Pamela Jones is the creator of Groklaw. She is a paralegal. Her purpose in founding Groklaw was to do legal research and make the results available, describing how to find legal information so as to make the process more open to understanding to those not in the legal field. The original purpose was to cover legal news stories of interest. Covering the SCO litigation in detail became the sole news story early in the history of Groklaw.
She feels her private information isn't relevant because the point of Groklaw is that no one person is as smart as an entire group. Groklaw is a group project, a community effort demonstrating the power of the open source approach, not a web site for or about her. For that reason, she originally had no personal information available on Groklaw, not even her name, going by the handle PJ. She has explained her reason for doing this: "I originally wanted to stay anonymous, in a sense, by just saying PJ. Eventually media attention and other factors made it impossible to remain just PJ but I would have if I could have. I have no desire to be famous, for one thing. And I have been creatively influenced by Scott McCloud's work. He points out in Understanding Comics (p. 45-51) in a section on iconic representation that people respond most strongly to a drawing of a character that simplifies to the point that anyone can identify with the character. I guess I was hoping for that effect. In other words, I was hoping people could assume whatever they wanted and just focus on what I said, rather than on who was saying it. For that reason, I chose PJ, because it could be anyone, either sex, any nationality, anyone and no one in particular. I wanted participation by anyone interested in the SCO story. No politics. Nothing extraneous. Just an effort to locate and provide evidence that could be useful. I knew the community could answer SCO, if they just knew what was needed. And they have."
