simply floored. I think I will remember that feeling until the day I die.

I looked at the stats and found out hundreds of people were reading what I was writing, apparently regularly. I turned on comments and, little by little, information began to be offered, particularly when I would ask for it, which I did more and more. Radio Userland also has stats on where your readers come from, what web site they visited before clicking on your site, and what I saw from that was that my readership was consistently growing, it was all word of mouth at that time, and the caliber of reader was very high. It included a high number of lawyers and programmers and professors at universities, from all over the world.

Finally came the idea. I had dug up some information about a Linux kernel author who made contributions to the kernel while an employee at Caldera, and when Slashdot put that article up on its site, the first time that had happened to Groklaw, the number of readers exploded. Even better, they had more information to offer. One would find an old press release, another an article from five years ago, another a speech by an executive, and so on.

When I saw that start to happen, I created a Legal Links page (http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=legal-links), with links to legal resources, and started pointing to articles explaining things like copyright and patent law, things readers needed to understand so as to know which article or which press release detail mattered.

I realized then that Groklaw could be a bridge between the tech and the legal worlds, and that if I explained clearly how the court system works and what kind of evidence is valuable in that context, the community would find it, add what they knew, and it could work. The necessary pieces were in place. And I suddenly but totally understood the power inherent in this process of open, group effort. It felt like trying to ride a giant wave, as opposed to trying to turn on and then direct a stream of water in a particular direction. It had a life of its own, and my job was to try to follow the flow, not control it.

We found more and more. The readers built on each other's knowledge, and I learned that way too. My email level shot up also, as readers more and more began sending me tips and links and information. At the time, reporters were faithfully writing down every word the SCO folks spoke and reporting it as if it were all true, so I began reaching out to journalists. As we found information, I sent it to journalists, and some, to their credit, responded; some immediately, others over time.