Requiring Facebook for Your News Site (or website) – the Missed Opportunity

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Last week I published I blog post titled Why Banning Anonymous Comments is Bad for Postmedia and Bad for Society in reaction to the fact that PostMedia’s newspapers( including the Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, etc…) now requires readers to login with a Facebook account to make comments.

The piece had a number of thoughtful and additive comments – which is always rewarding for an author to read.

Two responses, however, came from those in the newspaper industry. One came from someone claiming to be the editor of a local newspaper. I actually believe that this person is such an editor and their comments were sincere and additive. That said, there is some irony that they did not comment using their real name, while talking about how helpful and important it is that real names/identities be used. Of course they did use an identity of sorts – their role – although this is harder to verify.

The other comment came from Alex Blonski the Social Media Director at Postmedia Network Inc.

Again, both comments were thoughtful sincere and engaging – exactly what you want from a comment, especially those that don’t entirely agree with post. I also felt like while they raised legitimate interests and concerns, they, in part, missed my point. Both ultimately ended up in the same place: that handing commenting over to Facebook made life easier for newspapers since it meant less spam and nonconstructive comments.

I agree – if the lens by which you are looking at the problem is one of management, Facebook is the easier route. No doubt. My point is that it also comes at a non-trivial cost, one that potentially sees power asymmetries in a society reinforced. Those with privilege, who have financial and social freedom to be critical, will do so. Those who may be more marginalized may not feel as safe. This tradeoff was barely addressed in these responses.

As I noted in my piece, other sites appear to have found ways to foster commenting communities that are positive and additive without requiring people to use their real identities (although giving them the freedom to do so if they wish). But of course these sites have invested in developing their community. And as I tried to stress in my last post – if you are unhappy with the comments on your website – you really have yourself to blame, it’s the community you created. Anil Dash has good thoughts on this too.

As a result, it is sometimes hard to hear of newspapers talk about people not willing to pay for the news and complain of diminishing revenue while at the same time appearing blind to recognizing that what makes for a great website is not just the content (which, especially in the news world be commoditized) but rather that community that gathers around and discusses it. Restricting that community to Facebook users (or more specifically, people willing to use their Facebook account to comment – a far smaller subset) essentially limits the part of your website that can be the most unique and the most attractive to users – the community. This is actually a place where brand loyalty and market opportunities could be built, and yet I believe PostMedia’s move will make it harder, not easier to capitalize on this asset.

I also found some of specific’s of PostMedia’s comments hard to agree with. Alex Blonski noted that they had commenters pretending to be columnists, that they were overwhelmed with spam, and claiming that Discus – the commenting system I use on my site has similar requirements to Facebook. The later is definitely not true (while you may use your real identity, I don’t require you to, I don’t even require a legit email address) and the former two comments feel eminently manageable by any half decent commenting system.

Indeed Alexander Howard – the Gov 2.0 journalist who uses the twitter handle @digiphile seems to manage just fine on his own. He recently updated his policies around moderation – and indeed his (and Mathew Ingram’s) opinions on commenting should be read by everyone in every newspaper – not just PostMedia. In the end, here is a single journalist who has more than three times the twitter followers of the Vancouver Sun (~151,000 vs. ~43,000) so is likely dealing with a non-trivial amount of comments and other social media traffic. If he can handle it, surely PostMedia can to?

 

On Being Misquoted – Access Info Europe and Freedominfo.org

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I’ve just been alerted to a new post out on Freedominfo.org has quotes of mine that are used in way that is deeply disappointing. It’s never fund to see your ideas misused to make it appear that you are against something that you deeply support.

The most disappointing misquote comes from Helen Darbishire, a European FOI expert at Access Info Europe. Speaking about the convergence between open data and access to information laws (FOIA) she “lamented that comments like Eaves’ exacerbate divisions at a time when  “synergies” are developing at macro and micro levels.” The comment she is referring to is this one:

“I just think FOIA is broken; the wait time makes it broken….” David Eaves, a Canadian open government “evangelist,” told the October 2011 meeting of International information commissioners. He said “efforts to repair it are at the margins” and governments have little incentive for reform.

I’m not sure if Darbishire was present at the 7th International Conference of Information Commissioners where I made this comment in front of a room of mostly FOI experts but the comment actually got a very warm reception. Specifically, I was talking about how the wait times of access to information requests – not theidea of Access to Information. The fact is, that for many people waiting 4-30 weeks for a response from a government for a piece of information makes the process broken. In addition, I often see the conversation among FOIA experts focus on how to reduce that time by a week or a few days. But for most people, that will still leave them feeling like the system is too slow and so, in their mind, broken, particularly in a world where people are increasingly used to getting the information they want in about .3 seconds (the length of a Google search).

What I find particularly disappointing about Darbishire’s comments is that I’ve been advocating for for the open data and access to information communities to talk more to one another – indeed long before I find any reference of her calling for it. Back in April during the OGP meeting I wrote:

There remain important and interest gaps particularly between the more mature “Access to Information” community and the younger, still coalescing “Gov2.0/OpenGov/Tech/Transparency” community. It often feels like members of the access to information community are dismissive of the technology aspects of the open government movement in general and the OGP in particular. This is disappointing as technology is likely going to have a significant impact on the future of access to information. As more and more government work gets digitized, how way we access information is going to change, and the opportunities to architect for accessibility (or not) will become more important. These are important conversations and finding a way to knit these two communities together more could help the advance everyone’s thinking.

And of course, rather than disparage Access to Information as a concept I frequently praise it, such as during this article about the challenges of convergence between open data and access to information:

Let me pause to stress, I don’t share the above to disparage FOI. Quite the opposite. It is a critical and important tool and I’m not advocating for its end. Nor am I arguing the open data can – in the short or even medium term – solve the problems raised above.

That said, I’m willing to point out the failures of both Open Data and Access to information. But to then cherry pick my comments about FOIA and paint me as someone who is being unhelpful strikes me as problematic.

I feel doubly that way since, not only have I advocated for efforts to bridge the communities, I’ve tried to make efforts to make it happen. I was the one who suggested that Warren Krafchik – the Civil Society co-chair of the Open Government Partnership be invited to the Open Knowledge Festival to help with a conversation around helping bring the two communities together and reached out to him with the invitation.

If someone wants to label me as someone who is opinionated in the space, that’s okay – I do have opinions about what works and what doesn’t work and try to share them, sometimes in a constructive way, and sometimes – such as when on a panel – in a way that helps spur discussion. But to lay the charge of being divisive, when I’ve been trying for several years to bridge the conversation and bring the open data perspective into the FOIA community, feels unfair and problematic.

Why Banning Anonymous Comments is Bad for Postmedia and Bad for Society

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Last night I discovered that my local newspaper – the Vancouver Sun – was going to require users log in with Facebook to comment. It turns out that this will be true of all Postmedia newspapers.

I’m stunned that a newspaper ownership would make such a move. Even more so that editors and journalists would support it. We should all be disappointed when the fourth estate is unable to recognize it is dis-empowering those who are most marginalized. Especially when there are better alternatives at ones disposal. (For those interested in this I also recommend reading Mathew Ingram’s post, Anonymity Has Value, In Comments and Elsewhere from over a year ago.)

So what’s wrong with forcing users to sign in via Facebook to comment?

First, you have to be pretty privileged to believe that forcing people to use their real names will improve comments. Yes, there are a lot of people who use anonymity to troll or say stupid things, but there are also many people who – for very legitimate reasons – don’t want to use their real name.

What supporters of banning anonymity are saying is not just that they oppose trolls (I do too!) but that, for the sake of “accountability” we must also know the name of recovering sexual abuse victim who wants to share their personal perspective on a story in the comments. Or that we (and thus also their boss) should get to know the name of an employee who wants to share information about illegal or unethical practices they have seen at their work in a comment. It also means that a comment you make, ten years hence, can be saved on a newspapers website, traced back to your Facebook account and so used by a prospective employer to decide if you should get a job.

What ending anonymity is really about is power. Now, those who can comment will (even more so) be disproportionately those who have the income and social security to know they can voice their concern in public, safely. So I’m confident that this move will reduce trolls – but it will also snuff out the voices of those who are most marginalized. And journalists clearly understand the power dynamics of our society and the important role anonymity plays in balancing them  this is why they use anonymous sources to get scoops and dig up stories. So how newspapers as an institution, and journalists as a profession see narrowing the opportunity for those most marginalized to challenge power and authority in the comments section as being consistent with their mission, I cannot explain.

There are, of course, far better ways of handling comments. The CBC does a quite decent job of letting people vote up and down comments – this means I rarely see the worst trolls and many thoughtful comments rise to the top. The Globe does an adequate job at this as well. Mechanisms such as these are far less draconian the “outlawing” anonymity and preserve room for those most impacted or marginalized.

But let me go further. Journalists and editors often complain about the comments section as being wild. Well how often to they take even the tiniest bit of energy to engage their commentators? There are plenty of sites that allow anonymous comments with fantastic results – see flickr or reddit – but this is because those sites invested in creating norms and engaging their users. When has a journalist or commentator in this country ever decided to invest themselves in engaging their readers and commenters on a regular and ongoing basis in the comments section? While I’m sure there are important exceptions, by and large the answer is almost never. Indeed, I’m always stunned by the number of journalists and commentators I talk to who more or less hold much of their audience in contempt – seeing them as wild. No wonder the comment section has run amok – we can pretend otherwise but the commenters know you don’t respect them. If newspapers are not happy with their comment sections, they really have no one to blame but themselves. This is after all, the community they created, the norms they fostered, the result of investments that they made. Shluffing it all off to Facebook both runs counter to their mission but is also a shirking of responsibility (and business opportunity) of the highest order.

Of course, handing the problem to Facebook won’t solve it either. It was suggested, at last count, that over 80 million facebook accounts are fake. Expect that number to go up. But of course, the people who will be most happy to create that fake account are going to be the trolls who want to use it regularly, not the lone commentator who has an important perspective about a story but doesn’t want to tell the world who they are out of fear of social stigma or worse.

What’s worse, Postmedia has now essentially farmed its privacy policy out to Facebook. Presently that means that, in theory, you can’t be anonymous. But what will it mean in the future? Postmedia can’t tell you. They can’t even influence it.

For an organization managing discussions as sensitive as newspapers do – that is a pretty shocking stance to take. Who knows what future decisions about privacy Facebook is going to make. But here’s what I do know, I trusted the National Post a hell of a lot more to manage my comments and identity than I do Facebook because their missions are totally different. In the end, this could be bad not just for comments, but for Postmedia. Many people are already pretty uncomfortable with Facebook’s policies. I expect more will become so. Even if they don’t comment, I suspect readers will be drawn to sites that engage them more effectively – a newspapers that has outsourced its engagement to Facebook will probably lose out.

I get that Postmedia believes its job of managing comments will become easier because it has outsourced identity management to Facebook – but it has come at a real cost, one that I think is unacceptable for a newspaper. In the end, I think the quality of engagement and of discussion at Postmedia will suffer. That will be bad for it, but it will also be bad for society in general.

And that is sad news for all of us.

Added @ 9:27am PST. Note: Some Postmedia journalists want to make clear that this decision was a corporate one, not theirs.

Is the Internet bringing us together or is it tearing us apart?

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The other day the Vancouver Sun – via Simon Fraser University’s Public Square program – asked me to pen a piece answering the questions: Is the Internet bringing us together or is it tearing us apart?

Yesterday, they published the piece.

My short answer?

Trying to unravel whether the Internet is bringing us together or tearing us apart is impossible. It does both. What really matters is how we build generative communities, online and off.

My main point?

That community organizing is both growing and democratizing. On MeetUp alone there are 423 coming events in Vancouver. That’s 423 emergent community leaders, all learning how to mobilize people, whether it is for a party, to teach them how to knit, grow a business or learn how to speak Spanish.

This is pretty exciting.

A secondary point?

Is that it is not all good news. There are lots of communities, online and off, that are not generative. So if we are creating more communities, many of them will also be those we don’t agree with, and that are even destructive.

Check it

It always remains exciting to me what you can squeeze into 500 words. Yesterday, the Sun published the piece here, if you’re interested, please do consider checking it out.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Open Data

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I have an article titles Lies, Damn Lies and Open Data in Slate Magazine as part of their Future Tense series.

Here, for me, is the core point:

On the surface, the open data movement was about who could access and use government data. It rested on the idea that data was as much a public asset as a highway, bridge, or park and so should be made available to those who paid for its creation and curation: taxpayers. But contrary to the hopes of some advocates, improving public access to data—that is, access to the evidence upon which public policy is going to be constructed—does not magically cause governments’, and politicians’, desire for control to evaporate. Quite the opposite. Open data will not depoliticize debate. It will force citizens, and governments, to realize how politicized data is, and always has been.

The long form census debacle here in Canada was, I think, a great example of data getting politicized, and was really helped clarify my thinking around this. This piece has been germinating since then, but the core thesis has occasionally leaked out during some of my talks and discussion. Indeed, you can see me share some of it during the tail end of my opening keynote at the Open Knowledge Foundation International Open Data Camp almost three years ago.

Anyways, please hop on over to Slate and take a look – I hope you enjoy the read.

Fall 2012 – Some Fun Updates

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Hi friends – am super excited about a number of upcoming events I’ve been asked to participate in this fall.

All this means I’ll be in Charlotte, Boston and Washington DC in case friends are around.

Democratic National Convention

Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 6th, the National Democratic Institute has invited me to speak at the International Leaders Summit at the Democratic National Convention. Tim O’Reilly and I will both be giving talks on technology and government – I believe it will be live streamed via a Google Chat room so will try to post details.

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

I’ll be giving a talk on the State of Open Government at the Kennedy School on September 25th, as well as, possibly another talk at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Promise to blog on any talk I plan to give.

World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

I’ve also been asked by the State Department to be on a panel on innovation in diplomacy at the World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Boston on September 26th. Hope to write up a summary and thoughts about this once it is over.

The White House

I’ll also be speaking to the White House Innovation Fellows in late October – more details on that, but very excited as this is a fantastic group of people doing some very interesting work.

Lots of other exciting stuff happening this fall as well – so hoping to have a bunch of great blog posts I’ll be able to share with people soon.

Community Managers: Expectations, Experience and Culture Matter

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Here’s an awesome link to grind home my point from my OSCON keynote on Community Management, particularly the part where I spoke about the importance of managing wait times – the period between when a volunteer/contributor takes and action and when they get feedback on that action.

In my talk I referenced code review wait times. For non-developers, in open source projects, a volunteer (contributor) will often write a patch which they must be reviewed by someone who oversees the project before it gets incorporated into the software’s code base. This is akin to a quality assurance process – say, like if you are baking brownies for the church charity event, the organizer probably wants to see the brownies first, just to make sure they aren’t a disaster. The period between which you write the patch (or make the brownies) and when the project manager reviews them and say they are ok/not ok, that’s the wait time.

The thing is, if you never tell people how long they are going to have to wait – expect them to get unhappy. More importantly, if, while their waiting, other contributors come and make negative comments about their contributions, don’t be surprised if they get even more unhappy and become less and less inclined to submit patches (or brownies, or whatever makes your community go round).

In other words while your code base may be important but expectations, experience and culture matter, probably more. I don’t think anyone believes Drupal is the best CMS ever invented, but its community has a pretty good expectations, a great experience and fantastic culture, so I suspect it kicks the ass of many “technically” better CMS’s run by lesser managed communities.

Because hey, if I’ve come to expect that I have to wait an infinite or undetermined amount of time, if the experience I have interacting with others suck and if the culture of the community I’m trying to volunteer with is not positive… Guess what. I’m probably going to stop contributing.

This is not rocket science.

And you can see evidence of people who experience this frustration in places around the net. Edd Dumbill sent me this link via hacker news of a frustrated contributor tired of enduring crappy expectations, experience and culture.

Heres what happens to pull requests in my experience:

  • you first find something that needs fixing
  • you write a test to reproduce the problem
  • you pass the test
  • you push the code to github and wait
  • then you keep waiting
  • then you wait a lot longer (it’s been months now)
  • then some ivory tower asshole (not part of the core team) sitting in a basement finds a reason to comment in a negative way.
  • you respond to the comment
  • more people jump on the negative train and burry your honestly helpful idea in sad faces and unrelated negativity
  • the pull dies because you just don’t give a fuck any more

If this is what your volunteer community – be it software driven, or for poverty, or a religious org, or whatever – is like, you will bleed volunteers.

This is why I keep saying things like code review dashboards matter. I bet if this user could at least see what the average wait time is for code review he’d have been much, much happier. Even if that wait time were a month… at least he’d have known what to expect. Of course improving the experience and community culture are harder problems to solve… but they clearly would have helped as well.

Most open source projects have the data to set up such a dashboard, it is just a question of if we will.

Okay, I’m late for an appointment, but really wanted to share that link and write something about it.

NB: Apologies if you’ve already seen this. I accidentally publishes this as a page, not a post on August 24th, so it escaped most people’s view.

Roger Fisher: 1922-2012

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Virtually all of my blog readers, and for that matter, much of the world, will not know that on August 25 Roger Fisher passed away.

Roger Fisher was a Harvard academic and adviser to presidents and leaders, and perhaps most importantly – because his writings touched so many people – a co-author of Getting To Yes (along with numerous other books) which outlined and made accessible interest based negotiation theory to the world.

Sadly, his wikipedia page is shockingly short on the scope and range of his work and achievements (I’ve now edited it so it reflects his accomplishments much better). There is little about his important role advising President Carter and the other principals during the negotiations of the Camp David Accords and only passing reference to his role in resolving a long-standing border dispute between Peru and Ecuador. This is to say nothing of the millions of people in the corporate, non-profit and political spheres who have been influenced by his writings and thinking. In an odd way however, the entry is perhaps fitting for a man that was – in my limited experience – exceedingly humble.

Happily a more robust description of Fisher’s accomplishments see this wonderful summary over at the Harvard Law School’s website, here’s a tiny taste:

According to Patton, Fisher’s efforts contributed directly and materially to multiple steps toward peace in the Middle East, including Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, and the Camp David summit that led to an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty; peace in Central America and especially in El Salvador; the resolution of the longest-running war in the western hemisphere between Ecuador and Peru; the breakthrough that enabled resolution of the Iranian hostage conflict in 1980; a fundamental reshaping of the U.S.-Soviet relationship; and the negotiations and constitutional process that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.  (Read the full text of Patton’s tribute here.) Fisher is also recognized as the intellectual father of the “West Point Negotiation Project,” which has trained Army officers and cadets to recognize conflicts and apply the tools of principled negotiation in both peace and war.

For myself, it would not be overstating issues to say that Roger Fisher (along with Ury and Patton) changed my life. Indeed, the ideas found in Getting to Yes have been central to almost everything I’ve done for almost 15 years. Be it my work in open government, public policy, open source and open innovation, community management, or flat out negotiation consulting on things like the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, the ideas that make up interest based negotiation have strongly informed my thinking and made me more effective than I otherwise would ever have been. Frankly, they have made me a better person.

It is, and remains, one of my life’s great privileges that I briefly got to work with Roger. And while he remains someone who helped change the way people work, negotiate and collaborate together, the thing that I always remember about him was the incredible generosity with which he engaged everyone – including a 24 year kid fresh out of graduate school, long on dreams, and short on experience.

In late 2000 I got my first job with a Cambridge based Vantage Partners, a negotiation consulting company spun out of the Harvard Negotiation Project that Roger had helped found in 1983. Word came down from the partners that Roger (who did not work at Vantage) wanted an associate to help him plan and role out an upcoming workshop for a group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Through enormous good luck (I won a draw) I was the one chosen to help him. I remember being so overwhelmed by the opportunity (could a more striking fanboy moment be imagined?). And so it was that evening when, without warning, Roger called my apartment in Cambridge to talk about the work. Getting a call from Roger Fisher was a little like having my teenage self getting a call from Bono.

But while as high as that conversation made me feel, what really struck me was how much he wanted my opinions and my thoughts about what should happen over the few days that the Israeli’s and Palestinians would be in town. I was dumbstruck that he even wanted to know what I thought, but having him honestly engage my ideas reset all my notions about how those with power can engage those who feel like they have less. Even writing this, I’m struck with how insufficiently I’ve modeled Roger’s capacity to honestly, thoughtfully and respectfully engage almost anyone who feels intimated or having less authority than you.

But the one story that I feel really sums up his character comes from his 80th birthday party at Harvard in 2002. After the dinner and speeches people were mingling and starting to drift home. But Roger and I ended up deep in conversation, discussing possible paths to peace for Israel, the Palestinians and the middle east in general. In fact we become so engrossed we did not notice that virtually everyone had left and it was really just us, and his wife, standing by the door with their jackets, looking slightly displeased.

In that moment, the pieces of Roger Fisher that I knew (again, briefly) were all in play.

Here was a man who I recall feeling personally responsible for helping secure peace in the middle east 20 years earlier. He carried an indescribable personal burden for what he felt was a missed earlier opportunity to help the region as well as a responsibility to make it right.

Here also was man that enjoyed engaging with young people and getting new opinions. Much like the story above I was struck by ho much he wanted to know what I thought. He wanted opinion, and wanted to know how I saw the facts on the ground. It was startling, rewarding, humbling, and frankly, scary, to be taken so seriously.

But finally, and maybe most importantly he was a man so dedicated to his mission of tackling great problems and fulfilling his sense of duty that he even wanted to do it on his 80th birthday. While some may see that as tragic, for me it spoke volumes about the sense of responsibility and duty with which he lived his life.

While a shocking percentage of the world has read, or learned the ideas embedded within, Getting To Yes, few of those people will have known who Roger Fisher was or how he has influenced them. For him, my sense is that was just okay. He was never interested in fame, but rather in solving the worlds most dangerous and intractable problems. While the problems I tackle are more smaller and more humble than the ones he dealt with, I hope I can bring the same dedication, insight and skill that he brought to the table.

 

 

Transparency Case Study: There are Good and Bad Ways Your Organization can be made "Open"

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If you have not had the chance, I strongly encourage you to check out a fantastic piece of journalism in this week’s Economist on the state of the Catholic Church in America. It’s a wonderful example of investigative and data driven journalism made possible (sadly) by the recent spat of sexual-abuse and bankruptcy cases. As a result some of the normally secret financial records of the Church have been made public enabling the Economist to reconstruct the secret and opaque general finances of the Catholic church in America. It is a fascinating, and at times disturbing read.

The articles also suggests – I believe – a broader lessons for non-profits, governments and companies. Disclosure and transparency are essential to the effective running of an organization. As you read the piece it is clear that more disclosure would probably have compelled the Church to manage its finances in a more fiscally sound manner. It probably would have also made acts that are, at best negligent, at worst corrupt, difficult to impossible. This is, indeed, why many charities, organizations and public companies must conduct audits and publish the results.

But conforming to legal requirements will not shield you from an angry public. My sense is that many member contribution based organizations – from public companies to clubs to governments, are going to feel enormous pressure from their “contributors” to disclose more about how funds are collected, managed, disbursed and used. In a post financial collapse and post Enron era it’s unclear to me that people trust auditors the way they once did. In addition, as technology makes it easier to track money in real time, contributors are going to want more than just an annual audit. Even if they look at it rarely, they are going to want to know there is a dashboard or system they can look at and understand that shows them where the money goes.

I’m open to being wrong about this – and I’m not suggesting this is a panacea that solves all problems, but I nonetheless suspect that many organizations are going to feel pressure to become more transparent. There will be good ways in which that takes place… and bad ways. The Catholic Church story in the Economist is probably an example of the worst possible way: transparency forced upon an organization through the release of documents in a court case.

For anyone running an non-profit, community group, public agency or government department – this makes the article doubly worth reading. It is a case study in the worst possible scenario for your organization. The kind of disaster you never want to have to deal with.

The problem is, and I’m going to go out on a limb here, is that, at some point in the next 10-20 years, there is a non-trivial risk any organization (including your’s, reader) will face a publicity or legitimacy crisis because of a real or imagined problem. Trust me when I tell you: that moment will not be the moment when it is easiest or desirable from a cost, political and cultural perspective, to make your organization more transaparent. So better for you to think about how you’d like to shift policies, culture and norms to make it more transparent and accountable today, when things are okay, than in the crisis.

Consider again the Catholic Church. There are some fascinating and disturbing facts shared in the story that provide some interesting context. On the fascinating side, I had no idea of the scope and size of the Catholic Church. Consider that, according to the article:

“Almost 100m Americans, a third of the nation, have been baptised into the faith and 74m identify themselves as Catholic.”

and

“there are now over 6,800 Catholic schools (5% of the national total); 630 hospitals (11%) plus a similar number of smaller health facilities; and 244 colleges and universities.”

We are talking about a major non-profit that is providing significant services into numerous communities. It also means that the Catholic church does a lot of things that many other non-profits do. Whatever you are doing, they are probably doing it too.

Now consider some of the terrible financial practices the Church tried/tries to get away with because it thinks no one will be able to see them:

Lying about assets: “In a particularly striking example, the diocese of San Diego listed the value of a whole city block in downtown San Diego at $40,000, the price at which it had been acquired in the 1940s, rather than trying to estimate the current market value, as required. Worse, it altered the forms in which assets had to be listed. The judge in the case, Louise Adler, was so vexed by this and other shenanigans on the part of the diocese that she ordered a special investigation into church finances which was led by Todd Neilson, a former FBI agent and renowned forensic accountant. The diocese ended up settling its sexual-abuse cases for almost $200m.”

Playing fast and loose with finances: “Some dioceses have, in effect, raided priests’ pension funds to cover settlements and other losses. The church regularly collects money in the name of priests’ retirement. But in the dioceses that have gone bust lawyers and judges confirm that those funds are commingled with other investments, which makes them easily diverted to other uses.”

Misleading contributors about the destination of funds: “Under Cardinal Bernard Law, the archdiocese of Boston contributed nothing to its clergy retirement fund between 1986 and 2002, despite receiving an estimated $70m-90m in Easter and Christmas offerings that many parishioners believed would benefit retired priests.”

Using Public Subsidies to Indirectly Fund Unpopular Activities: “Muni bonds are generally tax-free for investors, so the cost of borrowing is lower than it would be for a taxable investment. In other words, the church enjoys a subsidy more commonly associated with local governments and public-sector projects. If the church has issued more debt in part to meet the financial strains caused by the scandals, then the American taxpayer has indirectly helped mitigate the church’s losses from its settlements. Taxpayers may end up on the hook for other costs, too. For example, settlement of the hundreds of possible abuse cases in New York might cause the closure of Catholic schools across the city.”

Of course all of this pales in comparison to the most disturbing part of the article: in several jurisdictions, the church is spending money to lobby governments to no extend the statute of limitations around sexual-abuse cases. This is so that it, and its priests, cannot be charged by authorities diminishing the likelihood that they get sued. The prospect that an organization that is supposed to both model the highest ideals of behaviour as well as protect the most marginalized is trying to limit the statues on such a heinous crime is so profoundly disgusting it is hard to put words to it. The Economist gives it a shot:

Various sources say that Cardinal Dolan and other New York bishops are spending a substantial amount—estimates range from $100,000 a year to well over $1m—on lobbying the state assembly to keep the current statute of limitations in place. His office will not comment on these estimates. This is in addition to the soft lobbying of lawmakers by those with pulpits at their disposal. The USCCB, the highest Catholic body in America, also lobbies the federal government on the issue. In April the California Catholic Conference, an organisation that brings the state’s bishops together, sent a letter to California’s Assembly opposing a bill that would extend the statute and require more rigorous background checks on church workers.

This disgusting discover aside, most organizations are probably not going to have the same profound problems found in the Catholic Church. But in almost every organization, no matter the controls, some form of mismanagement is probably taking place. The question is, will you already have in place policies and a culture that support transparency and disclosure before the problem is discovered – or will the crises become the moment where you have to try to implement them, probably under less than ideal circumstances?

As they said after Watergate “It’s not the Crime that kills you, but the cover up,” good transparency and disclosure can’t stop the crime, but it might help prevent them. Moreover, it can also make the cover up harder and, potentially, make it easier to ease the concerns of contributors and rebuilt trust. One could imagine that if the Church had been more transparent about its finances it might have better protected itself against bankruptcy from some of these cases. More importantly, it’s transparency might have make it easier to rebuilt trust, whereas any chance now will just seem like a reaction to the crises, not a genuine desire to operate differently.

Again, I think the pressure on many orgs to be more transparent is going to grow. And managers should recognize there are good and bad conditions under which such transparency can take place. Read this Economist story. In addition to be fascinating, it is a great case study in the worst case scenario for opaque institutions.

Suddenly, what happens online matters

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Yesterday, the Globe and Mail had a very good editorial about online death threats. In short, the piece argues that death threats made online matter and shouldn’t be treated as somehow “inferior” to those that happen in “real life.”

Death threats made on the Internet can be as serious as death threats made in person or by other forms of communication; some other threats less so. Police, prosecutors and judges need to assess the gravity of the threats and apply their common sense, from the decision to prosecute through to sentencing. There is no need to amend the Criminal Code in order to treat Internet threats as if they were less serious, as some lawyers have suggested.

Of course, my hope is that this treatment of online behaviour isn’t selective. I mean, if online threats should be considered seriously, shouldn’t other forms of online behaviour – like political behaviour – also be treated seriously?

I remember just two years ago, during the initially online prorogation protests many journalists and pundits deemed them as silly and unimportant. Back then the online editor of the Globe was kind enough to publish two pieces of mine (here and here) that attempted to counter this narrative. But this ran against the grain. Even at the Globe there were pundits who thought that treating online protests and petitions seriously was, well, silly. It was fascinating to see how stories about a 200,000+ plus facebook group focused less on how disgruntled many Canadians were than on how online politics didn’t matter.

Of course that was before the Arab spring when all of a sudden it became vogue to write about how online politicsdidmatter. It would be fascinating to see how the prorogation protests might have played out in the media if they’d occurred after Egypt.

For many of us, we’ve known for a long time that what happens online matters. Its why we care so much about the virtual space and demand it be taken seriously.

It is great to see the Globe’s editorial board feel the same way. Frankly we’d love to see more of it since the online world is very much part of our world, and the threats to it as a space where citizens and consumers can be in free are very real as well.

Threats online matter, and so does commerce, politics, free speech, and the infinite other activities that humans engage in, and will engage in online. Let’s treat it that way.