If you think back long and hard enough, you’ll remember that Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) snafu from earlier this year – a whole bunch of people went up in arms over some stealthy changes to the company’s governance documents that brought their policies in line with their practices. At the core of the issue was some sketchy wording that gave Facebook a non-revocable, permanent license to any content contributed to the social network – which, if you stop to think about it, is a pretty massive amount of content, considering that Facebook is far-and-away the largest social network on Earth.

It wasn’t the first time that Facebook’s drawn a ton of flak for what they thought would be a tiny policy change, and it’s likely not going to be the last time - but this time was a bit different. You see, this time, Facebook actually took the problem seriously, backpedaling on the changes, ditching the new TOS document and renaming it the “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR).” The name wasn’t the only thing that changed, though – Facebook opened the document up to users, making it into one of the largest crowd-sourced documents in history.

By the time the first draft of the SRR was finished, the hullabaloo had died out, replied with a quiet and growing respect for Facebook’s ability to be flexible, adaptable and forward-thinking.

Today, Facebook’s SRR will be updated – but not without the blessing of its users. Rather than sneaking in policy changes without so much as a by-your-leave, Facebook has actually REDLINED the changes to the document so that users won’t have to go searching around for them; one of the original accusations that users made about the stealthy TOS changes was that Facebook didn’t draw any particular attention to them, even though they were fairly major changes that users should have been made intimately aware of.

Since yesterday (August 11th), users have had the opportunity to view the proposed (!!) changes to the SRR and make any objections, comments or suggestions that they might have. What exactly Facebook is going to do with that feedback is anybody’s guess, but the point is – they’re collecting the feedback. That’s something they were never doing in the past, and it shows that Facebook has come to realize that they won’t survive on strength of numbers alone.

The hammer goes down in a few hours – users have a chance to provide feedback until 10:00 AM PDT on August 18th, which is in…gosh, I don’t know, I hate time zones. It’s in a few hours, anyway, so you’d best get over to Facebook’s Site Governance Page to get your two cents in!

Looking toward the future, we’re glad to see that Facebook is taking advantage of their massive userbase instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist or have opinions – like they used to appear to do. We’ll be weighing in here and there on changes to the document, and one thing we’re sure of at least is that we won’t be seeing any more stealthy, sneaky changes coming down the line – at least, not from this particular social network.