RE: position paper: Social Media in eGovernment

Owen,

Thanks for your comments - and yes we should absolutely debate these questions - which are designedly provocative, and aim to put the issues into an e-Government context.

There was one part I do have a little trouble with:

> With reference to the first question, I would make a plea for use of the
> word "stewardship" rather than "ownership" -- at least as far as public
> information is concerned.  (The notion that someone ... anyone ... could
> "own" a social network is also anathema to me.)  See the section entitled
> "Culture" at the bottom of page 10 (PDF page 16) of the document at
> http://www.defenselink.mil/cio-nii/docs/InfoSharingStrategy.pdf -- whose
> four enumerated goals are available in StratML format at
> http://xml.gov/stratml/DoDISS.xml 

To my mind, we can't just pretend that copyright and other intellectual property rights don't exist - there absolutely is *ownership* in social networks, with the nature of that ownership depending on their terms of use (e.g. many services allow me to retain ownership of *my* data, but grant extensive permission to the service provider).

We may like to live in a world of stewardship, but we actually live in a world of ownership - of intellectual property rights, copyright, and (in Europe) database rights. It is precisely because these networks have such value, that we should discuss who owns them - and ownership is absolutely the right word to use - because ownership inescapably exists and is important.

A rhetorical question: is there a major social networking service that doesn't address intellectual property rights, one way or another, in their terms of use?

That social networks are owned (somehow), is a fact. That they are (or should be) stewarded, is a point of view (and not necessarily one I disagree with by the way!).

If you like, "stewardship" is an answer to the "ownership" question.

John.

-----Original Message-----
From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Jose M. Alonso
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 6:03 PM
To: eGov IG
Cc: John Sheridan; Kevin Novak
Subject: position paper: Social Media in eGovernment


Dear Group participants,

As discussed at the F2F, John drafted a position paper for the  
upcoming W3C workshop on the Future of Social Networking [1] that  
Kevin and I reviewed.

Paper is available at [2] and has just been sent to the programme  
committee. I'm very sorry that due to time constraints we were not  
able to share it with the Group ahead of time to get more comments  
from you. We'll update the Group at a future call or by email once we  
get more information from the PC.

This closes ACTION-30.

Best,
Jose.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2008/12/egov-social-ws

--
Jose M. Alonso <josema@w3.org>    W3C/CTIC
eGovernment Lead                  http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/





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Received on Thursday, 4 December 2008 12:40:54 UTC