Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the Internet, announced the Contract for the Web today. RunSignup has endorsed the contract and pledges to live up to the ideals of a better web.
Much of the founding principles of RunSignup came from Open Source principles that are essentially the same as what Tim outlines. We felt registration needed to be more affordable, so we do not charge a per person fee. We felt the data belonged to the individual and the race, and not to us so we could make more money selling people’s data. We wanted other technology to easily interoperate so we built and open API. We wanted to continuously get better, so we built our software so that we can do our 1,500 upgrades per year without bringing our system down. We made our software accessible for all in a self serve and the same system serves everyone – whether it is the Philadelphia Marathon or the 50 person 5K, or the running club that is free to join.
Specifically for companies, the three major objectives are:
- Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
- Respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust
- Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst
We will be working over the next month to extend a couple of the features to help make our platform better.
We will be extending our “Anonymous” setting. We introduced this feature in 2014 at the suggestion of Anne Gault. It removes a person’s name from public “Find a Participant” and Results and Photo pages. We will be making this easier to find and adjust for users.
We will also be introducing a setting to remove tracking cookies. We have features that allow races to add tracking cookies, pixels and Javascript to pages so they can determine if their Facebook ads are cost effective for example. We will be adding capabilities for users to remove those tracking technologies (although ironically we will need to add a tracking cookie to help make this work).
