ExtraEagle

We now support the new fledgeling standard Universal Edit Button, which aims to create a common user interface for wikis etc.

If your browser supports the Universal Edit Button a tiny edit icon will appear in the URL field, which allows you to quickly and intuitively edit the agreement or template you’re currently on.

At time of writing the only browser which supports this is FireFox, you will also have to install a free extension. See here for instructions

We are very close to going out of beta with Agree2 and have been working on a new user agreement. While most people don’t really take them serious there is a small yet active group of people who thankfully read through these and take offense. I think this is great and we would like to publicly post the new user agreement for debate before we officially roll it in.

Go to the Public review version of the new Agree2 user agreement to read it and propose any changes you want. You can also add comments to it if you would like.

We will take any comments and changes that people suggest and try to incorporate them over the next week or two.

With whatever experiences we have here, we will probably start a new generic terms of services template that you can use for your own services. Feel free to do so already if you would like to submit your sites terms of services as a new template.

We have looked at several other user agreements on a variety of sites and included some aspects of these, albeit customized to our needs.

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We are trying to do our part to encourage people to use plain English language in their contracts. However it can be really difficult at times to cut legal fluff that just really isn’t necessary.

Adam Freedman has written a fantastic book the Party of the First Part about the history and foolishness of legalese has created a great little guide: “Can I write Plain English?”

We are planning to build tools into Agree2 to help kill off legalese.

While Agree2 is all about people and small businesses taking charge of their own contracts, we have also designed it from the beginning to be integrated with other web applications.

Example Applications

For example imagine a web application helping small design or programming shops find new clients and projects. Once a client finds you, you simply click “Prepare contract” in the fictional web applications user interface and it creates a contract on Agree2 filling out all the details of you and your client.

Another example would be a service allowing people to create and manage options to buy services or items from other people. Call it OptionsBay. Once the details of the services or products to be optioned are worked out through the service, the service creates the actual options contract on Agree2 and invites all parties to accept it.

Getting your templates Instant Ruby API

We have come up with a very quick and easy way for you to integrate Agree2 Templates in your own web applications using Ruby. We will have a more general purpose Ruby wrapper library soon.

All of this works on top of standard REST API’s and you should be able to do something similar in any language. However for now we are making it very easy for Ruby developers.

In the following example we will use a public template for an Options Contract. However you could just as easily create your own template customized for your application and we offer an instant Ruby API for it.

If you already have an Agree2 account Login to Agree2 and follow along, otherwise register your name and email address for the Agree2 Beta and we will send you an invitation shortly.

First select a template you can create your own private template later to see how instant it really is. Here we will pick the options template:

Now you have selected the template and you can see that it has several fields that you can fill out. We call these Smart Fields and they are an important part of the flexibility of Agree2. Feel free to fill it out and hit “create agreement from template” to try it out. Then hit back to return the template page.

On the bottom part of the sidebar of the template page you will find this box called “Other formats”. These provide other views to the template. The agreement pages also have a similar box, but the template page has one in particular that we are interested in Instant Ruby API

Once you click on that file you will see a ruby library file that has been customized for this template and with your username already filled out.

Using the API

This API will allow you to do such things as:

# This creates an agreement from the template
@agreement=Agree2::OptionForHolderToBuyAssetTemplate.prepare( :holder =>"John Doe",
    :asset =>"Consulting by Pelle Braendgaard",
    :amount =>"10",
    :units =>"hours",
    :price =>"$100/h",
    :valid_to =>"1 month from now")

# invite the parties
@party=@agreement.invite("johndoe@mailinator.com","John","Doe")
@party=@agreement.invite("pelle@stakeventures.com","Pelle","Brændgaard")

# Change something in the contract
@agreement.amount=20
@agreement.save

# Mark it as being final and ready to accept
@agreement.finalize

You can customize your template with fields within the text. The API will automatically update to support any new fields you add.

Requirements

• A recent Ruby (1.8.4) or higher
• RubyGems
• ActiveResource ( gem install activeresource --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org )

Installation

Download the api (hit “Save As” in your browser menu) and rename it option_for_holder_to_buy_asset.rb or whatever is recommended in the API.

If using it in a Ruby on Rails application we recommend saving it in the lib directory.

IMPORTANT: For security reasons we do not embed your password in this file. Remember to change it to your real password. Search for “YOUR PASSWORD” in this file and change it.

Now you can follow the simple steps above.

Try this next

Try creating your own template or duplicate an existing one. Try changing the smart fields and see how it automatically updates the API.

What’s next for us

We will provide a more fully featured general purpose API for Agree2 which will have full support for OAuth. The REST API is there already, but it needs to be documented and we might still change it.

We will document it and provide both a ruby gem and/or rails plugin that you will be able to integrate with greater flexibility into your application.

One of the biggest mistakes people make about contracts are that they are documents. It is an easy mistake to make. After all large parts of the legal profession have been feeding us this story for at least a century even though they all learn otherwise in their first class of Contract Law 101 in law school.

A contract is an agreement between 2 or more parties. “Between” is the keyword here and indicates a relationship.

For this reason we encourage the use of the word “agreement” instead of “contract” in Agree2. They are pretty much equivalent in legal language but the contract tends to fill people with fear and images of 20 page documents filled with tightly printed upper case legalese. I will continue using “Agreement” instead of “Contract” for the rest of this post.

What makes an agreement special though is that the relationship has strings attached. Each party to the contract promises to do something in exchange of the other parties fulfilling their duty. Understanding this is key to understanding contract law.

Thus a promise from me to pay you $100 is not an agreement and is generally speaking not legally enforceable. However if I promise to pay you $20 in return for you putting lunch on your credit card and you accept that is a legally binding agreement.

This is based on tradition that goes back to the middle ages ( see Law Merchant) and is part of both common law and most countries law codes.

An agreement does not have to be written down, but is pretty difficult to enforce by a court without some kind of documentation.

The contract document you have with a client or supplier complete with your and their signatures is a typical example of this documentation. However records in a database complete with server logs are now equally common. In either case they are only documentation or evidence of the agreement and not the agreement itself.

Thus the agreement you have with your client is a relationship between the two of you, albeit documented by the contract document.

To understand this better think about this try to think about other various legal agreements you might have with other people.

For example if you are married you have a relationship with your partner known as a Marriage. While there may be a marriage contract or the specific set of vows spoken out during the marriage ceremony, no one would confuse their marriage to a piece of paper or the exact words spoken several years back.

The same goes for business partnerships or even one click buying something on Amazon. All parties should understand clearly what the relationship entails.

For many types of agreements there are so many customs and traditions governing the relationship that leave little reason for you to specifically document it.

Think about when you go to a lunch counter and order a sandwich that is listed as $7. You are actually accepting an agreement to pay $7 for a sandwich that they will prepare for you.

Everyone understands the obligation so there is little need to print out and sign a 3 page agreement before hand. It would be breach of the contract if the guy behind the cash register all of a sudden wants to charge you $10. It would also be breach of contract if you decided to pay only $5 once you have received your sandwich.

However if you don’t want to pay cash and prefer to use a credit card the standard age old agreement changes to a slightly newer agreement and may require you do sign a piece of slip (documentation) that might say something:

CARDMEMBER ACKNOWLEDGES RECEIPT OF GOODS AND/OR SERVICES IN THE AMOUNT OF THE TOTAL SHOWN HERON AND AGREES TO PERFORM THE OBLIGATIONS SET FORTH BY THE CARDMEMBER’S AGREEMENT WITH THE ISSUER.

Note that many credit card slips don’t even include this text as it is pretty much well understood by everyone and there is no need to document the duties themselves and we end up only documenting the acceptance of them.

You might also be able to document your part of this agreement by waving your mobile phone near or entering a pin number in to a terminal. While you didn’t sign anything it is still a legally binding agreement based on new traditions and customs.

I will cover documenting the contract in of my next posts here. So remember to subscribe.

Also remember IANAL but I play one on my blog.

If you’re subscribed to this blog you might have signed up for the Agree2 beta back in March when we first launched it. So what has happened since then you might ask. March is a long time without a peep.

Well the March beta launch was successful, but not in the way that we had initially hoped for. Initially our beta was pretty limited, but we quickly began to see and hear the reaction that it’s cool but nothing more. Very few people tried more than just signing up and looking at it.

We interviewed various users and realized that it was kind of overwhelming at first. Too much was going on. Users who are already kind of scared of dealing with contracts in the first place felt even more scared with all the options that were available.

We took a deep breath and decided that this was actually a good thing. There were a small handful of users, so we decided to lay low and think the interface through again. While most of the underlying code is still there we have completely redesigned most of the important processes.

We think that the end product now is a thousand times better. Looking at usability we also went through and redesigned many of the core processes, such as templates and agreement editing.

A large key feature which wasn’t really there before are socially written public agreement templates. In the above screen shot you can see the ones available at the moment. Why not help create the perfect graphic design contract, user agreement, NDA etc.

Anyway we are now back, if you’re already registered try logging in again at Agree2. If you already signed up for our beta keep an eye in your mailbox for your first Agreement in Agree2 our User Agreement (yes we eat our own dog food). If you would like to try it out go to Agree2 and register yourself.

This time we will open up more widely. However it is still a beta. And when we say Beta that does mean that there may be occasional error screens, funky javascript and screechy style sheets. We are really happy to say that 2 of our beta users are already confident enough with us that they are using Agree2 for their own commercial agreements - you guys rock.

Please keep subscribed here as we will now be back more frequently talking about our features and also the basics of contract law.

After a lot of hard work we are now nearly ready to launch our first application. Agree2 is a platform for creating and managing agreements electronically.

These agreements are 100% electronic and legally binding in most parts of the world. You could use it to create one to one agreements between you and a partner or create advanced fully customizable templates that you can integrate with your web application.

Over the next week or two we will slowly introduce some of the features that will let Agree2 make you completely forget about annoying contracts by word email attachments or faxes in the future.

Please feel free to add yourself to our list of future beta users. We will be inviting more and more beta users in little by little as we iron out the last kinks. Beta users will for the time being be able to create unlimited agreements and templates.

As a beta user you should be aware that the agreements you create are still legally binding. Anyone you create an agreement with who is not a beta user will also be given the opportunity to register as a beta user.