A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies 330
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."
Reminds me of Cosovo/Kosovo (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems like people will always look for reasons to hate each other. Can't just make a suggestion; this is something we can HATE over!
Re:Interesting story... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, there was this time the mainland Chinese government and the one on the island were in bitter competition as to whose flag would be displayed in Red Hat Linux. I forget who won, and why displaying both wasn't a valid compromise. (Probably neither side wanted to compromise.)
Possibly. (Score:3, Interesting)
If it was one guy selling the software he wrote, you'd probably see the same implementations of his political views (provided that there was a way to do so).
With Open Source, the one guy can write his political opinions into his code ... which get grabbed and used in a different project ... which ends up in a third project ... etc.
And unless you have a similar political bent, you'd never notice it. At least until someone who did have such a bent brought it to your attention.
Worst summary ever (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, what article is the summary about? I was afraid that after reading all that gibberish it could lead me to a rick roll...
So, even assuming the story is real, quite it could actually not be real, it has nothing to do with open source, I'll tag it FUD, thanks.Case in point (Score:5, Interesting)
Even Microsoft can get hit by this. [msdn.com]
Palestinian Territories, Occupied...Iraq, Occupied (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not just Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. One of the fringe benefits of introducing FOSS to the tiny Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu was when I showed local geeks that they could actually choose the 'Pacific/Efate' time zone setting. (Efate is the island where the capital of Vanuatu is located.)
Windows and Mac OS X both display either Noumea (capital of New Caledonia to the South) or Honiara (capital of the Solomon Islands to the North). This creates a very real sense that, as far as the Big Boys are concerned, we don't exist. Worse still, Mac OS X thinks that Vanuatu uses Daylight Savings Time, like the adjacent time zone in Australia. My clock has been off by an hour for months now.
That may not sound like much, but believe me, that tiny little bit of tzdata goodness has created the impression among many local geeks that this software is designed not just for office drones in some distant country, but with them in mind.
Re:Interesting story... (Score:4, Interesting)
There was also the use of the UN flag under the Gnome or Tango icon sets (forgot which one) as a "locale settings" icon. It angered non-UN countries/users. Despite it having nothing to do with the UN at all, they felt slighted.
Re:Interesting story... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Interesting story... (Score:1, Interesting)
no, it's worse than that; read the article comments. They themselves chose a payments system which doesn't work for Israel (and Russia e.g.) due to the "high level of fraud" in payments from those countries. The open source code they are compaining about has the standard ISO country codes including Israel and even has the name manipulated in way which is more likely than not to be pro-Israeli ("Occupied Palestinian Territory", the UN official name, is changed to Palestine).
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