This article is a placeholder for the links that will be appearing here for readers of the “Free Exchange, Open Money” article in Linux User & Developer magazine, issue 104 - and for those attending my recent talks on the subject. I’m expanding and tidying the links, and they’ll be put up here on 28th August.*
Yesterday’s ShropCamp event was a great success, attracting a diverse crowd of people wanting to work with Open Data and local government. In particular it brought in a far greater crowd of non-technical people than these events generally attract.
This is good news, of course - but it did mean a lot less awareness of data privacy and, in particular, data ownership.
Facebook
In the four sessions I attended, participants talked around issues of building Facebook pages, and getting their communities to come there. This brings up one or two issues I promised to address and link to, so here they are:
Going to the places where your community already is, and talking to them there, is a strategic decision, and a correct one. Selecting Facebook, and building your presence there is a tactical decision, and one not to be made without a clear understanding of the downsides.
I’ve covered a lot of this in an article in Linux User last year, introducing open social networks: Social networking: The good, the bad & the ugly. The article was aimed at a technical audience, although the discussion on data privacy and ownership is non-technical. However, to save you wading through it, let’s cover the main points.
Whose data?
1. Facebook is very good at importing data from your other networks, whether tweets or social bookmarks. It’s not so good at passing it back to the outside world. In particular your contacts as a user or your community as a group (those who “like” your page). Should you ever lose your Page, through inadvertently violating the terms of service, what happens to your carefully-nurtured group?
2. There is little privacy on Facebook. Although you can change your settings, few users are even aware of how much about themselves they expose to advertisers and others. If you are building a group of vulnerable users, it may be better to hold most of your discussions with them somewhere you can control the safety of the environment
But our users are on Facebook
There’s no easy answer - you must go where your community is. But go in with your eyes open.
Try and collect name / e-mail at least by persuading people to sign up for a minimal set of announcements (e.g. once a month), which should get the majority of your community to click through and register. That way, were you to ever lose your FB page, you have not lost touch with everyone.
Investigate federated & open social networks. GNU Social and Diaspora are not ready for mainstream use yet, but consider trying Status.Net a sort of federated Twitter, which will make the foundation of GNU Social) internally with staff and volunteers. You can set it to forward all posts to Twitter - and thence on to FB, your blog, and elsewhere - yet remain in full control of your data, and your privacy settings.
Postscript:Political Facebook Groups Deleted On Royal Wedding Day
[added 30/04/2011]
“The Anti-Cuts Space London facebook group has been taken down without warning or permission. In the last 12 hours, facebook has deleted around 50 sites…” Read more here. Interesting comments, including additional groups deleted in the original article. Further coverage in The Guardian.
And compare with FB’s tardiness in responding over many of the hate groups with pages on Facebook.
To re-iterate: play in somebody else’s walled garden and you play by their rules. If you want freedom of expression, and control of your environment, then you have to make your own. Listen to this:
Yes, too busy to post much - but as 50% of time seems taken up by websites, I took the Survey For People Who Make Websites, 2010. Why? Well, without web developers taking part we wouldn’t get this sort of information.
It’s been a while since we’ve done any work with schools - something I hope to change in the next year, but it meant that when I was asked to write up case studies and apps for FOSS in education, to contribute to International Software Freedom Day leaflets, I had to go back a bit.
I’ll add more to the page as events dictate (but bear in mind that things I meant to post here a year ago are still unposted - if you think there are too many blog posts on the Internet, just think how dwarfed they are by the number of unposted items, particularly since we all started diverting our efforts to micro-blogging).
A memory game from GCompris, by Bruno Coudoin (screenshot under GNU/FDL)
As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points.
(It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)
“…a number of challenges which Big Society policy-makers and practitioners are going to have to overcome in order to encourage genuine people power that has a real impact on society”
“There are plenty of examples of initiatives both here and in the United States that exemplify social and economic change based upon promoting the principal of shared information and self-organization.
“Here are a few, devoted to democratizing public planning, focus upon place-making and all picture problem-solving alliances of people:”
“Money does not create things. We create money, and almost all of it as debt. It is simply a means of exchange, a way of apportioning reward to people for their labours, nothing more”
I once wrote a short dissertation on one of the lost crops of the Incas (Amaranth). Looking for time to get back over the Atlantic & read about some of our hemisphere’s old grains
LinuxUser & Developer, issue 86, just came through the letterbox. I flicked through and a reader’s letter caught my eye - not because it called my Arduino article “wonderful” <blush>, but for its links to CopyLeft hardware resources.
Small Form Factor, Free Software, Open Hardware - 3 out of 3 for the NanoNote.
QI-hardware, producers of the Ben NanoNote, and the MilkyMist One boards are all projects deserving much wider publicity within (and beyond) the Free Software and hardware hacking communities. I’m certainly very tempted by the NanoNote.
Thanks to Wolfgang Spraul of QI Hardware for writing in to LU&D with the links.
Picture Credit: http://sharism.cc/ - licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Somewhere between Liverpool. Manchester, and Birmingham, pottering around in a convertible Morris Minor, is a man with a re-cycled laptop, and an endless supply of enthusiasm for Free Software, Sustainable IT, and the good things that can happen in the 3rd Sector when IT Strategy and social media hit an organisation.
