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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."
I don't know why EWeek is specifically highlighting open source software. I don't see how closed source software is immune from this concern.
If you're a nonprofit, you need to look at all the software you're, open-source or not. If you're using software you need to examine it to make sure its not sending a message at odds with your organization.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
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. Ugh, this is not a story. This isn't the case on the agency's own site, but it was the case on the pages for Causes, which puts widgets... Facepalm.
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.
Even Microsoft can get hit by this.
I worked for the university webmaster back when I was in school. My boss noticed the option "Palestinian Territories, Occupied" appeared in the dropdown list of some web-form software we were using. Being kind of a joker, he then changed Iraq to "Iraq, Occupied". It remains like that to this day, years later.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Please don't bring the Israel/Palestine mudwrestling into slashdot. The walls have just been freshly painted, and it's not fundamentally a technology issue anyway, since those lobby groups will latch onto anything for publicity.
From TFA:
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.
25+ years back, I somehow got "volunteered" into putting up the flags for the World Youth Baseball Tournament when it was held in the town where I lived at the time.
There were about 15 or 20 countries involved and the organizers handed me a big box of flags, one for each country, and said "Here you go", and that was the extent of the direction that I received.
Each flag had a little tag pinned to it saying what country it was for, so I just put them up in alphabetical order, more-or-less the way that they came out of the box.
This almost caused an international diplomatic incident!
Apparently you can't put country X's flag up next to country Y because they are fighting about something, or Y doesn't recognize X, or you-name-it. Phones started to ring, including mine, and I had to rush out again and re-arrange the flags to suit the diplomats.
I ultimately put those flags up in four different orders over the course of the week or so that the baseball tournament was on, because the arrangements never suited everyone. I only had the "diplomatic incident" occur once, on that first day, but I spent hours on the phone with various mucky-mucks smoothing ruffled feathers. And re-arranged those damn flags almost every day afterward.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
"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.
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
And lets be honest about this: this is a company who has contributed NOTHING to the author for his time or effort and then has the gall to not only complain about his output,but smear all those like him who are nice enough to offer their software to us in a manner that allows to customize it to our tastes,with that "perils of open source" crap. I repeat this is just like those greedy lazy companies that sponge off the GPL for the software for their products while having a fit that they should Deity forbid have to give back. The only reason I am not nastier in my disgust towards them is I had the good fortune to see the positive side of open source this very night.
A customer of mine for whom I have been doing a lot of work recently and have had the good fortune to strike up a friendship with is an amateur astronomer. He also does a little consulting work on the side with the local college and has struck up a friendship with the rocketry and astronomy clubs,who like to pick his brain since he is a retired NASA engineer(he used to help design the full scale mock ups and did a lot of TTL and CMOS work for them in Houston. It was way cool to hold some of the original plans for the shuttle in my hands.). As we all know college is expensive and since the astronomy club is considered a "hobbyist" club they don't get the really cheap software provided by the college. I try to keep an eye out for good free open source software I think my customers would like and recently came across Stellarium which compares in features to the over $500 software that the teacher that hosts the astronomy club uses. After David showed them the other day what Stellarium could do and told them that I would be out there with him tonight to check out his telescope....well it was kind of funny actually. I walk out there and there is a line of college kids with their laptops hoping I would give them "that really cool software that David uses". So under a starry sky we had a little Stellarium install fest with me setting up the machines(mostly Windows and one Mac and one EEE) while David set the positioning.
You see IMHO it is moments like THAT that make Free Open Source software great,not some company whining that the software they got for free doesn't do exactly what they want. I read TFA BTW. Did you notice what they did when they had a problem? Did they donate some money to the developers? Maybe paid them a little money in return for customizing the software to their needs? Nope they just bitched and whined and smeared all open source with their little FUD article. At least the college kids who I helped out are grateful and are talking about donating a little money or time or at the very least writing them an email to thank them for their wonderful gift.
But it never ceases to amaze me how these companies think because they get something for free they can act like it is shit. I repeat: fork it or use one of the myriad of other pieces of software out their that better suits your needs. But don't bother whining when you can't even send a couple of bucks to the developers to get it customized to your needs. They are NOT your free employees so don't expect them to jump through your hoops when you give absolutely nothing in return. And as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The inital list was "feature" complete.
Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and a couple of other countries were ommited via the credit card processor.
( professedly due to exessive fraud.)
The person from israel who could not donate
found instant and easy issue with Palestine
being included.
The author blew it up for clicks or a donation
from Bill of Borg.
End of story.
G!
MACC