Sun's blogging policy, also known as Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse, is a masterpiece, in my opinion. It was originally written four years ago when our blog site was first deployed. It's spirit and intent was spot-on then and has served us so well over the years that we revised it to make it less blogging-centric so it can scale across our other community site.
The revision was a collaborative effort between Sun representatives from HR, Legal, Export, Privacy, Trademark, IP, Tim Bray, and myself.
To be honest, I went into the revision effort expecting to defend the document as tho' it were The Constitution, but I'm happy to report that the spirit of the document was eagerly preserved by everyone involved.
Here is a full summary of the revisions:
1. The title includes the term Guidelines instead of Policy (links to related Sun policies are provided in the document)
2. The content is no longer blogging-centric since the meaning scales nicely to cover other community sites (Forums, Wikis, Mediacast, Planets, etc.)
3. It includes additional guidelines that cover:
The revision was a collaborative effort between Sun representatives from HR, Legal, Export, Privacy, Trademark, IP, Tim Bray, and myself.
To be honest, I went into the revision effort expecting to defend the document as tho' it were The Constitution, but I'm happy to report that the spirit of the document was eagerly preserved by everyone involved.
Here is a full summary of the revisions:
1. The title includes the term Guidelines instead of Policy (links to related Sun policies are provided in the document)
2. The content is no longer blogging-centric since the meaning scales nicely to cover other community sites (Forums, Wikis, Mediacast, Planets, etc.)
3. It includes additional guidelines that cover:
- Not commenting on Sun legal matters
- Links to related Sun policies for easy reference
- Professional behavior as a Sun representative in virtual worlds
- Disclosing your Sun relationship when writing about Sun related topics
- Community moderation
- Proper use of other people's information
