Last week, I released Noise to Signal‘s first annual wall calendar.

My plan was to offer it for sale on my Zazzle store – not because I expected to retire on the proceeds, but because it was the easiest way I could think of to create and deliver it.

But there’s a part of my brain that’s now been conditioned by the social web and – in no small part – by Chris Anderson’s Free. That part of my brain kicks in every time I’m about to set a price, and asks, “Suppose the price was zero?”

I’ve done that a few times (a short e-book about getting value from your blog was one example). Open SoSi has been my company’s most ambitious free project. And of course people don’t have to pay to read the cartoon itself, and there’s a Creative Commons license on it.

So I created a PDF version of the calendar. It required some extra work, because I didn’t have Zazzle’s built-in calendar template to create the calendar grids themselves. And after a fruitless search for public domain calendar grids that would work, I created them in Word. (This step was frankly a wee bit tedious and should have been a lot more automated than they make it. Memo to Apple’s Pages app development team: a calendar template would be much appreciated.)

If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’m guessing I would have sold a handful of calendars. Instead, several thousand people viewed the calendar on SlideShare or visited the calendar post on Noise to Signal inside of a few days (and that, during the pre-Christmas traffic slump). Hundreds downloaded the PDF. The calendar made the front page of SlideShare as their Presentation of the Day as well as their “Hot on Twitter” and “Hot on Facebook” lists.

In short, instead of making what would have amounted to pocket change from a handful of people, I reached thousands of people who are new to Noise to Signal, and offered something valuable to the cartoon’s fans. That, to my way of thinking, is a pretty solid argument in favour of free.

Of course, the calendar’s available on Zazzle if you’d like a nicely printed version (they do a great job). And I’m releasing the calendar grids themselves to the public domain (PDF, 280KB).

By the way, here’s the SlideShare version:

Last week, the Vancouver Police Department launched their Twitter presence with a day-long marathon of tweeting the calls that came into the force. It was a success, rocketing them from zero to well over 1,800 followers that afternoon.

I got to comment on it for CTV News (here are the national and the local stories). While a lot of folks were critical of how long the VPD have taken to arrive on Twitter, I’m a little more forgiving; it can be a little hard for strongly hierarchical organizations to make the leap to the world of real-time online public conversation.

They’re in the thick of it now: from suggestions that they open up their crime maps and databases, to media questions about major incidents, tocomplaints about their antiquated web site, to gratuitous verbal abuse.

It’s been an interesting experiment, although it’s not quite clear yet where @VancouverPD is headed. When the reporter asked what I’d recommend for the future, I said they needed to become a lot more conversational… but now that I’ve had a little more time to read both their Twitter stream and the reaction to it, I’d answer differently. Yes, I’d like to see conversation (and that’s picked up admirably in recent days) – but more than that, I’d like to see compassion.

Because reading the discussion around their tweets, I see a lot of people ridiculing the mentally ill and people in distress – or at least riffing off their behaviour to tweak their friends. The @VancouverPD’s tweets about a woman dancing naked in the street or a man yelling at passers-by  quickly become fodder for jokes.

And why wouldn’t they? In a context-free tweet, the stark facts of the situation are funny. Once you remember that these are people who may well be facing overwhelming difficulty or pain, though, the jokes start to fall flat… but you get a better, fuller idea of what’s really happening.

The first day’s tweets were supposed to give us a picture of the daily life of the Vancouver Police Force. Compassion is part of that picture, and so far it’s been missing – not because their feed has been deliberately callous, but because their approach to date hasn’t made room for it. Even a few tweets reminding people that these are real people facing real struggles could provide some crucial context.

(Postscript: Justin Long shared the same concerns in a post a few days ago, framing it in the context of a similar initiative in Manchester.)

It’s come up three or four times at workshops I’ve conducted in the past few weeks: people who work for organizations with an entry in Wikipedia, wondering whether and how they can edit it – if, for instance, misinformation creeps in. (I’m assuming you’re not trying to sanitize your entry. Which is not a good idea.)

At first glance, Wikipedia’s guidelines make it seem like your only option is to sit back and hope someone corrects it for you:

A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia, and the aims of an individual editor. COI editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest.

COI editing is strongly discouraged. When editing causes disruption to the encyclopedia through violation of policies such as neutral point of view, what Wikipedia is not, and copyright compliance, accounts may be blocked. COI editing also risks causing public embarrassment for the individuals and groups being promoted.

The temptation, of course, is to ask a friend of your organization to do it for you, which is the advice I’ve heard from others. But that doesn’t really let you off the hook; all you’ve done is delegate your conflict of interest.

So is all hope lost? Fortunately, no: Wikipedia has an answer. A few answers, actually.

First, there actually are circumstances where they don’t mind you editing your own entry:

It is generally considered okay for you to edit your own article in certain circumstances:

• If the article is clearly derogatory in tone and was written based on questionable sources or no sources.
• If it contains private information you strongly don’t want shared, particularly if you are not famous. (This might include, for example, your e-mail address, date of birth, religious affiliation or sexual orientation.)
• If you believe it is libelous.

Wikipedia’s also cool with you doing minor cleanup and spam removal yourself – but they’d like you to log your change on the article’s discussion page.

Second, you can appeal to the Wikipedia community to make the change for you, making your case in the article’s discussion area. (You can find it by clicking on the “discussion” tab at the top of the article.)

And third, if you can’t cajole the people reading that discussion to make the change, you can contact Wikipedia directly with your suggested changes.

There’s more information in this essay on avoiding conflict of interest issues. It’s not always a clear-cut question; whether you’re editing with nefarious intentions or good ones is often a matter of opinion or perspective. And there aren’t too many edits you could make that would be worth having to weather the accusation that you’ve tried to manipulate “the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet“. When you aren’t completely certain of your ground, it’s a good idea to leave the actual editing to others, and opt for the discussion page or direct contact with Wikipedia.

Two enterprising folks dropped by the Yellow Page Group corporate headquarters in Montreal and built a small mountain of more than 500 unwanted Yellow Page directories in front of it… and interviewed a YPG rep brave enough to defend the indefensible.

(How enterprising? One is Aimee Davison, who is currently blogging about doing 100 interesting jobs by the end of the year. The other is Kyle MacDonald, whom you may remember as the guy who traded a single red paper clip for a house.) (Not all at once. He traded steadily up.)

There’s a lot to like about this video, but let me single out just one thing: the fact that the corporate rep is there at all, and is allowed to make her case. That ultimately makes the piece far more effective and persuasive; you hear the pro-Yellow Pages argument, but see it contradicted by the video evidence the video-makers gathered.

The staggeringly bogus “only one per cent of Canadians opt out” argument might be my favourite moment, though. That number might well be accurate. But…

• Given how little effort YPG puts into promoting their opt-out web page, and the fact you have to keep renewing your opted-out status, I’m pretty impressed that it’s that high.
• And ask yourself: how high would it be if people had to opt in using the same process?

To opt out of getting the Yellow Pages:

• In Canada
• In the U.S.A.