A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies

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."

Comments

Re:Not just Open Source

[masterzora]

If you RTFA, you'll find that the reasoning behind the decision is one you're more likely to find from businesses than from FOSS projects. Israel was among the list of countries from which they were receiving overly many fraudulent donations.

Overreacting

[Anonymous Coward]

If my reading of the article is right, it goes something like this:

There's a Ruby API that lists countries and regions. One of these is "Palestinian Territory -- Occupied". Someone decided to shorten this to "Palestine".

Meanwhile, someone at Facebook decided that a certain list of countries contains high risk of credit card fraud. One of those countries is Israel. So they won't take your credit card if you live there, probably because they've run into fraudsters operating in that country and they don't want to risk it. Just like they won't take a credit card from Nigeria, to name one.

So, someone sees this and concludes the worst. The Facebook application is anti-semitic. Overreact much?

Honestly, I think people are a bit too touchy about Israel/Palestine. Sure, it's a touchy subject, but a simple set of unrelated mistakes and people assume you're part of a vast conspiracy to destroy their nation? I think we as a society owe it to ourselves to be more careful about such accusations, and not simply react.

Re:OMG! OSS means people can make a statement

[bky1701]

Actually, no statement was made. The inclusion of Palestine was a glitch, and Israel was not included due to fraud originating from the country. I know this is slashdot, but would it kill maybe 3 or 4 people to actually RTFA before going off on rants? Doing that makes us all look bad. Thank you.

Article shows bias

[nwetters]

From TFA:

I pointed out that this isn't just any omission and addition. When you omit Israel and add Palestine (which is not even recognized as a country by the United Nations) to a country drop-down menu, you seem to be making a very loaded political statement.

Israel was omitted because of fraud from that country, which seems like a good reason. Palestine was probably included in the list because it is recognised by the UN, and is included in ISO 3166-1. If you were to delete Palestine from the list, it would certainly be a very loaded political statement, but its inclusion is not.

Re:Interesting story...

[phozz bare]

Dotan, You will find Israel, along with other "erased" countries such as France, Germany and the United States, all hidden under the "Industrial Countries" category. You will also notice that these other countries have a brief "at a glance" page not significantly different from Israel's.

Do you really think Israel's children are in a situation where they require the assistance of UNICEF?