Badge Wiki: start of 30-day feedback period on Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

Earlier this year, I wrote about the importance of thinking about a project’s architecture of participation when encouraging contribution from a new or existing community of people.

In that post, I included a checklist containing eight points to consider. I think I’ve got another one to add: get your policies right by soliciting feedback on them.

We Are Open Co-op is currently in the first phase of creating Badge Wiki, a knowledge base for the Open Badges community. It’s a project made possible through the support of Participate.com.

As part of this process, we have to come up with several policies, perhaps the two most important of which are the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. We decided to use the Wikimedia Foundation’s openly-licensed policies as a starting point, adapting them to our needs.

This has thrown up some interesting issues and considerations from an architecture of participation point of view. After all, if people don’t agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, they can’t use Badge Wiki. There are three important ways in which our draft policies differ from the original Wikimedia Foundation source policies:

1. CC BY – we propose that Badge Wiki use a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license instead of the CC BY-SA license used on other wikis, including Wikipedia. Although we would encourage them to do so, we recognise that some people may not be in a position to share material they reuse and remix from Badge Wiki under an open license.
2. Register to edit – we propose that, in order to edit Badge Wiki, you must have a registered user account, approved by an administrator. This is to prevent valuable contribution time being taken up by wiki vandalism, trolling, and other anti-social behaviours caused by anonymous editing.
3. Real name policy – we propose that members of Badge Wiki use their real names on their profile pages, as well as provide a short bio. This is to prevent accusations of sabotage, given that the Open Badges ecosystem includes commercial interests.

You can access the draft Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for Badge Wiki at the links below:

• Badge Wiki: draft Terms of Use
• Badge Wiki: draft Privacy Policy

You’re welcome to leave feedback on the posts themselves, in relevant Open Badges Google Group thread, or directly to us: [email protected].