Municipalist

Union lawyers target blogging Michigan school board member

"There is no teeth to the argument that public officials can't have blogs," says Wendy Day, an elected board member for a public school district in Howell, Michigan whose blog has attracted plenty of attention from across her community and from local media.

Wendy teaches at Lansing Community College. Of her early days on the Web, she admits: "I had no idea of the power of a blog." She candidly answered our questions about various dust-ups she has encountered in what could be termed a colorful blogging career. Her blog was recently the subject of a threatening letter from the law firm of the local teachers' union. One of her posts about that is here.

By the way, this Q & A, the 34th we have published with (mostly) public sector bloggers, is the first from Michigan, where I grew up.

Why she started her blog:

I was elected to the Howell School Board in 2006 after a lot of controversy in our district. As a conservative, home school mom, I was not welcomed by the administration or the board at the time.

I started the blog to offer another way to communicate with the public about Howell Schools and about broader education issues. There was little communication between the School Board and the community; I pledged to change that. The blog quickly became a place to discuss broader issues and at it's peak had hundreds of visitors every day and posts with 600-800 comments on them. I was brand new to blogging and learned some lessons the hard way.

Wikimedia Foundation replies to Municipalist questions on McCain plagiarism charges

[Update: We develop this further here.]

D.C.-based Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Dan Rosenthal responds to questions from Municipalist about the suggestion that John McCain's speech writers may have "plagiarized" from Wikipedia some material about Georgia and its history. "A Wikipedia editor" makes the charge.

The comments following the initial post at CQ's Political Insider blog are worthy reading. One asks: Can anybody plagiarize facts? And here is a follow-up post, with links to responses from the blogosphere and some mainstream media. Here is the speech. Rosenthal addressed our emailed questions in one reply, but we break them up here:

Municipalist: What is Wikipedia policy on use of its content?

Rosenthal: Wikimedia's policy on use of its content is one of freedom. First, let me note that the Wikimedia Foundation does not own the article content on our projects; the individual authors who write it do. All of their contributions are licensed under the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), which to summarize allows free reuse, commercially or otherwise, as long as the reuser attributes the preceding authors. It's slightly more complicated than that, but that's the gist of what's important to this question.

So, Sen. McCain, or Sen. Obama, or any other person is more than welcome to use content found on our projects, as long as it is properly attributed. Now, obviously when giving a speech that quotes a line or two from an article, or using a word or two from another source, there's a different story, and there is potentially a fair use argument to be made. That being said, however, in the vast majority of instances we require attribution to the authors of the content.

Keep in mind that we have been saying repeatedly that Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source of information, and people using Wikipedia for research should always verify their information elsewhere.

Municipalist: Apparently a Wikipedia editor emailed this charge to a member of the media. How does Wikipedia feel about this behavior of one of its own?

Rosenthal: There's very little to say. What people do outside of the project is their own business.

Municipalist: If journalists are free to "use" Wikipedia content, why not campaigns?

Rosenthal: Journalists and campaigns are free to use Wikipedia content. Advertisement campaigns have been using our content; why wouldn't a presidential campaign? Now, with that being said, just because they are free to use our content does not mean that it is necessarily a good idea. A presidential candidate and his campaign have significant amounts of staffer time and money invested into research and briefing, and I would sincerely hope that they are able to use Wikipedia responsibly and verify their sources and citations, rather than citing directly to Wikipedia (which is something that we discourage in grade school students, let alone campaigns).

Municipalist: Does Wikipedia care about this?

Rosenthal: Again it is hard to say because the term "Wikipedia" can have different meaning. If you mean the project itself, obviously the answer is no because software cannot care. If you mean the contributors and editors to the project, there has been some discussion about it, but the general response has been pretty apathetic. If you mean the Wikimedia Foundation, there has been very little internal discussion regarding the issue.

In closing, I hope the McCain campaign learns from this, as well as any campaign, organization or person who wants to use content from Wikipedia. Please do so responsibly, make sure your sources are cited, provide proper attribution, and try to use Wikipedia to dig deeper for content beyond just our articles. Doing so will go a long way toward preventing issues like this in the future.

Update: After the initial post, we emailed Rosenthal a follow-up: How does Wikimedia Foundation feel about the overall charge here? Meaning, plagiarism or rights infringement or whatever -- whenever it actually occurs. Regardless of whether it occurred here. Is use of Wikipedia content minus proper attribution a concern for you at all, and do you plan any response to it, educating users, suing, etc.?

Rosenthal: I don't think the Foundation actually has any real feelings about the charge, since there's not a whole lot of solid information at this point. We obviously do not at all support plagiarism when it does in fact occur. Attribution is one of the major keys to our encyclopedia, both for licensing reasons, and because it helps tell the story of the development of an article, as well as gives our contributors a sense of real authorship, so they can say "look what I have helped create." When attribution is taken away, it generally hurts our contributors. So while use of our content minus attribution is a concern for us, and it has been something that has been internally discussed, and sometimes is discussed at outreach events such as Wikimeetups, and Wikimedia Academies, I am not aware of any planned responses at this point in time.

[Calling Internet lawyers: Creative Commons License ruling handing down yesterday.]

[Hat tip: Politico blogger Ben Smith's essential daily remainders.]

More on why corporate blogs fail

Among the valuable comments here following the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog post on the recent Forrester report on the sorry state of business-to-business blogging:

• I maintain and manage what I’ll call a “pr dispersal site” for a Fortune 500 company, and all efforts to “spice it up” with engaging content and an honest voice have been met with shrieks of terror from PR, marketing, corporate HQ, and the vast sea of go-betweens.
• ... A blog isn’t a pulpit, it’s a conversation. B2B marketers need to step back, understand this newer medium, and craft new strategies for successful implementation. Applying strategies from other media to the blog is like trying to induce a car to go using a buggy whip.
• Successful blogs have three things in common. 1) Personality. 2) They offer information that is valuable and/or entertaining to readers. 3) Time and resources are invested; Postings are not an afterthought. Most corporate blogs have none of the above. Like anything else, you get what you put into it.
• Most corporate blogs are strangled at birth by having to go through the legal department post by post.

Or, there is another explanation, however painful. And that is that blogging for the most part is a Gen. X/Y thing, and as long as the Boomers and their previous-century business practices remain in place, blogs will not have any real impact on how corporations -- and the public sector -- do business.

Obama's nutty accuser

A skillful manipulator of the Web exploits the credibility of the National Press Club this morning to slur Barack Obama with bizarre claims of drug use and a homosexual affair. Municipalist has no partisan preference either way. But this bit of nonsense raises questions about how far to go to allow or stop open speech, as well as about how the Web can be used by the barely sane to effectively target public figures, as well as excite and enthrall the packs of wolves out there ready and willing to believe anything they find on the Internet. The National Press Club blog considers some of these issues.

By the way, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution addresses government's efforts to restrict free speech. It does not at all have anything to say about the private sector. If the National Press Club decides to refuse to rent space to some felon who plans to spew lies to the world, that's their right. It is odd that an organization such as the National Press Club does not understand this. Talk to a lawyer, people. On the other hand, the bizarre efforts from pro-Obama Web sites to intimidate the NPC to shut all this down are equally off the mark. This is a half-day story. At most. Save the passion for the real issues.

Bloggers facing more expensive legal judgements

Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, tells AP that more than 100 judgments valued at $17 million have been handed down against bloggers over the last three years — about 60 percent for defamation, 25 percent for copyright infringement and 10 percent involving privacy.

"It's the tip of the iceberg," Cox said. "Bloggers are being asked to write checks. The threats against bloggers are very real. The costs are very real."

The AP story actually conflates "blogging" with "journalism."  Blogging is much closer to conversation than journalism. But publishing is publishing, and the legal landscape will become a much bigger challenge to navigate.

Email FOIA issues are ever present with public sector bloggers

In a recent email exchange with John Stevens, a blogging school board member in Loudoun County, Virginia, we noticed this phrase at the end of his reply: "Please be aware that correspondence sent by or to School Board members is subject to Virginia's Freedom of Information Act." To those of us on the outside of the public sector, that can take you back a bit.

John told us that he now stores all his school board-related correspondence -- including correspondence related to his blog, since it focuses on school board work -- on one notebook computer, owned by the school district. So if a Freedom of Information Act request comes in, he can just hand over that computer, and have no worry about it providing access to any of his business or other personal email, since he never stores any on that machine.  Though he said he does access personal email on that machine through Web access.

"Typically a FOIA request wouldn't call for handing over a computer, but in a recent Loudoun case a judge ordered a county employee to search the chairman's personal computer for qualifying documents when the chairman had other qualifying documents stored on that PC, and I'd just as soon not be in that position," Stevens told Municipalist. "I don't know that operating this way inoculates me entirely (judge or plaintiff can always say 'I don't believe you') but it's the best I can do."

How do other public sector bloggers out there handle these issues? Let us know.

Q & A: Dave Ash, school board, Churchill County, Nevada

Dave Ash, aka Super Dave, the Nevada school trustee whose Web site caused quite a rumble between his school district and its teachers union before the union bullied him into taking it down, answers some questions from Municipalist. This is a follow-up to this post from Thursday.

This guy is thoughtful and obviously a trooper, and is one public official who enjoys engaging with his community. He sounds as if he lacks any bitterness whatsoever. It appears Ash has found a workable solution to his situation, one that could be a model for some public officials seeking to post online about their work. A sample of our conversation: What did your constituents and the community as a whole think of your site? "According to polls taken by the local newspaper and KOLO TV in Reno, NV 75-85% favored its continuation," he said. "They felt that all it did was expose issues that in the past had been covered up."

The "Super Dave" moniker comes from Municipalist, and is a reference to a hero of ours, the glorious Super Dave Osborne, the -- in our humble opinion -- frequently slammed-about but very noble stunt man. The name is used here with total respect, and is completely appropriate, in our view, given the crap Ash has put up with. Again: Please read yesterday's post for the full story. Finally: On with the show!

School board blogger shuts down after teachers' union objects

Drunk teacher in the classroom! Former school board member is an embezzler! Tedious, infantile teachers' union threatens endless, expensive grievance and arbitration procedures! Superintendent and school lawyer fold 'like lawn chairs'!

Wouldn't you read a blog about that stuff? Especially if it was published by a school board member with an inside view and apparently plenty of good sources from the very school district where this stuff was going on?

Municipalist lives for blogs like that. But it's gone, sister! Gone, gone, gone.

The blog in question -- or "message board," as some explanations have described it -- was shut down Dec. 4 by its operator, Dave Ash -- a trustee on the Churchill County, Nevada school board, after he was basically bullied for months by the school district's teachers union, as well as his own school district administration.

Ash will hereafter be known by us as Super Dave, after the fabulously determined stunt man who could survive anything. Super Dave Ash offered as his public explanation that he pulled the plug to save the school district money it would be forced to spend to fend off a threatened grievance procedure from the union, which began objecting at precisely the time a poster on the site revealed that a district teacher was drunk in school.

Local media round-up: December 2007 blog-demise story here.