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A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies

Posted by kdawson on from the careful-what-you-let-go-viral dept.

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

3 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Palestinian Territories, Occupied...Iraq, Occup by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Being kind of a joker, he then changed Iraq to "Iraq, Occupied". It remains like that to this day, years later. The software, the country, or both?
  2. Re:Interesting story... by McGiraf · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The CIA world factbook is one of the best places to get geographical data on countries."

    Yes, you are right. You can trust them because they are not controlled by any government.

  3. Re:Yes Minister by rishistar · · Score: 5, Funny

    Actually, here is the quote: Bernard Woolley (on the phone): "No, we can't have alphabetical seating in the Abbey: you would have Iraq and Iran next to each other. Plus Israel and Jordan, all sitting in the same pew. We would be in danger of starting World War III."

    --
    Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science