Signal social sharing permissions with stickers and buttons

This post is part of an experiment: for one month, I am giving away all my ideas.

A couple of days ago I violated one of my personal rules by tweeting a brilliant comment from my colleague Sandra Dametto, without first asking permission. We were mid-meeting and I was so taken by her comment that the tweet just sort of…slipped out.

Awesome framing of how to manage expectations from @girlatwork: “Audit the bubbles over everybody’s heads.”

Happily, Sandra was ok with my unsanctioned disclosure, but this incident got me to thinking: what if there were a away to signal your default sharing permissions offline, the way some people do online?

You may have received emails with a sig line like:

NOTES:  This email is:   [ ] bloggable    [X] ask first   [ ] private

(OK, maybe you’ve only seen that if you correspond with Phillip Smith. In this, as in many things email, Phillip is a visionary.)

I would propose a similar set of label pins, laptop stickers and facial tattoos…kind of like the Northern Voice “bloggable” t-shirts, but something more persistent, signalling your (un)willigness to have your in-person comments posted to the Internet.

Probably some of you are freaked out right now by the idea that anything you say might get posted to the Internet based on random conversations. This might be a really good — or really bad — time to check out the “overheard” feed on Twitter.