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When moderation goes wrong August 30, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, COP , 2comments

Another insightful discussion has broken out in the onlinefacilitation yahoogroup, and it’s great that the messages there are public facing, so that I can provide direct hyperlinks into individual messages which blog readers can visit without having to register or anything.

Beverley Trayner initiated the thread with a question about who owns posts.

Bev later elaborates on the story, which gave cause for concern, and sums up some of the replies received.

Rosanna rewrote one of her responses on her blog , (permalink not working atm) and I’m doing the same with mine below:

Beverley’s story is a true gift for us here, because of the way it
portrays real events in an online community rather than hypothetical
or hoped-for ones. I find the unravelling of disputes fascinating as
much as sad, beause they go so much further in revealing the true
underlying power relationships which are sometimes inherent in the
nature of the particular technology itself, or it’s implementation.

It’s very interesting that the dispute appears to have precipitated as
a result of one group continuing a dialogue referring to f2f meetings
in the online forum. That’s pretty much what I would expect to happen,
but another group, the moderators, which may or may not have an
overlap with the activists, acted to squash discussion, presumably
acting in an overprotecting manner thinking they were helping to avoid
a potential problem with the the non f2f people feeling left out by
these particular conversations.

OK, so the moderators are inexperienced, they don’t have the
confidence to just let things flow. Perhaps they were also guilty of
trying to set up an ‘artificial’ discussion space, with preconceived
ideas about exactly what the potential membership would be expected to
talk about and how they would be expected to behave, even if they
would surely fall short of that themselves.

The question which occupies my mind, is what are the contributory
factors which guided the the moderators to start acting in a way that
broke the community?

I suggest some possibilities:

*Pattern of thought and behaviour brought over from our current
society which encourage a top-down controlling structure as the only
workable possibility.

*The bulletinboard software, like so much social software these days,
comes preconfigured for a hierarchical group of all powerful
moderators. The role of the administrator as appointer of moderators
with the power to censor comes built in, and is therefore often taken
to be the normal way to behave. When under stress, the temptation to
actually use these powerful tools which are positioned right under the
nose, may be difficult to resist.

*Fashionable consensus and nearly all of the written advice and
conclusions from research all tell people that the key to successful
online community lies in facilitation, where the term facilitation has
passed into wider coinage as a euphamism for moderation, which in turn
is a euphamism for one person holding the unnegotiable power over
another to tell them what they can or can’t say and where they can or
cannot say it.

I think that in practice these days, given the difficulty for any
group of people who want to hold discussions in setting up something
that doesn’t involve appointing at least one all powerful moderator,
the best policy is probably to appoint only one, and for that person
to do as little as possible. This is the benevolent dictator model,
or absent dictator model. Technology for the truly unmoderated group
does still exist on the internet, and a few tens of thousands of
unmoderated groups persist quite happily, but not on the
world-wide-web where every space has to be owned by somebody.
Experiments with the “everyone is a moderator” model have not been too
sucessful in the longer run. A simple fact is that the more moderators
a community has, the greater the opportunity for one of them to turn
rogue, go insane , or make a mistake with seriously damaging
consequences.

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A grumble about Yahoogroups August 16, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : COP, tools , comments closed

Email groups are a simple form of many-to-many communication which have been in use since before the www , in parallel with usenet and early bulletin boards. They remain the principal community tool for many communities of practice, interest groups, support communites and so on. This is a grumble about one particular egroups platform in widespread use, namely yahoogroups. A month or so ago, the company which provides the Yahoogroups service released a series of ‘improvements’.

For people who subscribe via the digest version, which presents a series of messages in one single email, the format of the digest was improved so that individual messages can be replied to by clicking on the appropriate link. All very good for those who like to take a cursory interest in groups through the digest experience, which is at least better than going ‘nomail’ I suppose.

But at the same time, if you subscribe fully and receive all the individual emails, carefully filtered into a seperate folder and threaded by your choice of email client software, you will notice that a whole swathe of info, ads and links have been added to the end of every single mail! The appendage is about a page long in my setup, and causes me additional scrolling, which is a nuisance I would prefer to do without.

Below is an example of what I am talking about, from the last email I received from Nancy White’s excellent online facilitation group:

screenshot

While some of the information may be necessary, ( unsubscribe instructions help to avoid annoying requests sent to a list) a lot of it is irrelevant to the specific group and padded out with a lot of white space which only wears out the scroll wheel, mouse or keyboard and wastes valuable interaction time.
Grump.
As for alternatives, well the easy option is the simplified but not perfect service offered by competitor Googlegroups , or the open source Mailman system which needs to be hosted somewhere of your own.

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Thinking of community feed mixers August 12, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, tools , 2comments

Bev Trayner has been thinking about feed mixers:

Em duas línguas: Still thinking of feed mixers

“When you joined the community you could subscribe to the feed mix which would give you separate feeds for the individual blogs. You could then go through at your leisure, trimming out the ones that you didn’t want to follow.”

I think this kind of thing is what OPML files are for. When someone joins the community, they would pick up the OPML file for it ( which somebody would have to maintain, I suppose) plonk it into their feedreader and hey presto they are subscribed to a whole bunch of blogs which they can then do what they like with. Trouble is, how do they get new ones added in automatically?

( see also Em duas línguas: Looking for the right RSS mixer )

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Update: See also Enterprise RSS