Help solve employment inequity with Creative Commons agreements & contracts

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PublicGood Foundation is kicking off its Equitable Workplace Initiative with development of standardized, equitable employment agreements licensed for all to use with the Creative Commons. We are in need of employment law expertise to help create contracts from scratch and/or review and contribute to existing documents. Familiarity with Markdown, Git, and Pull Requests, will be helpful but not necessary.

The initial target is the US tech industry where there appears to be a significant trend for companies to have the most aggressive and unbalanced agreement each legal jurisdiction allows. PGF’s position it that the high variance creates quite a bit of waste and the inequity of the typical agreements harm the significant harm relationship of the parties with only short gains for the business. Our Equitable Workplace Initiative will provide an alternative that we think is better for society, the market, as well as the signing parties.

As a tech company ourselves we compare legal contracts to software and think principles of software code such as SOLID[1] and Clean[2] are applicable to the legal code. It is also our position that empowered and free workers are a net positive for the working person and for the business over the long run. Creators would need to understand typical business, including investor, needs as well as empathy and respect for the working person in order to obtain an equitable balance of concerns.

The BEIPA[3] appears to be satisfactory for our current intellectual property agreement needs but there is need for comparable non-disclosure, non-compete, and employment agreements - first for the tech sector followed by others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

[2] https://medium.com/s/story/reflections-on-clean-code-8c9b683277ca

[3] https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement