DRAFT - HYPOTHETICAL - FOR DISCUSSION ONLY
WorldCC MODEL COLLABORATIVE CONTRACTING POLICY

The policy is intended to be used by an enterprise with its business partners and suppliers. Within the enterprise, the "owner" of the policy is the contract management function.

The policy takes the perspective of a "receiving" party: the enterprise is receiving a proposal for contract text from a partner, customer or supplier. The policy is intended to accelerate review and reduce reinvention for incoming materials. The "receiving" perspective highlights the costs on the relationship of a party insisting on its own forms and formats. It facilitates cooperation and standards formation.

Standards reduce needless work, delay, cost and risk. Enterprises are rightly concerned with being infected by inappropriate or malicious contract terms. Variations, even benevolent variations, create complexity that is expensive for an enterprise to manage. Forms, computable structures and common style rules reduce the surface of exposure and increase the ability of parties to focus on their business and relationships.

This policy encourages the proposing party to use publicly available materials, preferrably materials that have been developed through cooperation among participants. Ideally, the materials are hosted publicly and subject to a standards process.

The policy leaves open the possibility that a party will have good reasons to propose a new form or clause. Circumstances may be different or the proposing party may have an improvement, law may have changed or perhaps someone spotted an error or ambiguity. If formatted as suggested by this policy, these additions will improve and expand the standard solutions.

The policy seeks to encourage reuse on four levels:

1. Reuse of forms - a list of forms that the enterprise is comfortable with;
2. Reuse of clauses - libraries of contract components (mostly sections) that can be used as components, by copying or reference;
3. Use of Design Patterns of the WorldCC that combine text, graphics and logical organization; and
4. Consistent formats - a style guide and components for drafting.

It encourages codification by borrowing a secure method of collaboration from software engineering and using it with public libraries of "Prose Objects". The policy itself is a document standard that uses the modular formats and versioning it recommends. A list of issues is available at https://github.com/CommonAccord/WorldCC-ModelContractPolicy-CmA/issues