GoodGNUs

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

You can read a little more at:

The Interview with Status.net’s Evan Prodromou.

See links relating to this & ScraperWiki which I mentioned at #Shropcamp

and for those who asked me for more about what I do: try this: -)

& the Complementary Currency Unconference.

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.

See also: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/facebook-takedowns:-burying-bad-news

& http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/FB_takedowns

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:

To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event.

ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.

Talks at #smcLiv were given by Mike Nolan, on coping with social media overload, and Jon Bloor, on Publish & (Don’t) be damned. Social Media & the Law. Mike is certainly tapping a rich vein, given the number of information channels we’re all hooked into, and talk around the tables afterwards ranged from GTD through #inboxZero to using the good old-fashioned telephone to cut down on e-mail.

Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan

There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.

One of the “watercooler conversations” at Talk About Local (see post below) was the legal action taken by Royal Mail to force ErnestMarples.com to take down its extremely useful site converting postcodes to geographical information.

This service being forced down has had a knock-on effect on all of the voluntary-sector projects that use it, like Job Centre Pro Plus and The Straight Choice (”Live Election Leaflet Monitoring”), removing functionality or disabling them entirely.

Have you paid to use that postcode?

Unless Lord Mandelson’s New Labour get the chamce to sell off Royal Mail before the next election, Royal Mail is a publicly-owned company. It may feel it has a duty to maximise revenue by charging huge sums for access to our postcodes (without which it refuses to deliver our letters), but joined up government thinking would suggest thatgiving free access allows web entrpreneurs to build an infrastructure & eco-system around postcode services that could not only lead to paying customers for more sophisticated premium Royal Mail postal code services, but create more wealth in the economy, and hence more taxes to prop up Royal Mail until it gets better (& less over-compensated) management.

At the very least they could make the data available under a freely-licensed arrangement for not-for-profits. Not ideal, but better than throwing solicitors at good citizens. Indeed, so outrageous is Royal Mail’s behaviour that even a Labour government minister is taking them to task for it, then again Tom Watson is an honourable exception amongst politicians, given his understanding of the digital world.

Oh, and why Ernest Marples? After the postmaster general behind postcodes.

And to see where we could be going with publicly-owned data, look across the Atlantic.

Postscript: There’s a petion up at the No. 10 petition site: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites.” & a Guardian article on the affair. Thanks to Aidan McGuire for pointing out the petition.

Alternatively, route around the problem, and help out at Free The Postcode, the user-genertaed postcode database.