Announcing the Media 2.0 Best Practices

I posted recently about broken windows in social media and asked if there was anything more we could do about them.  The prevailing sentiment in comments was that "broken windows" are a necessary evil, but the community would win in the end.

Problems aren't going to fix themselves - as social computing goes mainstream, I see the risk of bystander effect increasing as more windows get broken.  So you and I are going to need to get involved.

As a first step, how taking a first step forward with platform vendors?  The Media 2.0 Workgroup - a group I've been affiliated with for a while - has decided to work on an initiative that will focus on the ethics of participation.

Here's more from Chris Saad.  If you're interested, I encourage you to visit the Media 2.0 Best Practices page to learn more and get involved.

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Announcing the Media 2.0 Best Practices

Today I am proud to announce the Media 2.0 Best Practices.

The Highlights

• We are creating a document that the community can own and that vendors can use as a promise to their participants
• The project was started by JS-Kit and donated to the Media 2.0 Workgroup for broader participation
• The group will discuss and debate the strawman during the coming conferences (SxSW, Web 2.0 and others)
• This will be a document owned by the community for any vendor in the marketplace to adopt. It will be hosted at www.mediabestpractices.com
• Participants are: Chris Saad, Khris Loux (On Behalf of JS-Kit), Eric Blantz, Stowe Boyd, Micah Baldwin (On behalf of Lijit), Brian Solis, Ben Metcalfe, Marianne Richmond, Jeremiah Owyang, Daniela Barbosa, Peter Kim, Loïc Le Meur (also on behalf of Seesmic/Twhirl), Deborah Schultz.

The goal...

To give publishers, emerging media platforms and individual participants an evolving set of 'Best Practices' to encourage open, democratic and transparent interaction. Further, to help participants who wish to engage with those platforms to know, at a glance, which aspects of the best practices they can reasonably expect to be applied to their experience.

The history...

Over the past weeks, Eric Blantz, Khris Loux, Stowe Boyd and I (Chris Saad) have been discussing the ethics and best practices around social media and social tools, specifically with regard to the needs of a social tools vendor like JS-Kit. All of us are working with JS-Kit in some way or another. The Recent Facebook flap about their Terms of Service led us to consider addressing these issues in a larger forum. As Eric said, 'the value of the activity is proportional to the involvement of a wider group of smart people.' We immediately thought of the Media 2.0 Workgroup as a good start for that wider group. As a result, JS-Kit authorized us to donate our draft materials to the workgroup for open sourcing to the community.

We have high aspirations, but we don't know exactly what form any results of the process might take. Perhaps we will be able to define a strong consensus on a number of topics that we will craft into a document or a website. Alternatively, we might fall into camps, arguing different sides of complex issues. Perhaps we would create a series of public conversations on the most difficult and important topics, and video those, with participation of others. We don't know.

We do know that the issues around the ethics of participation in the social web are enormous importance. The web is the most valuable human artifact ever created, and it is ours: there is no higher authority to ask 'how should we act?' We have to look to ourselves to find these answers, and the sooner the better.

The plan...

This will be a document owned by the community for any vendor in the marketplace to adopt. The core group of participants will discuss and debate the issues over the coming conferences (SxSW, Web 2.0 etc) and we will keep the entire community informed via the Mailing List, Twitter and Media 2.0 Workgroup feed.

Initial Participants in the process are...

Chris Saad, Khris Loux (On Behalf of JS-Kit), Eric Blantz, Stowe Boyd, Micah Baldwin (On behalf of Lijit), Brian Solis, Ben Metcalfe, Marianne Richmond, Jeremiah Owyang, Daniela Barbosa,  Peter Kim, Loïc Le Meur (also on behalf of Seesmic/Twhirl), Deborah Schultz.

Check it out...

Visit the site and view the strawman at www.mediabestpractices.com