Want to Join the Scouts? - Don't bother trying if you don't believe in god

You would have thought that in 2012 and after the 2010 Equality Act has been in operation for 18 months it should be difficult for any organisation to discriminate against anyone based on their religious beliefs. But for a charity benefiting from royal patronage and actually aimed at children it would be unthinkable - after all didn't Jesus (allegedly) say "suffer the children". 

However this bizarre state of affairs is alive and well within one of the longest standing and richest charities in the UK - The Scouts Association.

Yes The Scouts - of camping canoeing,  knot tying and singalong fame, actively and proudly ban any atheist from joining and claim an exemption from the equality act exists to allow them to single out atheists as the only group barred from joining.

You wouldn't imagine this could happen.  After all the current (as of April 2012) home page of their website proudly shows off the new muslim friendly uniform to allow girls to join and they have a wide variety of oaths designed to cover virtually any religion you can name but no secular one.  And it was this lack that prompted me to contact them.

Our daughter is now old enough to join the scouts and we felt it might be an interesting activity for her - something to bring out the adventurous side and widen her horizons.  She has a wide circle of friends and, as is typical in this tolerant and diverse country we live in, they are of many faiths. At the last count we can include a couple of devout catholics, three jews, some creationist christians, four muslims (some from mixed faith households) and any number for whom the question of religion has never arisen.  All these children get along great with only a couple of dinosaur toys causing a little consternation at one point! 

Based on our wonderful diversity I didn't think there would be any problem with the scouts so dropped them a little email asking if there was a secular version of the oath which my daughter could use instead.

This was the reply...

Hi K,

 Thanks for your email.

 The Scout Association is a faith based organisation that asks all of its members to make a Promise which includes, as you mention, stating a 'duty to God.' Although this does not necessarily have to be a Christian, or other major faith, God, it does suppose a belief in a higher being. This belief is very much down to personal understanding.

Therefore, we do not have a version of the promise that does not include God, such as for Atheists. This shared belief is one of the things that brings Scouts together across the world, and it forms a fundamental part of our programme of activities.

Please do give me a call if you have any further questions.

(I have removed the name of the diversity officer responsible for this email though you could contact their office on diversity.inclusion@scouts.org.uk )

Oh yes I had some questions so I called.

The call was largely pointless. and can be summarised as

Q. Why do you ban Atheists?
A. We don't, we just require everyone to believe in a higher spiritual power (presumably the inclusive term for all possible religions)
Q. But what bit of canoeing, camping and singalongs requires you to believe in god?
A. We are a faith based organisation so can do what we like?
Q. No you can't
A. Yes we can
Q Why?
A We are a faith based organisation and require everyone to believe in a higher spiritual power

Loop endlessly - you can tell when the person on the other end of the phone can't really explain when they loop around the same arguments without actually answering the questions.

So following this I had a chat to the equality commission and they felt that The Scouts couldn't actually do this. Their argument as basically - it would be illegal to say "no jews allowed" so "no atheists allowed" is equally illegal.  Hence my next email...

From: karl
Sent: 03 April 2012 17:52
To: Diversity Inclusion
Subject: Re: Membership query

Dear C,

I am disappointed by your response to this important issue.  Under the equality act 2010 it is illegal to discriminate against any person based on their faith or belief system and atheism is explicitly included within the act. As your association is not affiliated to any specific religion it would therefore seem that to deny access to a member of the public based solely on their religious beliefs is counter to the 2010 equality act.

I have spoken to the equality commission and they share this view.

I would welcome your response.

 
This was the response

Dear Karl,

I'm sorry that you are disappointed by the response. In terms of the law, The Scout Association complies with all UK Equality legislation, including the Equality Act. As a membership organisation, rather than simply a programme of activities, it is permitted for us to put a requirement of this shared belief in for being a member and we thus are exempt.

I do wish to reassure you that there are other organisations, which we work closely with, who run similar activities without this requirement, such as The Woodcraft Folk, which may be better suited to your needs.

Kind regards,

Well the woodcraft folk don't suit us and the equality act equally states that you can't refuse membership based on religion so hence my next email...



I have a number of questions for you.

1) My understanding is that these exemptions are intended to apply to organisations which support a particular religion or belief.  The examples given in accompanying notes refer to clubs set up to support jewish war veterans etc. As the scout association permits members from a full range of religions and allows members to opt out of services etc that are not in accordance with their own religion I cannot see how these exemptions allow the scouts to be selective in their implementation.

Either the scouts are a christian organisation with the aim of supporting and furthering christian understanding and so restrict membership to those of a specific religion or they are accepting of the full range of religious beliefs and views and tolerate a full range of religious believers.  It seems "unchristian" and potentially unlawful to cherry pick which belief systems are permitted.

2) Would Pagans and Scientologists be permitted to join the scouts?  Both of these groups are acknowledged to be religions within the UK.

3) Why are the scouts excluding Atheists as a single group. Atheists follow, in general, a moral code in line with every other member of the UK and so to exclude them seems perverse and intolerant.

I am intending to raise this matter further with the charity commission to seek clarification on your association's understanding of these exemptions.

I look forward to your answers to the above questions.

Kind regards,

To which I got this response

Karl,

I believe that we have already covered many of the points you have raised, through previous emails and our phone conversation and, therefore, it is of no benefit to go over them once again. We are within UK legislation and this policy is a fundamental aspect of Scouting.

Obviously, you are free to liaise with the Charity Commission, if desired.

Kind regards,

Basically "sod off you annoying atheist"

I have now raised the issue with the Charity Commission who on the phone agree with my point of view that to say "no atheists" is equal to and equally illegal as "no jews" or "no muslims" they are considering my written complaint about this breach of Charity Law.

In summary The Scouts don't want their members mixing with Atheists and are misrepresenting the exemptions of the equality act 2010 to their own narrow minded and discriminatory ends. 

What will Twitter do to Web Design?

For many people, Social Media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) is the way they find lots of new and interesting sites and experiences on the Internet. This can be friends posting links to interesting info, celebrities promoting sites, columnists pushing up their readership numbers or increasingly businesses using SM to promote their goods and services. 
 
Many ways now exist for websites to generate Twitter or Facebook links directly from their pages. This enables the public to quickly and easily share their discoveries without faffing around with link shorteners and separate SM logins etc. This can generate significant traffic and hopefully business for websites as they are effectively co-opting their readers into being free Publicity and Marketing agents for them. 
 
So what does this mean for webdesign? 
 
When I first started in the Internet business, web sites had to be designed to suit the lowest common denominator of viewer. This meant 640*480 screens 16000 (or even 256) colours and designs that could be transmitted over a 9.6kbit/s phone connection. Now websites can be stuffed with millions of colours, huge screen resolutions flash animation and need Megabit sized broadband speeds to download acceptably. 
 
This, of course, assumes everyone is sitting in front of a high spec, large screen PC able to run all this stuff when in fact many people will be viewing sites via iPhones, Blackberries other smartphones or iPads each with their own capabilities and limitations. Anyone trying to view websites on a tiny Blackberry screen using GPRS will understand what a limitation this imposes and what a struggle it can be. 
 
This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for web designers. They need to use the opportunity of having viewers promote content via SM to increase their readership, but also recognize the audience out there using mobile devices and offer lighter, simpler and smaller web experiences that can be used on these devices. 
 
This could be via intelligent systems which recognize these devices and deliver adapted content (the bbc site is a notable one for this) or perhaps the use of specific micro-sites able to deliver cut-down content. 
 
Either way designers will need to adapt to the changing landscape of delivery systems and networks. 
 
Those designers brought up in the first generation of web design may have a lot to teach the new mobile, SM aware Internet. 
 
Karl Meyer
www.spice.co.uk
------------------

Will Twitter split in two?

Previously I posted on how twitter can start to make money from its increasingly popular service
 
http://rand-musing.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html
 
and all those ways still apply but now it seems possible that the best way for twitter to become profitable is to divide itself into two separate businesses.
 
This might seem strange when the history of IT in general and the Internet in particular has been one of endless mergers and acquisitions resulting in gigantic businesses like Microsoft, Google etc but I really think that Twitter may be an exception to this rule and for a number of reasons
 
Twitter is structurally very different from every other Social Media site around and different in its model to every other website that I can think of in that its website is largely irrelevant. If you scan through your own twitter feed you'll find that the vast majority of posts aren't coming from twitter.com they're emerging from iphones, blackberrys, literally dozens of third party applications, APIs from news providers etc etc etc.  In my own (unscientific) stream I would guess that no more than 10% of the content I read on twitter actually originates via twitter.com.
 
Myself, if I'm watching The Apprentice or Xfactor (under protest in the later case I hasten to add) I'll be reading twitter not on my laptop but on my blackberry and will post comments via that device simply because its easier to use and doesn't burn my lap in the process!
 
The key conclusion from this is that Twitter(ing) the service is much much more popular than twitter.com the website and so the two can, and should, be considered separately.
 
If you then start to look at revenue opportunities it becomes clear that some of the existing revenue plans that have emerged within twitter are therefore not likely to produce the expected returns.
 
Promoted trending topics will only be seen by around 10% of twitter users and therefore could be seen are being worth only 10% of what they would based on twitter user numbers  certainly the click-through numbers will be dramatically lower - even less than 10% of expected if the .com site users are the less active portion of the twitter membership.
 
Any site based advertising will therefore be viewed by a smaller and potentially less active sub set of the whole membership making it much less attractive (or lucrative).
 
On the other hand in service revenues could be extremely attractive - either paid for insertions (tricky to square with the audience), or pay per view subscriptions (an area I think has lots of legs).
 
Twitter, the service provider, could also offer its services into closed user groups (either Business to Business or Intra Company) to provide rapid messaging delivery inside a company.  This could provide a very interesting revenue stream and earn cash to fund future developments.
 
Based in this I would expect to see some announcements regarding  Twitter's business structure very soon..
 
Karl Meyer
www.SPICE.co.uk

Why Car Manufacturer Websites are rubbish

Having just been through the hell that is buying a new car I feel compelled to vent my frustration at their useless websites.
 
If you haven't been to one recently then I suggest giving them a go - they are all the same so pick anyone you fancy.  But first get a large mug of tea and a few valium ready first.
 
The biggest gripe is their obsession with using flashy flash animations to do virtually everything. The amount of time spent watching a little circular "loading" icon going round and round and round is just endless.  You go on their home page and unlike every other web site around which loads pretty instantly (even on a 500kbit/s 'broadband') they sit there loading endless widgets and slidey animations and active controls for this that and the other.  The processing power to advertise a Fiesta must be 20 times that required to launch a shuttle.
 
And it doesn't end with the home page.  Every separate vehicle has its own animation sequence (or three) with revolving cars, zoomy in and out pictures of the interior and the ability to paint each car in any of the colours available.  Why this can't be done with a range of static image galleries and some fancy navigation I don't know.
 
Then once you've done all this you can go to the "configurator" where you can add options to your vehicle and get a price.  Now forget tick boxes or radio buttons - this has to be done with custom animations and graphics. 
 
Not to mention huge abuse of the mouse-over function which makes trying to do any of this virtually impossible if your mousepad is a bit oversensitive  (as an aside http://www.Royalmail.com is another big villian in the mouseover abuse stakes and as I use that site daily I know!)
 
I realise that car firms spend millions on fancy brochures and TV ads but trying to replicate these experiences on the Internet simply isn't the way that its done and they need to consider the Internet to be a separate distinctive media.
 
For any examples of the villany try  www.citroen.co.uk  www.ford.co.uk  as some of the worst of the bunch
 
Karl Meyer
Associate ww.Spice.co.uk

 

Why the Twitter cock-up could be the making of the service

Tuesday's very public exposure of the twittter.com website was seen by some as a demonstration that Twitter isn't really up to running a 'proper' service and an indication that Social Media and Twitter in particular is really not a business ready activity.
 
However I think that it demonstrates both a lot of the strengths of Twitter and may points everyone in the direction of where Twitter might want to position itself....
 
The hack on the twitter.com website was really just a demonstration that its possible to drop a very small piece of malware code into even the 140 character limit of twitter messages.  Its something that a paranoid security person might have picked up on when examining their site but in reality it simply shows that no single web site can ever be 100% protected against attacks.  But most importantly it showed that the vast majority of twitter users who access Twitter via third party PC apps and mobiles were almost totally unaffected by the problem.
 
People saying that the problem on twitter.com means that twitter and Social Media are dangerous are actually missing the point. Twitter and Twitter.com are effectively two separate things just like email and outlook express are two separate things. Just because outlook express has a problem doesn't mean that email is bad.
 
The fact that the majority of twitter users weren't affected shows that twitter has grown beyond being a web site and is now a communications service (just like email).  Twitter.com has given birth to tweeting and tweeting is (largely) separate from the twitter.com website.
 
This has two fundamental efffects.
 
1) It gives Twitter a potential revenue stream to licence the "tweeting" technology to third parties either for public services or (most probably) internal company messaging services
 
2) It means that any revenue streams twitter hopes to make from its current service need to be planned around the fact that the majority of its users won't be viewing its home page very often and so revenue has to be found inside the twitter stream rather than wrapped around it.
 
All this makes the new front end to twitter.com simultaneously very important to do properly (to remove these potential security issues) and largely irrelevant (as most people won't be using it!)

Why Critical Mass is Critical for your Business Website

Imagine a high street shop selling nothing but four inch high fuchsia pink stilettos - hardly a recipe for success (except maybe in Chelsea) but its a problem faced by virtually every start-up website - lack of content.
 
No matter if your website is selling shoes or motor tools or is an information only website you need a critical mass of content before your site will be attractive.  The reason for this is simple - you need to ensure customers stay as long as possible on your site and, more importantly, come back time and time again and the only way to do this is to continually refresh and increase the amount of content on your site. If you're a blogger or video producer people will want to see more of your excellent work but if you only have two or three pieces on show they have no reason to come back for more.  Everyone knows the "difficult second album" problem faced by bands (all the good stuff on the first one and only the leftovers on the second) and this problem is worse for on-line content providers.
 
The problem is even worse for on-line retailers.  After a success on EBay  selling a couple of lines the shop owner decides to launch their own site only to find very very few customers despite all the SEO and Adwords they can afford to throw at it.  In these cases the problem is almost certainly lack of products.  
 
One reason why business owners don't put up enough content (or products) on their site is because they don't think like the customer.  You may have been hugely successful selling fishing reels on EBay but try setting up a website with only fishing reels (or 4 inch pink stilettos) and you'll only have a fraction of the success because customers buy in a different way to the way you're trying to sell to them. 
 
If you're into fishing you'll maybe buy a couple of reels a year but you'll buy hooks, weights, line, bait etc etc etc time and time again and you'll have a favourite place to buy these bits.  Whilst you're in the the shop buying bait you'll spot a new reel and maybe pick it up (maybe not straight away but eventually) and you'll probably pay £1-£2 over the odds just for the simplicity of buying everything from one place.  Unless Reels-R-Us.co.uk are extremely cheap you may never bother going there.   Reels-R-Us are failing because they don't have the critical mass of products to make them the go-to place for all fishing accessories (not just reels).
 
This is why the Bemoths of on-line news content (bbc.co.uk, cnn.com etc) attract such a huge proportion of the on-line viewers - they have the mass and range of content allowing users to browse virtually endlessly.
 
So how do you build critical mass?
 
Answer: With great difficulty.  The huge web sites are often an offshoot of an established brand and so can easily access large amounts of content and stock whereas a start-up doesn't have the legacy (or cash) to do the same.  But what you can do is focus and be targeted in your content. Don't spread yourself too thin in a scattergun approach but equally don't fixate on a single product range.  Think of what other things your customers will or might need at the same time when they're buying your core product and try to fill in around those core items. Then, over time, expand carefully into other areas, each time trying to ensure the range of content or products offers your customers the right mix of stuff to retain their interest. 
 
Karl Meyer
Associate  www.spice.co.uk

Where now for Twitter?

With the latest user numbers being announced for Social Media sites and Facebook reaching 500,000,000 members against twitter's 200,000,000 its interesting to think about where twitter is heading and when (and how) it will start to make money.
 
With the growth in its user numbers slowing its clear that Twitter is heading towards maturity and will start to have to consider where the money will come from.  One aspect of Twitter that makes it very different to its competitors/compatriots is that it is more like a service rather than a site. The majority of its users rarely actually go to www.twitter.com instead using third party applications like tweetdeck or smartphone apps.  This makes some of the obvious money making ventures such as sidebar and banner ads irrelevant but does open up a whole range of opportunities.
 
Essentially there are three ways a service like twitter can make money...
 

• Pay to Post
• Pay to Read
• Clickthrough fees

 
Pay to Post
 
Twitter has always said that membership will always be free and that it will be free for members to post but words and deeds can always change over time.  Though I doubt personal members will ever be charged to join or tweet the same may not always be the case for businesses.  This could take two forms...  Membership charges where businesses are charged to join and tweet or tweet insertion charges. 
 
The first is fairly simple and non-contentious but unlikely to earn a huge amount of money. The second however could earn huge amounts but would be a very tricky sell. 
 
Businesses could be charged on the basis that their tweets would be inserted into the stream of users say 1 tweet in every 50 in your stream would be an advert.  At the most basic level these could be shotgun tweets advertising everything from coffee to burgers but with a bit of clever search engine work it would be possible to envisage context sensitive tweets being inserted into your timeline based on the content and members you follow.  Google already do this with your googlemail account by analysing the content of the mail and sticking 'relevant' ads into the sidebar.
 
Would you object to one tweet in 50 or one in 100 being a 'relevant' advert? - how much would advertisers pay to have their ads viewed?  What kind of click through rate would be expected?  All these questions (and more) would need to be asked but this I think could be a major earner for Twitter. After all we accept ads on ITV and Channel 4 in return for 'free' programmes.  I'm sure google would be interested in being able to get its hands on the content of 200,000,000 timelines and insert tailored ads.
 
Pay to Read
 
Why on earth would people pay to read tweets? After all the vast majority of Twitter is pointless noise - surely nothing is worth paying for? 
 
Where this option has legs is the service not site nature of twitter.  Most twitter users use their mobile phones to access the service or use it as a background app on their desktop when they should be working and this gives an opportunity for paying to read.
 
If you're a football fan (of either flavour) or indeed any kind of sports fan.  What value would you put on having live score updates in your twitter timeline?  £1 a month? Less? More?  Travel updates? News streams? Financial Data? 
 
In fact anything which is short, and time sensitive could be seen to have a value and a system where you can subscribe to have this information sent out to you, aggregated via your twitter app (or even a specific app tailored to the data but plugged into the twitter service could have a market. Twitter then becomes a messaging platform for third party data.
 
Click Through Fees
 
A lot of tweets (both personal and increasingly business ones) are actually links to extenal data (images or other sites/services)  This again is a big difference between Twitter the service and Facebook the site.  Facebook is largely a destination site whereas Twitter is more of a portal to other content.  Of course where there are external links and external content there is the opportunity to earn click-through/referral fees.  Within the 140 character limit there is limited scope to insert the relevant tracking codes but this isn't insurmountable and again could generate significant fees - particularly from business accounts.
 
The benefit of all these income streams are that they play to Twitters strengths as a messaging platform and are not mutually exclusive. 
 
The next year could be a very interesting and possibly profitable time for Twitter
 
Karl Meyer
www.spice.co.uk