One of the issues raised during the development of this blog was whether to have Staff Contribution Guidelines. Without the need for any protracted discussion, we decided that having such Guidelines in place prior to launch was desirable. Accordingly, draft Guidelines were prepared by the SSC legal team with reference to:
- the Standards of Integrity and Conduct for the State Services;
- multiple corporate and other organisational blogging policies, including those of Yahoo!, BT, IBM, Sun and Harvard Law; and
- various commentaries on such policies, including Fredrik Wackå’s Policies compared: Today’s corporate blogging rules, Kevin O’Keefe’s Law firm blog policy: Points to consider and Charlene Li’s Blogging policy examples.
We chose to include within the document not only a series of guidelines, but also some introductory information on blogging for those not familiar with the medium, as well as instructions on posting content to a WordPress blog (WordPress being the chosen platform for In Development) and information on cross-posting and copyright in contributions. We ended up with a document whose table of contents looks like this:
- Goal of In Development
- Purpose of Guidelines
- Scope of Guidelines
- The nature of blogging
- The technology
- The benefits of blogging
- The risks of blogging
- Guidelines
- Standards of Integrity and Conduct for the State Services
- Personal responsibility
- Confidential information
- Personal information
- Copyright and trademarks
- Conflicts of interest
- Be yourself
- Respect your colleagues and audience
- Be accurate
- Converse and give feedback
- Priority of regular work commitments
- Media inquiries
- Posting instructions
- How to enter a post
- Adding images, audio, video or slideshows to posts
- Editing posts
- Cross-posting
- Copyright in contributions
- Further assistance
- Appendix - In Development’s Terms of Use
It then occurred to the team that this document may be a useful starting point for other State Services agencies contemplating organisational blogs, as well as for non-governmental organisations in the same position.As such, SSC has decided to release its Staff Contribution Guidelines pursuant to the broadest, i.e., most permissive, form of the newly introduced Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand licences. That form of licence is known as the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand License. You can read a summary of the key terms of that License, as well as its full legal terms online. Or you can download the Staff Contributions Guidelines (PDF. 186KB).
While those wishing to use the work will want to read the terms of the licence itself (whether the “human-readable summary of the Legal Code”, as Creative Commons likes to put it, or the full contractual provisions, apparently reserved for non-human lawyers), in essence the licence states you are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work and to adapt the work provided you attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (which in this case would be nothing more than indicating its source).
Needless to say, if an organisation or firm decides to use the Guidelines and has any comments on how they may be improved, we’d love to hear them.
5 Comments
Hi Richard
This is really interesting. Can you tell me more about how the CC licence you selected differs from Crown Copyright?
Hi, was there a reason you used wordpress as a preferred supplier of the blogging tol. We have just set up a blog at the Auckland Art Gallery and used blogger. I’d be interested in knowing how wordpress is working. Also the policy i put together for the blog (very similar to yours) actually frightened some people off blogging, have your staff been keen to start writing?
Great stuff.
Sarah
Hi Courtney. Many thanks for your comment. I’d be glad to give you my five cents’ worth.
Crown copyright is a specific species of copyright regulated principally by section 26 of the Copyright Act 1994 (http://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/DLM345937.html). That section states that, where a work is made by a person employed or engaged by the Crown under a contract of service, a contract of apprenticeship, or a contract for services, the work qualifies for copyright and the Crown is the first owner of any copyright in the work.
“Crown” for these purposes is defined in section 2 of the Act to mean Her Majesty the Queen in right of New Zealand and includes a Minister of the Crown, a government department, and an Office of Parliament. It expressly does not include a Crown entity or a State enterprise named in Schedule 1 to the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986. As such, while Crown entities and SOEs do enjoy copyright in their works, their copyright is not “Crown copyright”.
You may be interested to know, if you don’t already, that section 27 of the Act contains a list of governmental/Parliamentary materials in which no copyright exists. In essence, no copyright exists in Bills, Acts, regulations, bylaws, NZ Parliamentary debates, select committee reports laid before the House, court and tribunal judgments and reports of Royal commissions, commissions of inquiry, ministerial inquiries, or statutory inquiries.
What the Creative Commons licence attached to the Staff Contribution Guidelines does is provide a licence to the world at large to use the work in accordance with the terms of the specific licence chosen. We have chosen the widest/most permissive form of CC licence for this work. Crown copyright in the work is still retained, but a wide licence is given to the world at large to use the work in circumstances which, without the licence, would breach Crown copyright in the work. The work can be copied, distributed, transmitted and adapted provided attribution is given to SSC/the Crown.
I guess the key point to make is that the Creative Commons licences offer copyright owners (including but not limited to the Crown) an easy and flexible means of allowing others to use their copyright works, under different terms depending on the licence chosen. “Crown copyright” and “Creative Commons licences” are quite distinct things. One way of looking at it is to think of “Crown copyright”, like any form of copyright, as a bundle of rights, some of which can, at the election of the copyright owner, be shared with others by way of various licence arrangements. Creative Commons licences are convenient examples of such licence arrangements.
If Crown copyright in a work were an apple, a Creative Commons licence relating to that work would be a slice of it. The size of the slice (corresponding to the degree of uses to which the work could be put) depends on the form of licence chosen.
Hi Sarah
I didn’t spot your comment when drafting the response to Courtney’s comment. Sorry about that.
While others in the team may wish to comment on this one, my understanding is that the Commission chose WordPress because it’s a tried and true open source blogging platform which offers considerable flexibility, is easy to use and facilitates compliance with the NZ Government Web Standards and Recommendations. That is not to say that Blogger is a less worthy platform, but as someone who’s tinkered around under the WordPress hood, I would argue that WordPress is both powerful and extensible yet elegant in its simplicity. As regards its extensibility, as you probably know, the international WordPress community is huge, with new themes and plugins being added to the open source repositories every day. It is through WordPress’ plugin architecture that one can easily add all sorts of bells and whistles to a blog.
As regards the Staff Contribution Guidelines potentially frightening staff off contributing posts to the blog, we’ve not yet noticed the Guidelines having any such effect. We’ve only just begun, of course, so the impact of the Guidelines is something we’ll keep an eye on, but I doubt (at least from my legal perspective) that they’ll have that effect. Indeed, one of the drivers behind drafting and implementing such guidelines was the view that staff may need and benefit from a measure of guidance both on the benefits and potential pitfalls of blogging as well as around legal rights and responsibilities. The key ins and outs of copyright and defamation, for example, are not things that everyone knows or can reasonably be expected to know (update: notwithstanding that, legally, ignorance of the law is no excuse if you defame someone or breach third party copyright). It was considered far preferable for contributing staff to have an understanding, in broad and non-draconian terms, of the dos and don’ts and the potential risks and permanence of online commentary, rather than simply giving them access and letting them go for their lives, as it were.
The other comment I’d make is that, rather than simply handing contributors a copy of the Guidelines and sending them off to read them, we had a session with contributors in which we went through the main points in the Guidelines and gave everyone an opportunity to raise any questions they might have had.
All the best with Outpost!
Hi Sarah, to follow up what Richard said, a leading factor in our decision to go with WordPress was that we can install and host it on our own server here at the SSC. That gives us more control, and ensures that we will be able to fulfill our responsibilities under New Zealand legislation with respect to that content. For more information, check out the Overseas hosting risk analysis.
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