See? Photographic evidence:

Catherine Winters, typing on her iPhone. Photo by Jeremy Lim.

“Hey,” you might exclaim, upon seeing the above photo, your voice pitching with excitement in having caught me with my iPhone out. “Catherine’s not paying attention to the speaker at all! Look at her tweeting away!”

Pernicious lies! Zoom in, and you’ll find that’s not this “Twitter” thing all the kids have been talking about at all! No, in fact, I’m using the excellent cloud-based note-taking app Simplenote to take meticulously detailed, hierarchically-indented notes! Ha!

In fact, I took a great deal of notes on my iPhone that day, as FreelanceCamp Vancouver turned out to be extremely useful. I was particularly interested by the session I was at when Jeremy Lim snapped the above picture, Contracts for People Who Hate Contracts. Led by Martin Ertl, cofounder of Vancouver open-source contracts startup LexPublica, it covered a number of contingencies and best practices surrounding the most inconvenient of all business practices: agreeing on things for money.

Martin clarified a few issues for me, including, when I, as a designer, ought to write a single project-spanning contract as opposed to a preliminary contract to determine project scope and one to cover the actual work as outlined in the resulting scope document. Which is as important as it sounds. I’ve used one of LexPublica’s contracts before, and I plan to continue to do so in future. One point he did emphasize: the most important part of such an agreement is a good explanation of the actual work to be undertaken. It turns out that, “I’ll have one website, please” can mean somewhat different things to different people. Who knew?

Other highlights included Kemp Edmonds’ talk on how to ask Kemp Edmonds to not call you a plagiarist when you plagiarize his presentations, and one particularly interesting discussion on “solopreneurs”. Google indicates this is indeed a word, and it seems like everyone is using it to mean roughly the same thing. (“It’s not quite a freelancer, not quite an entrepreneur, but OH MAN–”)

The big distinction between a freelancer and a solopreneur seems to be that the solopreneur has somewhat more infrastructure–they’re able to go after larger projects because they can outsource, team up with, or subcontract to other freelancers and solopreneurs, dividing up labour, while still not having all the overhead of an actual company with employees.

Which sounds appealing. After all, companies are expensive, right?

In any event, whether it ends up being a direction I choose to go in or merely interesting food for thought in a changing economy, the solopreneurs session was fascinating, and you should’ve been there. So there.

If you weren’t able to make it, I strongly recommend any future FreelanceCamps Vancouver¹ and I wholeheartedly endorse it as one of the most informative — and demographically representative – –Camp-suffixed events I’ve ever attended in Vancouver.

1. That’s the correct plural, right?

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st century is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards authoritarianism, but rather, intellectual property encumbrances. The idea that VANOC can trademark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclusivity of the brand that they’ve threatened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say nothing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I wholeheartedly support the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trademarked by VANOC.

But I’ve been thinking about situations where The Authorities have confiscated memory cards or deleted photos and so, I’m wondering about technical workarounds to this: I would consider using an EyeFi card in my camera to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jailbroken iPhone or possibly something with reasonable battery life.) to automatically upload my photos to my website or Flickr so that I wasn’t actually storing any pictures, I was posting them live. Short of jamming or Iranian-scale network monitoring and packet inspection, there would really be little anyone could do, assuming the images themselves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is distribution of that photo a trademark or copyright violation? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Winter”, or “Games” in this post actionable? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of something involving one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seriously consider myself at risk for having the last name “Winters”, or for writing under that name, but it’s so important to explicitly affirm that I have the right to do so when proposing –or passing!– any law that purports to restrict speech.

This post is © Catherine Winters, licensed under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike. Also, let me know.

With that in mind, I propose the Creative Commons ActuallyTellMeAboutIt license. I know I’d like to hear when someone uses my stuff! Plus, hey, the icon’s obvious, right?

On the other hand, CreativeCommons.org defines “Attribution” as: “You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.”

So I suppose it is already implied that you would eventually hear of this. Still, it would be nice to codify it somehow without having to post any specifics of the means of attribution.

This actually reminded me of things I did in high school, so maybe this is something we want to encourage! (“Hi, Catherine? About dinner next week? Yeah, I’m not sure we’re totally comfortable with you having any opportunity to tell our kids anything at all, actually…”)

Look, part of living in a technologically sophisticated society is understanding that there are things people will do with technology that doesn’t mesh up with what its designers intended. Further, we can’t stop that from happening, except through further education. (“…and that’s why we don’t lick electrical sockets, class.” “Ohhhhh!”)

The problem is that people all too often want a quick fix for runaway knowledge, and that usually takes the form of legislation, or of ceasing the distribution of documents containing Iraqi nuclear “secrets”.

So in this case, what’s the legislation we’re supposed to support? Internet hackers must be stopped from threatening children? Cameras must be licensed to prohibit the extraction of their internal components? Cameras should not contain flashes? No energy weapons at school? Oh wait. That last one is actually pretty smart.

Upon reading the CBC article, one notes that there’s definitely a “oh no, internet!” vibe to it, but nobody quoted in it is actually suggesting that the current “leave your knives and things at home, please” laws and school policies aren’t enough. Truly a refreshing change.