CZ Talk:Managing Editor Announcements

Response from Christine Bush Re: Real Names Policy Editorial

   I appreciate Managing Editor's interest in my work and this effort to make others aware of it. Thank you. It is helpful to be reminded of past traumas. It is also useful to move past them and to continue evaluating best practices. The web is nothing if not dynamic and much has changed since 2006. I met with Larry Sanger earlier this year because he is working on a new project that I found interesting and he was in town fundraising so we had Chinese food one day. His new project is called InfoBitt, a crowdsourced newspaper. All you need to participate is an e-mail address. Larry's projects evolve with the web.

   Digital identity is a core concept of the online experience and scholars are deeply engaged in discussing it. There is currently a MOOC being offered through edX on the topic of Open Knowledge and I will be integrating many of the materials from it into this exploration of our policy. Most of the discussions about the course materials occur using social media and blogs. These are vibrant discussions that do not require anyone to use their real name; in part because they do not. But it is also true that the practice of pseudonymity, unlike a real names policy, does not prevent the use of your real name and some choose to do so. The point is to give people a choice, to empower their participation on their terms.

   To suggest that CZ is not a social media platform seems to willfully ignore the fact that we have already begun to become one. We have a Twitter account (through which Managing Editor's announcement of my draft was delivered to 71 followers---far more than have seen it here, I suspect). We also have a Facebook presence, a Google+ Community, and another Google Group to supplement this wiki-based forum. We are going down this road, as we should. Surely we can find a way to enable people who find CZ on these numerous, highly-connected platforms to take the next step towards contributing to our project by using modern identity credentialing systems.

   To this end, an open invitation remains extended to anyone interested in the topic to continue to monitor and contribute to the discussion of this draft, not only on the article's talk page (where there have already been some very insightful and constructive comments made) but also through your social media networks of choice. You can include me using Twitter, tumblr, WordPress, or Google+. Christine Bush 18:41, 16 October 2014 (UTC)