Hi Carl & Aaron,
I believe that we will be able to take this on. I've copied Sarah Ryan on this email -- she's an associate in our NY office who plans to work with a partner in one of our California offices on this. She's been working through the internal channels to line everything up, and should be in touch very soon. Feel free to email or call her if you'd like to discuss. And let me know if you have any questions or need anything else from me.
I'll look forward to seeing all of this when it's up and running -- sounds fantastic!
Rhett
On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Carl Malamud
<carl@media.org> wrote:
Hi -
Any luck on finding Aaron a c4 incorporator?
Best regards,
Carl
On Jul 29, 2008, at 10:14 AM, Rhett Millsaps II wrote:
Hi Carl and Aaron,
This sounds like a great project, and I'm hopeful that we'll have some folks here who can do this pro bono. The question is whether we have a partner in one of our offices with experience with 501(c)(4) incorporations. I'm checking around, and will let you know as soon as I can. As you know, I just get involved when things get messy, so I'm trying to draft some of our transactional folks to take this on.
I actually know Larry Lessig from my Stanford days, but it's been fun to go toe to toe with his folks on the HP case!
I hope to get back to you with good news soon, and will put you in touch with the right folks here if and when I find them.
Thanks,
Rhett
On 7/25/08, Carl Malamud <carl@media.org> wrote: Hi Rhett -
I'm David Halperin's friend. I used to be Podesta's Chief Technology Officer at the Center, am now running a c(3) nonprofit out of California that puts primary legal materials (e.g., court cases) on the net called Public.Resource.Org.
I'd like to introduce you to Aaron Swartz who has created Watchdog.Net. The advice they received from their first funder, the Sunlight Foundation, was that they should be a c(4). I believe this is Aaron's first nonprofit, but he has accumulated a distinguished record in a variety of Internet enterprises. He wrote the "RSS" standard which is what newsfeeds are based on.
He was also a founder of Reddit, a popular social networking site that was sold to Conde Naste. And, perhaps most importantly, he's been the technical smarts behind a lot of impressive operations for Internet veterans such as Brewster Kahle and Lawrence Lessig (a name you may remember from your recent Harry Potter suit. :)
Watchdog has some funding, but because they are early stage they are definitely not flush, so I know Aaron would appreciate any reduced fees or perhaps even pro bono representation for the initial C(4) application. If it is helpful, I am happy to provide advice during the process, but this is Aaron's gig and I'm not directly involved.
I'll let you two arrange a phone call with each other and you can decide if this is worth taking the next step.
Best regards,
Carl
P.S. Aaron ... Rhett's URL, which you no doubt found already, is http://web.omm.com/rhettmillsapsii/
A service of Public.Resource.Org.