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I’m just using this post to draw together different initiatives in the wake of Monday’s Methodist Council decision. There is a discussion happening on my post yesterday about areas where we might draw discussions together. Matt Wardman has suggested the Methodist Recorder’s website, I have suggested using one of the existing Facebook groups for Methodists.
But meanwhile, Dave Warnock has set something up. Hats off and show your receding hairline (if you’re a man) to him! In Opening Consultation: Social Media Guidelines he tells us he has set up a Google document. If you give Dave your email address he will authorise you to edit it. Between us he hopes we can come up with a set of values for social media that authentically reflects Methodist spirituality.
And I also wanted to draw attention to something on David Hallam’s blog. In his brief post yesterday he helpfully draws our attention to an article on the Social Media Examiner about IBM’s attitude to employees’ use of social media. Essentially, it’s one full of permission and blessing, albeit backed up by guidelines. I’ve only had time for a quick skim, but at first glance it looks like a creative approach from an industry that has to understand social media. As indeed must we.
How thankful I am that people are thinking of these initiatives in order to take us beyond debate to action.
Big Circumstance 
Thanks Dave,
Just one comment. I am against gated communities like Facebook, myspace, linked in etc for open consultation. Firstly, it is wrong that people should have to create an account with a gated community to have access to the consultation. Secondly, the data is not accessible enough. eg Facebook has very poor tools for group collaboration. It makes it very hard for people to keep track without actually visiting the group page regularly.
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Fair point, Dave, it depends what we’re trying to achieve. If it’s a conversation, then FB can work quite well (and provided people are careful about their privacy settings). If we want to work on a document together, then it won’t work, and your initiative with Google Docs is a welcome move forwards on that one.
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Dave,
The conversation abilities for multiple people are really really basic in facebook.
The privacy settings are not the whole picture. The only way to be at all safe is to assume that everything that goes on facebook can go fully public. Remember nobody agrees to keep what you write private, even with no other privacy issues they can post anything they see anywhere.
Please we need to stop people thinking facebook is some safe place where you can keep things just between a few people. It is not the case.
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Sure, but all I envisaged was a simple public conversation. If I’m going to input to a consultation like this I don’t feel the need to hide behind anonymity. I didn’t at the time envisage a group collaboration on the creation or editing of a document. Had I thought of that (like you did) then I would have looked for a cloud app solution (as you did).
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