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July 28, 2006
DOPA Passes: What Does This Mean for Your Library's New Website?
H.R. 5319: DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act) passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 415 to 10. The legislation now goes to the Senate. Someday I will stop being amazed at the sheer ignorance of our elected officials. Not yet though--this still shocks me.
ALA has asked that if your Representative voted against it, that you please
email them a quick thank you for opposing DOPA. Here is the short list of Representatives who
voted against DOPA:
Conyers (Detroit, MI)
Grijalva (Tuscon, AZ)
Hinchey (Saugerties, NY)
Honda (San Jose, CA)
Kucinich (Cleveland, OH)
Lee (Oakland, CA)
Lofgren (San Jose, CA)
McDermott (Seattle, WA)
Payne (Newark, NJ)
Schakowsky (Evanston, IL)
Scott (Newport News, VA)
Serrano (Bronx, NY)
Stark (Fremont, CA)
Watson (Los Angeles, CA)
Woolsey (Petaluma, CA) (LiB's rep)
What would the passage of DOPA mean? The bill would "require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms." You get E-Rate = This Applies to You.
They define social network websites as:
(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users
That is pretty much every website out there that allows interaction of any kind with users: Amazon, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, and as Alane Wilson from OCLC points out: Open WorldCat. Plus any of those neat commercial solutions you've tapped to make your library website more interactive and friendly (Flickr, MySpace, Blogger blog with comments)? Nope...you have to block those from your minor users now. Sorry. It is, after all, all for the children. We don't want them to actually experience what the online world is like or teach them how to be safe online. It's better to just bury our heads in the sand, bury their heads in the sand with us, and pretend like they can't get access to these things elsewhere. Yet one more way to "irrelevantize" (yes that's a word) ourselves even faster to this young generation.
If I was a Library Director, I wouldn't accept E-Rate money if my job depended on it. I think if DOPA passes we'll see more and more libraries refusing E-Rate. The amount of money and staff time you have to spend now on the filtering is borderline worth it strictly from a financial perspective. Add this ridiculous incursion, and it's definitely not worth it to most libraries. How shameful.
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» Alerte sur les logiciels sociaux from Marlene's corner
La biblioblogosphère US (ici, ici, et aussi ici, entre autres) commente largement ces jours-ci l'actualité législative : en effet, le projet de loi sur la "suppression des prédateurs numériques" (DOPA, Deleting Online Predators Act), vient d'être voté ... [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 29, 2006 1:50:29 AM
Comments
This is what I sent to my senators in Washington state. I am not a librarin, though I do work in the Instructional Computing department for a community college. "Please vote against the DOPA. It will not protect our children from online predators. Parents, educators and librarians need to educate our children how to be safe online. We teach our children not to open the door and not to give out information over the phone to strangers, and to look both ways before crossing the street. Yet we don't put barbed wire around our homes to keep predators out, nor do we ban telephones so predators can't call our children, nor do we ban cars because our kids might get hit by a careless driver. Nor do we burn books because we don’t want our children reading them.
The DOPA is a poorly thought out and poorly written plan that doesn't take into consideration all the useful sites that minors (most of which are students) can access such as wikis, free educational study and tutoring websites, and the ability to network with other students, friends, and family members. I have two children at home, several nieces and nephews, and many of their friends that are online in my home. Their ability to expand their knowledge, seek tutoring help, and explore new information would be severely limited if social networking and chat services we banned from schools and libraries. What needs to happen instead is that parents need to educate and monitor their children. I monitor what my children do online, I educate them right from wrong, and then I trust that they will use their best judgment. Educators should be teaching them in the classroom. We don't just hand a kid car keys and a car and then say, "Here you go, now drive!" No way! That would be crazy. Instead, we teach them with a textbook, and then with a simulator, and then we actually let them get behind the wheel, while we sit beside them and monitor their ability to handle such a powerful tool. The internet is a very powerful tool also. It can be a useful tool and it can be a dangerous tool, just like a car. It all depends on how well educated the user is and how they decide to use it.
I would gladly support legislation that would require public school students to take technology classes, similar to the D.A.R.E. program, only for the internet instead of drugs, a program that teaches children of all age levels safe and appropriate use of the internet. I believe less money would be spent educating our children than would be spent on the added security, software, training, monitoring and enforcement that would be necessary to comply with the DOPA. Let's not ban websites, let's instead educate our children, our nation's future.
Passing the DOPA will not stop children from being vulnerable to predators, only good parenting and education can do that! Our nation is already losing jobs because our educational system is not keeping up with third world countries like India. Banning children from valuable educational resources would only increase the job losses and lower paying jobs that we Americans have been faced with over the past several years. For the future of our nation, and our children, please vote against the DOPA!"
I urge everyone to write their senators before they have their chance to vote.
Posted by: Lori | August 3, 2006
Fair enough David. But there are costs with accepting E-Rate money. It's not free money. How much additional money did you have to spend on filtering software? Staff time to install it and maintain it? To train staff on the filtering software? Staff time troubleshooting it, helping users deactivate it when requested? How much does it slow the network down? I just wonder how much money is actually offset by stafftime and costs asscociated with the filtering software. And, as I said, with this new addition--things are only going to get more costly and time-intensive.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton (LiB) | July29, 2006
. . .
And suddenly, the question from the Digital Natives conference, the one about email access in a school library being blocked "because of CIPA," doesn't seem so silly anymore.
This attitude of swaddling children in cotton wool and ptrotecting them from the world cannot be healthy. At the very least, it cannot be healthier than teaching them how to use their brains and common sense to determine what actions are smart and which are not. I worry endlessly that this generation of "helicopter parents" are turning out what are going to be completely helpless adults.
My other worry is that, if libraries have to turn down E-Rates in order to fund their technology, where do they go for that money, and with what strings will the new funding come? I can't imagine that Microsoft or Dell or whoever would not, if given the chance, exercise some influence over library policy if they are suddenly the source of all that library's technology.
Okay, I'm starting to hyperventilate here. Time to go lie down or take an aspirin and start writing emails.
Posted by: Kris | July28, 2006
"I wouldn't accept E-Rate money if my job depended on it." I see it as more complcated than that, unfortunately. For example, MPOW has received $400,000 in years past, and I'm guessing that other urban, underfunded libraries fall into the same category - E-rate actually PAYS FOR their internet access. So no e-rate = no web.
Lose-lose situation...
Posted by: david king | July28, 2006
