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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."

5 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    First of all:
    This is could not have happened by using closed source software...... mhhh why?

    2nd:
    Quote frem TFA: "anti-Semitism", "blablabla"
    ->
    You all know that israel is a !STATE! with inhabitants of all colours and creeds. Not limited to guys with semitic ancestry, right? Furthermore, what are most of the palestinians (since they speak Arabian) referred to?

    I get mad when I here bullshit of this kind.

  2. Re:Huh? by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 0, Troll

    I suppose you think Taiwan is a country too? I have never heard of a country called "Taiwan" before. The only Taiwan I know of is an island governed by the Republic of China
  3. Re:Fuck em by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'm calling bullshit. Every e-commerce retailer I've ever gone to that sells outside the US has Israel listed. Every e-commerce retailer I've ever gone to don't have Palestine, which is not a country, on their list.

    This is politically motivated; the blame lies primarily upon whatever retard working on RoR put Palestine in the list of countries, but the blame lies as well on the people who didn't proof it.

    --
    "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  4. Zionists could win the Olympic gold for whining by ChameleonDave · · Score: 0, Troll

    this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages

    Well, no. The summary tries to make the inclusion of Palestine out to be extra bad, when in fact it is the opposite. Without the presence of Palestine on the list, Israelis couldn't donate to the organisation. With the presence of Palestine, Israelis can simply use that option. After all, all of the State of Israel is in Palestine, just as the Kingdom of Spain is in Iberia.

    Of course, the whining is nothing to do with donations. It's just to do with the chip Israel carries on its shoulder. They have quite some cheek in complaining about a country being denied to them on paper, when they deny a country to its native population in fact.

  5. Re:Meh by ChameleonDave · · Score: 0, Troll

    The reason this is the case is because there weren't many people that called themselves a "Palestinian" until Israel was declared a country by the UN

    And how many people called themselves "Israeli" before Israel was declared? Zero.

    "Palestinian", before that, was a national (like "British" or "American") rather than an ethnic term. Those Jews living in Palestine were happy to accept the official (from the British Mandate of Palestine) appellation of "Palestinian" for all citizens of that territory. The Jewish newspaper now called the Jerusalem Post was at that time called the Palestine Post.

    When Jewish Palestinians (in numbers swelled by massive immigration whose stated aim was to take over the country) started to claim that Palestine was actually a country called "Israel" and that they were citizens of it called "Israelis", that left Arab Palestinians (the vast majority of Palestinians) as the only ones still using the term. That had the consequence of making the term more ethnic than national, as there was now an ethnic group denied a nation, rather than a nation with many ethnic groups.