APEX News - Special Edition
Disclaimer: Articles published express the views of the contributing Authors and are not necessarily those of the APEX Board of Directors and / or the APEX Newsletter Editor.
COMMUNITY BUILDING CASE STUDIES
INTRODUCTION
We humans process information differently. When methods of processing information are well established, we often have created barriers to achieve adaptive change, which in turn determines how we deal with fear and anxiety as normal activity.
However any change which is adaptive rather than technical will, as a matter of course, put at risk a way of knowing the world that also serves as a way of managing a persistent, fundamental anxiety and unnecessary complexity to our efforts to affect the change process. So let us look at a few case studies to assess change, building community and rekindling critical thinking.
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GEOCITIES - ACQUIRED BY YAHOO! Inc
Yahoo! Inc. is closing its GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.) personal home page service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the Web that's largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.
GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.) rose to power during an era when publishing on the Internet meant setting up your own Web site. GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.) simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML, the language that describes Web pages.
“We will be closing GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.) later this year (2009)” Yahoo! Inc. said in a note on the site. “We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer.”
Today, the way people choose to express themselves on the Internet is shifting away from isolated Web pages. Instead they use social-networking sites such as Facebook (© Yahoo! Inc.) with built-in features for creating a profile, staying in touch with contacts, and maintaining at least a little privacy; WordPress, where it's easy to post updates to a blog; or Flickr (© Yahoo! Inc.) where the photographically inclined can meet, share, and comment.
Conclusion: Yahoo! Inc. did, in fact, change the community aspect of GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.) which eventually left single entities of web pages with no common interest evident.
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ESTABLISHMENT OF DCA ( Disability Compliance Alliance )
Many agree that the innocence of those early years ( 1997-1999 ) at GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.) is lost. A time in which the Internet was young and full of eager men, women and children establishing web pages. Who believed that the little people would have a viable presence and not let this new medium fall into the hands of the “establishment.”
But one idea which did not loose its appeal was that of helping those less fortunate, or our disABLED. Although the Heartland Disability Compliance Alliance ( HDCA ) is now but a handful of its high mark of 1,408 members, those who remain, those who would join and those who remember Heartland have a deep feeling of pride in what has been accomplished. Perhaps in some small way those early pioneers who did not possess the HTML authoring tools nor validation tools of today, really led the way.
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The September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11) consisted of a series of coordinated terrorist suicide attacks by Islamic extremists on that date upon the United States of America. This horrific massacre forever changed the United States of America.
In some way 9/11 also changed our innocence, online communities, the way we present our thoughts or ideas on the Internet, brought on a profusion of spammers, scam artists, copyright infringers, unsupported news and a host of other less than ethical practices.
Whether we will return to helping our disABLED through involvement in online activities such as the Disability Compliance Alliance, in greater numbers than at the height of Heartland Disability Compliance Alliance (HDCA) will be a matter left to historians in future years.
Conclusion: By eliminating the community aspect which involved many persons to espouse accessibility, the furtherance of involvement by new members was curtailed with no new additions and as the older members abandoned their web presence, the membership began to shrink.
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ESTABLISHMENT OF APEX
The Association for Positive Ethical eXchange was formed in November of 1999 as a response to an increasing awareness that many companies abuse the Internet by defrauding the public. They promise goods and services, and collect money for those goods and services, but either do not provide what was promised or provide substandard goods or services without recourse for dissatisfied customers. A complete history may be found at the following link:
http://www.apex-ethics.com/history.htm
APEX transitioned from its original intent (above) more toward award program owners, then back to its emphasis on ethical behavior and inclusiveness. Since a major effort involves education and showing by example, perhaps revisiting ethics is not only appropriate, but necessary.
ETHICS
A code of ethics sets out in detail both acceptable and unacceptable behavior and promotes high standards of practice in relationships with human kind. Codes of ethics are traditionally divided into normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics.
Further, they may be voluntary or involuntary or subject to administrative review or not subject to administrative or peer review. Various forms of Ethics follow:
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Normative Ethics - Normative Ethics or Prescriptive Ethics is the study of moral problems which seeks to discover how one ought to act, not how one does in fact act or how one thinks one should act.
Metaethics - Metaethics investigates where our ethical principles come from and what they mean. Are they merely social inventions?
Applied Ethics - Applied ethics involves examining specific controversial issues by using the conceptual tools of metaethics and normative ethics and discussions in applied ethics try to resolve these controversial issues.
Peer reviews have been subject to criticism throughout a broad spectrum of activities.
Conclusion: Whether APEX learns ( other organizations too ) from the GeoCities (© Yahoo! Inc.), Yahoo! Inc. and DCA case studies will remain a question. Also whether the dynamics which led to more recent changes in information delivery remain viable or will change too, remains a question.
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SUMMARY
- • Building a community and future proofing a master plan requires due diligence, keeping abreast of technological changes, reinforcement of original intent and a host of other considerations all of which require doing more than paying lip service.
- • The sum total of any community building effort encompasses the collective knowledge and willingness of the community in adapting to change and mitigation of the fear to change if necessary.
- • The Internet will retain a place for budding authors, graphic artists and small business interests only if a collective spirit remains which does not hand over the reins of individuality to narrow minded entities.
Acknowledgement: The above article was provided by and is Copyright © Denny Lancaster 2009 - 2010 with sole publishing rights being held by APEX and may not be republished and / or redistributed without the written permission of the Author.