Experiences in Crowd Sourcing
ARwJgR Of course, I understand a little about this post but will try cope with it!!...
Strange but true. Your resource is expensive. At least it could be sold for good money on its auction!...
Thank you, a very interesting note!!...
Not bad post, but a lot of extra !!...
Drumbeat Privacy Project
Michael Feldman
Ok. So I was intimidated by some of the other possible projects such as Twithawk and Mechanical Turk. Signing up for things and following directions? Ew. So, the clear solution was to try and tackle the creative problem proposed by Drumbeat to simplify various internet companies' privacy policies, a la Creative Commons. The idea is to create a simple structure of icons, images and phrases to more effectively communicate a companies privacy policy without requiring the user to sift through a ton of dense legalese.
In creative commons, each icon which stands for a particular set of rights the author wishes to protect. But this won't work for privacy policies because the policies are different for each company. They don't merely invoke a set of already-delineated rights. One organization called Privacy Choice has already tried to create icons to simplify the process of learning about companies privacy policies, (see http://www.privacychoice.org/whos_watching). But this website is not completely effective since it requires the user to "mouse over" various categories of privacy policies, only to encounter much more "mumbo jumbo."
It seemed to me that the primary design problem was that there are multiple levels of information: specific data within specific provisions within general categories. So I tried to create an idea for a basic system which used the Privacy Choice Categories (plus a few others I thought would be relevant), color coded them so that a user could tell which categories might require greater attention, and then placed the provisions on a rather vague scale. While not as specific as an ultimate solution might want to be, this at least gives a user site-specific information that will be useful before delving into the actual text. From here, the next step would be to create a stock of short phrases which could appear when the user mouses over the icons which would give more detailed information without resorting to large blocks of text.
All in all, the challenge is very interesting and definitely something I would be happy to continue to work on over the next few weeks. The specific challenge of conveying all information in a given privacy policy in simpler symbols is one which will likely require involvement of the actual companies to conform their policies to set rubrics (or at least stock modular blocks of text), but short of that, it might be possible to create a more intuitive set of symbols that could be more generally applicable to all policies. But then there would still be the problem of aggregation of information since people would have to go through each policy to decode it and re-encode it into the new system.
You can find the actual suggestions I posted to drumbeat here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Drumbeat/Challenges/Privacy_Icons.
Bruno Magrani
If Firefox is about making the web better through software, drumbeat intends to be the twin brother that focus on connecting project ideas and people together to promote a better web. In a way, one can think about it as an incubator for projects to improve people's experience on the web.
Because the project seemed quite exciting to me I took the liberty to exchange some emails with the people involved to get a sense of how I could be of most help to the project and decided to collaborate coming up with other examples of people who are contributing to improve the web. This first initial experience â being able to chose how to best participate in the project â denoted one of the wonders of online peer production: the advantage over traditional industrial information production systems in terms of information gains regarding how to connect a person's interest with a specific task.
If one important component of the project involves coming up with ideas for projects an equally important component involves getting real life examples of who is doing what to improve the web. It works both as way to recognize the efforts of these people, but also to stimulate other people to do the same and start their own initiatives. In a sense this is intended to send a message saying: everyone can and should contribute to make a better web.
One of the things that I notice while reading the projects and people being featured was that they were too much focused on experiences happening in the United States and some in Europe, so I decided to come up with examples of what both common and notorious people were doing in a developing country such as Brazil. My contribution can be found here and I'm definitely going to keep contributing to the project.