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Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights: the voting so far

Social Network Users Bill Of RightsThe SXSW panel got a decent amount of attention, including article by Helen A. S. Popkin’s Vote on your ‘Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights’ on MSNBC’s Technolog, Kim Cameron’s post on the Identity Weblog, and a brief link from Mark Sullivan of PC World. Here’s the voting so far

  1. 41 yes 0 no Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service
  2. 41 yes 0 no Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand
  3. 41 yes 0 no Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification
  4. 33 yes 4 no Empowerment : Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
  5. 35 yes 2 no Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies
  6. 37 yes 3 no Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others
  7. 39 yes 1 no Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first
  8. 39 yes 1 no Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
  9. 38 yes 0 no Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data
  10. 39 yes 0 no Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised
  11. 36 yes 2 no Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
  12. 24 yes 13 no Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
  13. 35 yes 1 no Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions
  14. 37 yes 1 no Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data

So it’s in general overwhelmingly positive: five rights are unanimous, and another eight at 89% or higher.  The one exception: the right to self-define, currently at about 65%.  As I said in a comment on the earlier thread, this right is vital for people like whistleblowers, domestic violence victims, political dissidents, closeted LGBTQs.   I wonder whether the large minority of people who don’t think it matters are thinking about it from those perspectives.

The voting continues at http://SNUBillOfRights.com.  Please voice your opinion!

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Q: What should I read to find more about the Q&A space? A: Here’s some links.

two question marksThe Q&A (question and answer site) market segment is red hot right now.  Here’s some links to complement my own posts Life imitates art imitates life, Prisms, Kool-aid, and Opportunity, and What do you think of this one-line pitch for qweries?

The overall landscape

Quora

Stack Overflow

Ask.com

And …

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Preparing for a coaches’ meeting, parts 1 and 2 (DRAFT)

Draft! Revised version to appear as a two-part series on NWEN’s blog.

Congratulations to the 20 companies who advanced to the second round of the First Look Forum!  Hopefully by now you’re already scheduling your meetings with the coaches.   We’ve got a great list of coaches, including some of the highest-profile investors and entrepreneurs in the Seattle area.  From a startup’s perspective, it’s a huge opportunity — and potentially a little scary.

Back in fall 2009, I was in that situation with Qworky.  We were delighted to make it into the second round, and through the luck of the draw one of our coaches was one of the angel investors on our shortlist of “people we really really want to meet”.  Huzzah!  But then everybody’s schedule got busy and we didn’t prepare as thoroughly for the meeting as we had intended to.  One of the other founders still hadn’t left their previous job, and the other had some conflicts, so I wound up doing the meeting by myself …

And I bombed.
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What do you think of this “one-line pitch” for qweries?

qweries helps everybody

find answers
get in the conversation,
and contribute to your community

by prioritizing diversity and design

As I described on the NWEN blog in The agile one-pager (part 5), a good one-line pitch covers what a company does, who they do it for, and a bit about how. Here’s what I’ve currently got for qweries, a Q&A (questions-and-answers) startup that will compete with sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers.

Reactions?

Suggestions?

Suppose I were to add a third word: “by prioritizing design, _______, and diversity.”   Some of the possibilities that leap to mind include “privacy”, “community”, “emotion”, “accessibility”, “fun” … Thoughts on any of those, or other ideas?

jon

PS: updated several times, most recently May 25.  Thanks to everybody who’s given feedback, and especially to Mikhaila for

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qw3ries
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The home stretch: part 6 of “The Agile One-pager” (DRAFT)

Draft! Revised version on NWEN’s blog.

The first four parts of the series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) have gotten us close.  Now it’s time for the final push.  For impatient readers, here are the tips

  • Go back over the section descriptions in the application form and double-check that you’re addressing the right questions in the right places.
  • Do a section-by-section, line-by-line review
  • Formatting and wording changes can often save you a half-dozen valuable lines, but don’t remove all the white space or emotion
  • Make it look great.  Have you included a logo?
  • It won’t be perfect.  Relax.  Nobody else’s is either.

Read on for more …

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First Look Forum participants, please join us Wednesday evening for a Twitter chat!

As we head into the homestretch with the First Look Forum, we wanted to give an opportunity for people to ask some last-minute questions and get some quick feedback.  Email works, of course, but it’s soooooo 20th century.  So we’re also going to be having a Twitter chat, on Wednesday February 16 at 7:30 p.m.

If you’ve never been to a Twitter chat before, you’re missing out on some good fun.  It moves quickly, and with a lot of people talking at once it packs a lot of information into a short time.  Whether or not you have a Twitter account, you can follow the discussion on the #nwen hashtag using TweetChat at http://tweetchat.com/room/nwen or use your favorite Twitter client.

Want to join in the conversation?   You’ll need to have a Twitter account — you can sign up at http://twitter.com/signup.  Twitter’s FAQ and Howcast’s How To Use Twitter video have more information to get you started.

If there are some topics you’d like to see discussed, feel free to leave them as comments here — or you can email to me at jon {at} achangeiscoming {dot} net.    Or even better, you can tweet them to me –  I’m @jdp23.

Read on for more background (originally from the ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference‘s Getting started on Twitter page).   See you on Twitter!

jon

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Starting the feedback loop: part 2 of “The agile one-pager” (DRAFT)

Draft! Revised version with better takeaways posted on NWEN’s blog.

In part 1 of the series, we looked at reasons to write an executive summary, highlighted resources like Rebecca Lovell’s The Art of the One-Page App and Garage Technology Ventures’ Writing a compelling executive summary, and introduced the agile approach to writing an executive summary: make progress, get feedback, iterate.  Here’s the key takeaways for part 2:

  1. Don’t be afraid to write down something aspirational or funny.  you can always go back and edit it later.
  2. Start by getting quick feedback on individual sections even before you’ve got a draft of the whole document
  3. Spend a few minutes preparing before any discusison with a potential advisor, even if it’s just a phone call or IM

Read on for more!
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The agile approach to a one-page executive summary, part 1: Getting started (DRAFT)

Update, February 2: Final version posted on NWEN’s blog.

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How can we use #PrivChat to press for #privacy rights? (REVISED)

How can we utilize organizational capacity provided by forums like #PrivChat to press gov't/companies for #privacy rights?

Update, August 2: discussion of Google+ and HR1981 in a new comment

Originally written January 19.  Updated January 24, after discussions with Weaver2World and MissHealth.
I modified one of the recommendations and added a new one. See the pink highlights in the text.

Mark Stanley of the Center for Democracy and Technology wrapped up Tuesday’s #privchat with a heck of a good question.  And as is usually the case in the weekly Twitter privacy chat, there were good answers from a variety of perspectives. For example:

I see fora like #privchat as launchpads for further advocacy and to facilitate networking on these issuesPublic awarness + vocalization = attention from gov't/cos = action to diminish impact on bottom line (?)Use these fora to publicly badger the privacy villains and bless the privacy heroes like #ThankTwitter.i think it important to recognize this is a place for divergent views, including large orgs, to participate and discussFan of positive reinforcement when companies / orgs do something intelligent / right. Forums can aggregate / focus attn

All great ideas … so I put my process hat on and suggested that we encourage people to think and blog about it, and continue the discussion next week.  Here’s my contribution (with early assistance from @hellrazr of @PrivacyActivism and additional suggestions from @Weaver2World).

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Thoughts about a social media campaign for “The Stripping of Freedoms”

Work in progress! See discussion questions at the bottom

excerpt from The Stripping of Freedom logoEPIC’s The Stripping of Freedoms conference has an all-star cast: Kate Hanni of FlyersRights, pilot Michael Roberts of Fed Up Flyers, Jim Babb of We Won’t Fly, Prof. Jeffrey Rosen, Bruce Schneier, Nadhira Al-Khalili of CAIR, Chip Pitts of BORDC, Ginger McCall and Lillie Coney of EPIC, and many many more.  So it’s a great chance to mobilize the resistance to the TSA.

Social media* are an important way of getting the word out; letting people participate whether or not they can make it to Washington DC; putting pressure on Congress, the Obama administration, and the airlines; and trying to get the traditional media to cover our side of the story as well as the TSA’s.   Here’s some thoughts about how to approach it.

The first step is to let people know about the conference — and get them excited about it.  There are a lot of easy ways to do this: invite people to the Facebook event, share the links to EPIC’s page and blog posts on Facebook and Myspace, tweet it, mail it to your friends who are likely to be interested, tell any bloggers and journalists you know about it. A lot of people have never done anything like this before, so we’ll try to have some basic instructions available.  We’ll also set up threads in the FlyerTalk forums and the We Won’t Fly blog to ask for questions and strategy suggestions.

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Taking the Train!

picture through a window of Puget sounds and a small wharf

View from Amtrak's Coast Starlighter, Washington

We got on the train in Seattle’s King St. Station: a quick ID check, and that was it.

No nude pictures.

No irradiation.

No groping.

This is how travel should be.

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Security alert: bots using Facebook chat

If somebody starts chatting with you and asks you to try a link, be wary …

2010-11-22_0905

No, I didn’t click on the link. I do my best to keep up with security patches, but why take the chance of visiting a site that’s likely to be filled with malware?

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