On starting to read the page explaining the reasoning behind the move from sixty policies to one, it becomes very clear that the language being used is that of promotion, aiming to convince readers that this is a good idea. In and of itself this is interesting, and perhaps show some insecurities that Google may have in what they are doing.

The language used emphasises ease and simplicity:

• “We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read.”
• “Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.”
• “Easy to work across Google – Our new policy reflects our desire to create a simple product experience that does what you need, when you want it to.”
• “Easy to share and collaborate – When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.”

But as with any good advertising they seem to be introducing and solving a problem that perhaps customers never knew existed.

By using Wordle we can quickly compare the language of the existing main privacy policy with the privacy policy that will come in to place on 1 March.

Existing Google Privacy Policy

Google Privacy Policy from 1 March 2012

Whilst these diagrams are hardly scientific (and I would be fascinated to read a proper language analysis of both documents and the rationale page) it is interesting to note the possible decrease in the use of the word ‘privacy’ in the latest policy. The word ‘security’ also features considerably less in the latest document – for those who might not be able to see it at first, it appears above the word ‘use’, top centre.

Google provide an archive of previous policies and version changes here, a practice which they seem to have started in 2004 (see last section) and one I hope they continue.

In 2005 they introduced a phrase in the last section of the policy: ‘We will not reduce your rights under this Policy without your explicit consent[...]‘. In the current and new versions of the policy this is a stand alone sentence.

In creating one policy it may, even in the simplest terms, combine your personal and professional use of their services, let alone create much more complex problems that subtle differences and uses of all sixty previous policies perhaps necessarily resolved.

So based on their own policy the question arises: have Google reduced your rights and are you able to give your explicit consent?

On May 16, 2011, Jeremy Hunt, U.K. secretary of state for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, asked
citizens and those who work in fixed or mobile communications, television, radio, online publishing, video games, and other digital and creative content industries for responses to an open letter reviewing communications in the digital age. The open letter contained a series of questions aimed at gathering business and citizen ideas “to help frame the Government’s initial approach to deregulation and maximize the communications industry’s contribution to economic growth.”

Hunt invited responses and ideas via a YouTube video (the department has had its own channel since 2006), and the department’s dedicated webpage encouraged visitors to have their say using the Twitter hashtag #commsreview. The open letter responses would be used to form a green paper, the U.K. equivalent of a proposed rule, to be published later in the parliamentary term for further consultation, followed by a final policy directive, known as a white paper, to be put before government.

Hunt describes the aim of the communication review as to “strip away unnecessary red tape and remove barriers to growth. The wider public interest will underpin the way we address these issues.”
And therein lies the key, “wider public interest”,not just to how this review is being conducted but the significant shift in how policy creation and government are now operating, which is essential for businesses to understand.

On both sides of the Atlantic transparency, open government, open data and social media have been increasingly discussed. Going hand-in-hand with freedom of information, they have been part of policy and communications development for a number of years.

In the U.K. we have seen the development of No. 10′s transparency Web pages, which include lists of which corporations government ministers are meeting with and the energy usage by departments communicate consistently every government department building. The Public Sector Transparency Board set up by Prime Minister David Cameron has the agenda of ensuring the release of key public datasets, setting open data standards across the whole public sector and “listening to what the public wants and then driving through the opening up of the most needed data sets.”

To make sense of this raw government data, new services are beginning to appear. Initially using U.K. data, this year saw the launch of Open Corporates. They aim to create a URL for every company in the world on their website (think of it as a corporate Wikipedia but with financial data) and import government transactional data relating to those companies where possible. So far they have 26 million companies listed across 31 jurisdictions, including the United States. Put this service together with another data driven U.K. site, Who’s Lobbying?, and you have the beginnings of a new accessible set of transparency tools.

This is a significant cultural shift. The U.K. civil service has been long renowned for its closed, conservative, cautious nature, doing the bidding of ministers and senior civil servants quietly. It is now being asked to work openly, publicly and collaboratively, of which using social media for public two-way communication with citizens and businesses is just a part. For some, this is terrifying. And it is already challenging how departments communicate consistently to everyone, rather than exclusively to press or favored business partners.

The economic climate and global down turn has also made citizens more aware of how their tax dollars are being spent. Yet unlike the past, citizens are now not only more easily able to access government spending data but to share their thoughts via social networks, forums and blogs. Obvious results are the “Occupy” protests in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere.

Catherine Howe, chief executive of the company Public-i, thinks this social media, transparency and open data shift has both a positive and negative impact for companies doing business with the public sector. She considers the upside to be access and connecting to the right people quickly. However, “You have to assume that every contact you have with government will end up in public. Not just contracts, but taking someone out to dinner,” she says. “This is fine if you share values as a business with the ministers or councillors you are dealing with but it will cause problems if the dealings are inconsistent with your (or their) brand.” And just like civil servants, this is something she believes that businesses will have to adjust to.

Welcome to Open Business.

*************

Links
http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/telecommunications_and_online/8109.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/user/dcms https://twitter.com/#!/dcms
http://kathryncorrick.co.uk/2011/07/04/reviewing-the-uk-communications-act-an-open-
letter-to-jeremy-hunt/
http://www.number10.gov.uk/transparency/who-ministers-are-meeting/
http://opencorporates.com/
http://whoslobbying.com/
http://data.gov.uk/blog/new-public-sector-transparency-board-and-public-data-
transparency-principles http://www.public-i.info/
http://www.public-i.info/

With kind thanks to Service Contractor magazine for permitting the re-publishing of this article.

This started as an update to this post but I realised that once I had written over eleven paragraphs it probably needed its own URL. Right, deep breath, here goes…

*************

I’d like you all to read ‘In which I don’t try to write like a man’ by Margaret Robertson. Margaret is both a leading games writer and development director of Hide & Seek. It is her response to Mark Sorrell’s blog post ‘Dear Men, Please Listen. Love, Man‘ and also a discussion thread about his article on Reddit.

Reading it made me feel so incredibly sad. Margaret is one of the leading thinkers and writers in the UK about games, and is someone who I regard highly. And yet she has felt that she has had to behave in certain ways within the games industry and online so that she did not become a target for abuse. She writes:

Here are some other things that I included in my ‘not making myself a target’ strategy:

- not wearing skirts
- not wearing heels
- not coming to the defence of other women on the receiving end of abuse and threats and dismissals
- not, under any circumstances, ever ever ever ever indicating that there might be any sexual activity in my thoughts or my life or my body
- not talking about ‘being a woman’ or anything dumb and feminist like that
- judging the success of my approach on the number of people who didn’t realise from my writing that I was female.

She also points to how games executive, Jade Raymond, has been accused within the Reddit discussion (and presumably elsewhere) of letting herself be used as a sex symbol in the following photo:

Good grief.

As if to prove the point, the accusation gets repeated in the comments under Margaret’s post, by a determined but rather ignored troll.

Margaret has made be ponder whether I similarly self-edit. I don’t think I do, and I don’t think in the industries I work in that I fear being known as a woman or fear that I should play down that fact. I am aware that I self-edit in terms of professionalism, business objectives and protecting the privacy of friends, colleagues, clients and family but those are very different reasons to self-editing from dread of abuse.

No one should feel they should self-edit to such an extent that they deny who they are out of fear. For there lies tyranny.

But what to do?

This story by PestilantialSpoon in the comments of Margaret’s post (there isn’t a comment URL so I can’t link to it, but it appears about 69 comments in) perhaps highlights a common challenge:

I’d tried playing by the rules when I started a new game industry job a couple of years back. You’ll understand this when I say that I wanted to be respected as a professional, and I was afraid that my propensity to joke around with “the boys” at my previous game job diminished the respect they had toward me. So with some resolve, I vowed to “play by the rules” when I started my new job. Let’s just say it wasn’t even a month in before flagrantly inappropriate behavior started happening.

Regardless of how I dress, what I (don’t) say, or what I (don’t) do, there will always be men who don’t treat me with the respect they should. The good news is there are men who do! Indeed, there was one programmer who was a tremendous support to me throughout the sexual harassment I was experiencing. It’s good to know there are guys like that.

I’ve left that job due to a multitude of reasons, and now that I find myself gearing up to start a new job, I ask myself repeatedly how I should conduct myself on a day to day basis. I definitely want to be myself – and for me, that means I still want to joke around with the boys sometimes. That might leave the playing field open for the occasional dodo to cross the line, but I guess all I can do is make that line well and fully known and deal with anyone crossing it swiftly and decisively. I guess it remains to be seen whether I can have it both ways, but it’s worth a shot. Wish me luck.

Margaret herself has concluded:

But in the end, I was right to think I was clever and smart. I have avoided making myself a target of sexist assholes by playing by their rules. I’ve done a *blinding* job of that so far.

I think I’m going to stop doing that now.

Hurrah!

Yet, all of this has made me wonder – is the games industry institutionally sexist? I don’t have an answer to this. I don’t want to make a sweeping generalisation, particularly given that I do not work directly in the industry I work more on the outskirts. But it is difficult to come to any other conclusion.

If that is the case, then I’d suggest that it may make some of the problems easier to tackle. Rather than at the moment the vague notions that the situation is part of games industry culture and wider complex social issues regarding gender. In doing so it would make the problem less abstract.

Institutions have policies, regulations, best practice, goals, KPIs – and numerous other managerial and business instruments. We all love to dislike such policies at times, but quite often they have good purpose behind them. This wouldn’t be a cure, but it would be a starting point*.

Thoughts?

*This does not mean that I do not think other industries don’t have similar challenges be it for either gender, but as I stated in the last blog post it’s good to try and change your corner of the world if you can.

UPDATE 17/12/2011: If it’s not clear above, I would be as interested in hearing that the games industry isn’t institutionally sexist, and evidence to show that. This is a genuine, not rhetorical question.

To explain, @doctoe (Jo Twist) is leaving Channel 4 in January to become CEO of UKIE, the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment. @sorrell (Mark Sorrell) is Head of Games at Screenpop.

Now we’ve got that out the way, let’s link to the post and tell the story of what happened next [warning post contains some language that some viewers may find, well, sweary]. Dear Men, Please Listen. Love, Man, wrote Mark aka @sorrell.

When you read it through make sure you also take time to view the comments.

[inserting some time for you to read and digest - this took me about ten minutes].

Digested version
For those of you who do not have ten minutes to spare then here’s the digest digested:

Mark is angry at the way women are often treated online, ‘particularly in the game community and their lack of representation in the game industry’. He’d like to change this. He also thinks that for things to change men need to talk about it and agree that there this is a problem, and begin to think through how to change this behaviour.

This is an issue and area which often brings with it sweeping generalisations and polemic positions. It’s also incredibly complicated, far wider than the games industry. We could chew the cud as to the extent of the problem and look at other industries to see where the reverse occurs, however many of these discussions have been rehearsed and re-hashed elsewhere. Let’s keep focussed.

Timing is everything

Mark’s post is timely. It follows a piece written last week by Kira Cochrane looking at Why is British public life dominated by men?. There are also numerous other initiatives that have been growing within the tech industry over the last several years to encourage more women to work in technology and digital related jobs, and also to support those who already work in these industries.

For instance, the work Suw Charman-Anderson has done in establishing Ada Lovelace day, highlighting women who work in science & technology – which we took to OpenTech in 2009. Or She Says which focusses on women in advertising and creative businesses.

Gathering apace is also a movement to change England & Wales’ teaching of ICT from being mainly about using office software packages to programming and coding. Coding for Kids and the Young Rewired State, lead by Emma Mulqueeny, are aiming to ‘find and foster the young children and teenagers who are driven to teaching themselves how to code’.

Having worked in digital media for over ten years trying to encourage both men and women to fulfil their potential, my point is that this feels different. Dare I even say ‘zeitgeist-ie’ or the beginnings of a tipping point. We’re not there yet, and if you read Cochrane’s article you may even feel that in the wider sphere of British public life things are going backwards, but it’s good to try and change your corner of the world if you can.

But perhaps we’re further than we think? Last year I invited a male friend to the launch of Social Media Week. What surprised him was the number of women in the room (it was roughly 65:35 or 60:40 male:female if memory serves me correctly), particularly he said in comparison to the advertising industry, which was what he was used to and where you’d hardly see any women at a similar event.

Anyhow what happened next?

After reading Mark’s post I had a chat with him on Twitter (apologies if these don’t quite seem to be in the right order, Twitter has yet to make linking to entire conversations that easy):

What I like about Mark’s approach is that it is not only the premis that men need to begin to take responsibility for behaviour online, but that changing attitudes and behaviour to women online and in the games industry makes good business sense. He’s not the first to say this, and I remember having a conversation along similar lines with Tom Armitage back in 2006 after we’d been to the first Game City festival, but this point is the leverage, it’s the potential reason for change:

The more diverse your team, the more diverse your products, the more attitudes and angles will be considered and the better your product will be. The more money you will make. In a world of freemium, of mass-market gaming, of digging out those few whales that will bring money and fame to your game, you need to have as broad an appeal as possible. More diversity in your company will bring more diversity to your product. So form a more diverse team. And if the people just aren’t there for you to hire, make damn sure you’re pressuring everywhere you can to ensure that these people do exist in the future.

The government state that:

The Open Data measures will boost investment in medical research and digital technology in the UK, including many small and medium sized enterprises. This will help realise the Prime Minister’s ambition to make Tech City one of the world’s great technology centres and create an environment where the next Apple or Skype could come out of the UK by making useful and valuable transport, health, weather and house price data available.

The measures will specifically:

• improve medical knowledge and practice with world-first linked-data services which will enable healthcare impacts to be tracked across the entire Health Service and improve medical practice; the service is expected put the UK in a prime position for research investment
• make business logistics and commuting more efficient through new planned and real-time information on the running of trains and buses across Great Britain and data on almost every road in Britain for the first time, including road works, for use in ‘satnav’ and digital technology
• allow entrepreneurs to develop useful applications for business and consumers using the largest volume of open, free, high-quality weather data in the world along with house prices at address level
• empower patients through individual access to their personal GP records online and encourage the market for education data management and learning platforms.

It all looks like good news, but the devil is often in the detail, so I’m still trying to digest what this may mean in practice. For those much wiser than I here is the news via an email from Jule Price Julie Price, Assistant Director, Shareholder Executive, Department for Business, Innovation & Skills:

Dear All

As promised we want to keep our stakeholders up to date with the latest progress on the Public Data Corporation project. You may well have seen the Chancellor’s announcement within today’s Autumn Statement but I thought that it would be helpful to set out what this means in practice.

The [UK] Government has today announced that:

To support the growth of high-value data businesses and make access to data easier for startups, the Government is making available for free a range of core reference data sets. In addition it is announcing the creation of a Data Strategy Board and a Public Data Group which will maximise the value of data the public sector buys from the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Companies House.

What this means in practice:
Delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation, Government has announced the establishment of a Data Strategy Board (DSB) which will seek to maximise the value of data from the Public Data Group (PDG) of Trading Funds for long-term economic and social benefit, including through the release of data free of charge.

Sending a clear signal of the DSB’s mandate, Government is announcing the release of additional core reference datasets for unrestricted use from the PDG, including, for the first time, weather observation and detailed weather forecast data and core data from the Companies Register.

The PDG currently includes Ordnance Survey, Met Office, HM Land Registry and Companies House. The Group will identify and deliver efficiencies and synergies to reduce the cost of data for users and re-users of data and provide additional funding for making data freely available.

This change clearly separates the commissioning and provision functions of public data, rebalancing the incentives to release more data for free, as well as strengthening the capability of Government to commission data for its own needs.

This announcement signals a significant step towards making additional core reference data from the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, HM Land Registry and Companies House available and free at the point of use.

For further information on the wider announcement please see the following link: http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/news/open-data-measures-growth-review

I do hope this is helpful and we will of course keep you informed of further progress.

If you would like to discuss this further please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards.

Julie

UPDATE 8/12/2011: Tim Davies has evaluated what all this might mean in a blog post here.

The term isn’t new and has been one of a number of phrases to describe social entrepreneurship and social enterprises – where businesses have social goals such as who they employ, the environment, fair trade, giving back to the local community and putting people, society and issues before profit. Good examples of such businesses are Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant, the People Tree fashion house and the Grameen Bank.

All of which means things can get a bit confusing.

Look up ‘social business’ in Wikipedia and you’ll quickly see that the older use of the term is employed.

Why mention this?
I was recently asked to take part in a set of videos for IBM looking at the newer use of the term, which was not something I was going to turn down. Yet having worked with social enterprises on and off for over ten years I’m still not comfortable with its newer use, even if the principles are something that I would generally encourage and that I also work as a consultant and trainer with clients to help them put into practice.

Two of the videos produced by IBM are below, so that you can get some sense of how IBM and others consider ‘social business’.

Perhaps like the term ‘social media’ the very practices it describes will become so prevalent that we will understand these practices as simply media and good business? There is one more video yet to be published entitled ‘The Future of Social Business’, which may also indicate a solution.

Following this training course, you will be able to:

• Understand how to strategically plan your Facebook campaign(s)
• Understand the latest technical advances Facebook has to offer
• Consider your Facebook Apps campaign and brief an agency/developer
• Create, develop and manage successful Facebook Pages
• Understand your Facebook Advertising options and challenges
• Monitor and measure your Facebook campaign performance
• Understand the privacy and legal issues around Facebook and your data

Here’s the course description:

Facebook Marketing Training Course
12 Mar 2012, Covent Garden, London

With 800 million users worldwide and more than 30 million users in the UK, chances are you are familiar with Facebook but are probably not using its full potential in your organisation or business.

The Emarketeers Facebook Marketing course takes a hands-on, practical approach, leading you through the stages in developing and implementing a Facebook campaign. The course also explains the strategic decisions you will need to take in order harness the full capability of the world’s largest social network.

This one day course, led by two industry experts, will use a combination of practical exercises, presentations and case studies, so that by the end of the day you will be equipped with the skills and knowledge you need to excel at Facebook marketing.

Course Programme

Overview

• How are individuals using Facebook, what are the latest trends?
• What does Facebook have to offer for brands and organisations?
• What are the key differences between features such as Profiles, Places, Groups and Pages?
• What is Facebook good for and not good for?
• Some of the challenges and legal issues in using Facebook for brands
• How does Facebook fit into a wider social media and communications strategy?

Getting Up To Speed: A look at the latest changes and what they mean for brands

• The Timeline and Ticker
• Open Graph
• “Frictionless sharing”
• The latest Apps
• Examples – who’s got it right; room for improvement?
• Advantages and challenges

Introduction to Facebook Connect

• What is Facebook Connect and what does it make possible?
• Adding ‘Share’ and ‘Like’ buttons on your own website
• Comment functions

Facebook Pages

• What makes a successful Facebook Page? Examining examples and case studies
• How to set up a page
• How to bring in content from an external sources (RSS, iFrames)
• Retention: growing a page vs. maintaining a page
• How much content to produce? Content creation vs. content curation
• Running competitions
• Introduction to Edge Ranking. What does a ‘Like’ really mean?
• Managing your pages – moderation, spam prevention, Facebook search
• When and why to get an agency involved, what do you need to brief an agency?
• Top do’s and don’ts

Facebook Apps

• What are Facebook apps and what’s possible?
• What is the Facebook API and what does that mean?
• Case studies and examples
• Briefing a developer or an agency
• Top ten tips on what to do and what to avoid

Facebook Advertising

• What advertising options are available
• How to make a Facebook ad
• Data and demographic targeting
• Purpose of ad campaign – conversion into what?
• A/B Testing and optimisation
• FAQs: eg. to link to a Facebook Page or to your website? What click-through rate should we expect?
• Examples and tips

Measuring and Monitoring

• What can be measured and monitored?
• Industry benchmarks
• Measurement tools – what’s out there for free, what to look for when paying for a tool
• Measuring success beyond your Facebook Page and ‘Likes’ – from web analytics to KPIs, thinking strategically about measuring success

Managing and Administrating Your Facebook Presence

• The personal vs. professional grey area
• Privacy and data protection
• Resources and staffing
• Costs and budgeting
• When to get and agency involved; what to look for when searching for agencies; how to brief your agency

And if that isn’t enough… Further tactics and options

• Sponsored Stories
• Facebook Places and check-ins
• Facebook credits
• Facebook and ecommerce

More details and to book here