Part 1:

Can Facebook Get You Fired?
25% of people surveyed had heard of a coworker being disciplined for social media comments.  I too have worked for a company where employees were punished for even “liking” a negative status about the company on Facebook.  This is becoming more of an issue as people are over sharing information to the public and not thinking about the consequences of typing a few silly words about how they feel.  In the case of employees I know being punished they were all given a final warning write up for insubordination all based on here say of another employee sharing with their manager that negative comments were floating around the social site. 
The article has several key points to recognize to keep the personal space of Facebook from mixing with professional workplace issues, which are: think before you post, be picky about who you friend, do it on your own time and computer, watch what you post at home, keep the dialogue positive, figure out privacy settings, and learn your employee rights.  In this class it has been stressed to make sure we fully understand out privacy settings for each type of social media outlet we are exploring the use of and setting them to a level that would allow us to keep a professional relationship with our peers and teacher.  Another related article (Privacy of Information) recommended to read was about how “cookies” are getting smarter and more intrusive to online surfers.  This can pose a huge problem for employees who may be using their work computers to do a quick search online or have a laptop given to them from work that they also use for personal searches.  The article explains that tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to "cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.  Then bought and sold information is used to target that specific person’s interests.  The tracking software is often embedded in other files so it becomes blended with files that are necessary to operate the search engine.  The article noted MSN. com as one of the most intrusive search engines.  They created a company, Targus Information Corp, to record and track detailed information describing specific peoples’ demographic information.  Other free websites that offer a service, like dictionary.com, feel entitled to track information from visitors because they are not paying to use the site.  If this information is collected and sold, it essentially can be bought by human resources departments that are evaluating potential hires and may show up on a background check eventually.  A one time search for something that could be considered a red flag to a potential or current employer may come around to ruin an employee just from the information being so carefully tracked.


Part 2:

    A current problem in Public Affairs that needs to be addressed is the incentives for giving (to the nonprofit sector).  As the economy slipped, Americans have become more frugal with their money and held onto savings instead of giving back to organizations working to help to provide services to those in need.  Now with the looming tax changes lowering the amount that can be deducted on income taxes and the increase in the number of nonprofit organizations competing for donations, incentives to give are becoming a critical issue for strategic planning in order to create long term sustainability.
    Nonprofits use several tactics to try and create incentives to give.  Many focus on the tax exemption, give stewardship rewards, and/or memorialize large donors through name dedications (on buildings, halls, bricks, etc.).  Tax exemption is very appealing to donors in a mid-salary range because it is beneficial for lowering their tax bracket and will usually allow them to donate more to a nonprofit just by being educated on the benefits.  Stewardship rewards are a great marketing strategy to incentivize donors.  Cause related marketing, where a person purchases an item and part of the proceeds are donated, has been an up and coming trendy strategy to promote media attention to organizations and receive donations.  Any time someone receives a tangible incentive from a donation she is likely to build and retain a positive relationship with that organization and may continue to donate.  The previous two incentives to give are geared towards smaller gifts, but dedications are incentives for major gift donors.  People who are willing to give a large gift to an organization are often rewarded by having their name associated with a building or placed on a plaque honoring their large donation for everyone to see.  This is typically a status incentive amongst high profile community members.
    Recommender systems can help solve some of the issues with incentives to donate for nonprofit organizations.  Recommender systems allow interaction from advertisers with potential clients amongst people who have searched for a product or service related to other products and services.  These systems can broaden a searcher’s knowledge to other products or services they may not have previously known about that can either further help them or can be a replacement for what they were originally looking for.  According to Lessig, there are four constraints that affect a person’s behavior, the law, social norms, the market, and the architecture/design of the issue.  Recommender systems can address all of these constraints for incentives to giving.  Legally, donors can be exposed to other opportunities if their privacy settings enable their information to be shared, so the rate of exposure to other organizations related to those they are giving to can be increased and therefore allow donors to access more possibilities to donate.  Recommender systems can also increase attention to smaller organizations in a positive aspect so that it because more socially accepting to support these smaller organizations that may otherwise have gone unnoticed and underfunded.  Addressing the market for incentives to donate is a difficult issue for increasing incentives to donate.  By using recommender systems, there will be a flood of knowledge of other organizations to donors that they were unaware of previously, which can end up spreading their donations thinner amongst more organizations or frustrating them and adversely causing them not to donate at all for fear of choosing the wrong organization.  Over time, I think that this will actually allow organizations to enter into strategic mergers to lower competition for donor resources and/or eliminate organizations that are not structured to be sustainable.  Either of these will help decrease market failure for donations and in the end be beneficial to the donors and the organizations.  The constraint of the design of the issue can be alleviated by recommender systems as well because the issue is in education of how the donations are handled that affects incentives to donate.  By offering comparable organizations and information, the donor becomes more educated and can make more informed decisions, therefore their incentive to donate is sheer belief in the cause they are supporting.  Recommender systems can obviously be a beneficial tool to incorporate into strategic planning for nonprofit organizations to increase donor incentives.

Module 3

The group I chose on meetup.com that I would be interested in attending events for is the Arizona Young Professional’s Social Group.  They have several events posted per month that have a lot of attendees registered so it seems to be a popular group to attend events for.  The first event I would be interested in attending is the new members mixer on Friday September 30, and 7 pm, at Duke’s Sports Grill on Scottsdale and McDowell.  There are currently 166 people expected to attend and I have been to that bar before and like that place so it would not be too far out of my comfort zone to go meet people that are my same age and working professionals in the Valley.  I really liked to ease of searching for events on meetup.com and the diversity of options that are shared.

I chose to create an avatar on Second Life.  To learn how to explore on the website there are blogs, forums, classifieds, groups, and you can link it to your facebook so that other friends can find you and not just strangers.  I read the quick start guide for an overview and the information under the “what is second life?” and then just played around with different ideas.  I had to watch the video about how to customize my avatar because it was difficult to figure out where to go to do so, but I like that they had instructional videos for many of the different actions you could do in the second life.  I was very surprised to see how many different options there were to explore in the second life and the volume of events they had to offer for avatars to participate in and meet other people playing.  I really liked the diversity of options and interests, you can meet people, use it to express creativity, for educational purposes, or even use it as a business venture to make money.  I prefer to talk to people in real life - I have always worked in face to face customer service - so to me these types of online programs are very far out of my comfort zone.  I really cannot relate to the want or need to interface with strangers/friends in an online environment, but I find myself to be outgoing and I easily interact with people that share my interests on a regular basis.  However, if someone did not know how to find others with common interests to their own this site would be a really good opportunity to meet those types of people because it is organized really well in gathering individuals with common interests.

The content displayed on this week’s module resonated well with me.  I do not belong to any of the avatar type websites, but I do have a lot of experience with websites that rely on user generated recommendations to improve the quality of their service, like Amazon, Netflix, all of my iPhone Apps, and most of the several websites I use for online shopping.  The power that these websites gain by relying on feedback from their users is astonishing and very smart.  I also like how Anderson spoke about how anyone with a webcam can become famous now (a few shotty YouTube video stars come to mind...) because of user generated feedback on the websites like YouTube.  Going “viral” is easily attainable by the use of these types of websites.  Content shared on YouTube can be educational and help spread seminar type information to a large amount of people very easily.  The example of sharing paralysis and being a support beacon for other families who may be struggling to find hope from disabilities is a positive example of how sharing information can be helpful.  I know religious organizations have had luck with posting sermons to share their beliefs to large groups of people.  I myself have used YouTube to search a LOT of “how to” type clips because I can easily learn from watching and repeating.  The ease of gaining access to this information is a double edged sword, which is the caution from a majority of the content, because it can be used for harmful purposes as well.

Regulating Constraints for Real Life Issues

    In the Spring of 2009, Maricopa County police officers raided the home of a blogger, who was writing about information leaked by current and retired police officers.  Jeff Pataky was the writer of the blog from the website “Bad Phoenix Cops,” and was out of town when the raid took place.  Police seized his computers, hard drive, notes, and all of his backups her had in the apartment, while handcuffing his roommate so they would not be deterred.  Pataky began disliking the legal system in the Phoenix area when he was filing for a divorce with his wife, and was eventually charged with harassment after filing too many complaints against her.  From that point, he befriended several sources within the policing department that gave him insider information on the corruption of the police force.  The charges against him have all been dropped, but he feels violated for expressing information given to him by sources and sharing it with his community.  The article and interview were written by another man, Carlos Miller, who is in bad favor with the law for repeatedly taking photographs of law enforcement officials against their will and posting them for the community to see.  He created a blog website dedicated to exposing unjust charges against civilians regarding exposing the community to police wrongdoings and has taken up a collection on this website to help fund his legal battles.  The problem in this situation is that some civilians feel they have the right to expose corruption of police officials by any means necessary, and law enforcement officials disagree.  The issue involves the community, the law enforcement officials, and the legal system.  To combat this issue a more clear law must be established to define who is to blame and whether sharing information from a source, obtained legally, is still illegal if it jeopardizes the legal system.
    The issues that are in conflict in this situation are privacy and due process issues.  The police felt violated from having their mistakes exposed and felt that Pataky was infringing on their privacy.  Pataky felt that the police were not upholding the law properly and violating due process.  Each party involved felt the other was in the wrong, so conflict arose.  Pataky spent so much time trying to file his claim and fight for his rights, but the legal system was over clustered with unnecessary steps to the point where he was not patient enough and was charged with harassment for seeking quicker results.  He channeled that anger into lashing out at all law enforcement officials, and in return those officials again felt he was in violation of the law.  This vicious circle is the critical issue in the situations.  In the video posted about the legal system, Phillip K Howard addresses the issue that we are trained to look at every issue as a matter of individual rights, but instead need to realize there are circumstances that need to be taken into consideration.  He recommends to judge law by effect on the broader society not the effect on individuals.  The legal system does not currently reflect this recommendation and Pataky is a victim of the system.  Alternately, the law enforcement officials privacy was violated and they should be protected as a broader unit, and they are also in that sense victims.
    The four constraints the Lessig believes affect regulation of an issue are the market, architecture, laws, and norms. (2006 123)  In this issue, the market would be the availability of the information provided to create the blog about law enforcement officials.  The architecture involved in the issue would be the means in which the information obtained was released to the community.  The information was released through a public blog, but could have been far less damaging had it just been written in a private diary, and far more damaging had it have been professionally published and distributed to every community member.  The laws are the largest constraint on the issue because they directly address whether privacy was violated or not.  In this case, law enforcement officials felt privacy was violated, and later the courts ruled that it was not.  Phillip K Howard even explains in his speech that people are aware that what they say may be used against them legally or repeated and it is up to them to make the choice to carefully select their words or not.  The law upholds this to be true.  The final constraint is the norms.  It is not socially acceptable to hack into databases to obtain private information, even if that information shows deviant behavior, because the hacking itself is deviant behavior.  It is also not acceptable for members of an organization to leak private information to the public that would get other members in trouble.  These were both problems that occurred in the issue.
    Based on the information previously discussed, my recommendation would be to address the information leaks within the police department before singling out one blogger and destroying his personal property.  The broader effect is the end result, and addressing the issue at the root of the problem (police immorality) is more effective in achieving the end result.  The blogger should have been used as a resource to help identify issues within the police force regarding enforcement of policies.  He still may be charged with any laws that he broke, but he should have been treated more as a resource than a threat, because he exposed a critical issue in the community.  Clearly many officers do not trust their superiors and fear losing their job if they are giving a blogger information to give to the community instead of addressing the issues first hand.    Since the information was not obtained illegally by the blogger, he is simply an outlet for complaints within the police department.  Maybe an anonymous confidential tip line could be enacted for the police officers to use if they feel fellow officers are not abiding by the duties.  This would regulate the broader issue much better.
    The main differences between the two different approaches to the situation are really the attention focused on the boarder picture instead of the individual, and the legal/illegal break down in ownership of sharing information.  In the first explanation of the issue, the focus was on the individual failing at following social norms by providing information not easily obtained, teetering on breaking privacy laws, and the means by which the information was provided.  In the second explanation of the issue, the focus is on the breakdown of the systems in place for the police department to share violations of duties and the lack of structure to report issues.  The norms expect that police officers are doing their job correctly and upholding the law, but the issue addressed disagrees.  Lessig agrees that tradeoffs must be made between the constraints to regulate the issue (2006 130), but it is also important to note that the correct issue must be identified before the constraints should be restructured to balance.