Examples of Terms of Service (TOS)
I had to do a little research on user agreements and terms of service (TOS) as I had not looked at them for a while. I thought I would share what I found.
The really interesting thing about TOS is the schism between their purposes. On one hand they are used as a protection for site owners (legal mumbo jumbo inserted here). On the other hand they may have the intent of setting expectation of member participation. One document can't do both. So some sites have two - which I think is useful.
But ultimately, a list of rules or guidelines are not what creates the culture of a group. It is how they do or do not talk about them in small, useful ways and finally, about how they live and model them. Oh, and in open spaces, control is mostly an illusion. So we get back to wrestling with a fundmental question: can the commons stay useful even when a small but persistent set of players want to foul it up?
Anyway... here is the list.
posted by Nancy White at 1:53 PM
3 Comments:
Nice list, Nancy. I'm a big fan of the idea of having two "terms of service" statements--one a social contracct, prominently displayed, and the other a legalese version hidden behind a link.
Flickr's community guidelines is one of my favorite social contracts of that ilk.
Nancy, Ryan -- really helpful post, and comment, for me (I'm pulling together some starter materials for an internal social-web wiki for a nonprofit client).
The two-documents approach has the right ring to me, too. It’s a given that you’d tack up legalese TOS on a community site. But that “social contract” doc -- a clear distillation of the community’s principles and expectations for participation – seems more important to successfully nurturing to life an online community.
When I began this current project, there wasn’t much consensus among stakeholders about what sort of ideals and principles they wanted community efforts to embody. Some leaned toward trying to keep any user-generated content and behavior as controlled as possible; others were more receptive to rolling out a set of tools and seeing what happens. In these circumstances, creating, and building consensus around, a simple and clear statement of principles and ideals is prerequisite to building anything.
Once we’ve hashed things out and have agreed on a social contract, these stakeholders will be capable of consistently modeling its principles should we roll out a forum, content-sharing site, etc. And as you say, Nancy, that’s critical (along with plain luck) to success in building online community.
Thanks for your talk last night, Nancy.
I recently co-developed this "Code of Conduct" for a community website that I expect to redo with more "Web 2.0" features in the next few months:
http://bbtc.org/php/show_page.php?page_id=199
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