Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

Besides the couchsurfers who care about the openness of our precious not so little network, the call for open social networks is getting louder and louder. On CS it might be flogging dead horses but our experiences will strengthen other hospitality exchange networks (and our presence will attract the right people to the right networks).

I’m sure that anyone who supports OpenCouchSurfing will support the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington, September 4, 2007

Looking from the rapid spread of this bill of rights, I dare to say, that we’re not alone, by far not alone.