More on Permissions
I have been fairly pessimistic (yeah, it's in my nature) about the permission slips for quotes; I didn't imagine anyone would actually read the letter, much less take the time to respond, much less take the time to respond positively. However, the signed slips are "flooding" in at a rate of a few per day; I received one from IBM, Duckworth, Springer, and Guardian in the past few days. By far, the most interesting has been from Jason Walsh, a freelance writer for guardian.co.uk. I'm quoting from Jason's interview with Jef Raskin, and through email, Jason pointed me at another online site he is writing for called Digit. I was so intrigued with his writing style that I read through each of his previous entries on the site; I was particularly enthused by his post "Design Like You Don't Give A Damn", as his short rant seems to summarize a lot of what I've been thinking about with "public service design" or "societal design".
In addition to "meeting interesting people", I've also had continually reinforced upon me the nature of "fair use" - most everyone who is agreeing to my use of quotes has also mentioned that their permission is probably unnecessary, and that my use falls under "fair use". This is good, I think, but I still don't feel comfortable enough crap-shooting with the rest of the quotes; if they aren't accepted by a certain date, I'll have to remove them.