Pages

2/26/2009

Facebook promotes policy participation

It seems that after a flurry of backlash these past few weeks over Facebook's recent changes to their user information policy (which FB reversed last week), Mark Zuckerberg and team have decided to turn the tables and opened up Facebook's guiding policies for public participation.

Beginning today, we are giving you a greater opportunity to voice your opinion over how Facebook is governed. We're starting this off by publishing two new documents for your review and comment. The first is the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights and will serve as the guiding framework behind any policy we'll consider—or the reason we won't consider others. The second document is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the existing Terms of Use. With both documents, we tried hard to simplify the language so you have a clear understanding of how Facebook will be run. We've created separate groups for each document so you can read them and provide comments and feedback. You can find the Facebook Principles here and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities here. Before these new proposals go into effect, you'll also have the ability to vote for or against proposed changes.

I believe these steps are unprecedented in promoting understanding and enabling participation on the web. I hope you will take a look at these documents, read them carefully, and share your thoughts.


For me this another step in the evolution of the ideals of participation and transparency. And it's so interesting to see these type of social experiments being explored. I applaud Facebook for a) admitting they made a mistake and b) for taking the risk in opening up their policies and principles for open debate. You can bet this one development that'll be watching carefully. But for now, I'm off to review FB's proposed documents to see what I think.

1 comment:

**5p34k1nt0ngu3z** said...

I'm not on Facebook, but I think the steps they are taking are quite noble. I agree with Christine's post on page one, and Karen's response to her at the bottom of page two. "Will" instead of "should" is a necessary change to the Facebook Principles.