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Death of a community member January 12, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, online facilitation, UK, cider, listservs , add a comment

On the E-Mint listserv there’s a discussion about what happens after the death of a community member. Should their profile be taken down? Can the next of kin access their email?

 

My story involves the death of a prominent member, waybackmachine ,
wiki and transfer of websites.

A prominent member of uk cider stopped posting for several months
and people began to inquire after him. Eventually his wife found the
group and explained that he had been in a car accident and was
recovering very slowly. Then we heard that he suddenly died of a heart
attack.

I was approached by a couple of members who were concerned that
Paul’s own website and accumulated content should not be lost to
posterity and they tried writing to his wife as tactfully as possible,
but understandably she had bigger worries at the time.

So I created a wiki page linked from the members page, which contains
tributes written by the group as a reaction to hearing the tragic
news, and links to Paul’s site as archived on the “waybackmachine”
where I assume the content will remain indefinitely, even if the
original site is taken down. It’s the saddest task for a facilitator,
but seemed very necessary.

http://tinyurl.com/ypmsf8

http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Paul_Gunningham_In_Memorium

Interestingly I later discovered that the domain names and content had
passed on to another small scale web developer in a similar niche. I
don’t know how this was arranged, but I assume it was agreed with the
next of kin.

If somebody dies owning domain names and nobody inherits them, then
they eventually expire and come up for resale. There are then
companies who specialise in auctioning off the means to acquire them.

Desired feature: ignore threads in gMail July 3, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : listservs, tools , add a comment

Funny I’ve been thinking about email functionality and I agree entirely with Jack’s analysis and feature request:

Knowledge Jolt with Jack: Desired feature: ignore threads in YahooGroups

Since I do read yahoogroups, googegroups, Mailman and other listservs in email rather than visit the websites, the feature requested could be implemented across all platforms through the use of a decent email client. I happen to use gMail, so it would be nice if Google would implement this. I’d like to be able to ignore threads and watch threads. Maybe authors too. Then I’d be back somewhere near the usability I had with Forte Agent about 10 years ago!

forteagent.gif

Collecting tips for online facilitators and moderators July 2, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, distributed research, online facilitation, COP, listservs, Wiki , add a comment

Like a previous post, ( and this one and this one ), this is another blog post inspired by conversation on a listserv (email discussion group).

The discussion was sparked off originally by a request for advice on dealing with repeated disruption in an online community. The e-Mint community responded with some suggestions, including technological measures. Then I invoked an ethical dimension to the topic and the scope continued to broaden. Participants started to append little notes of congratulation to their contributions, in appreciation of the discussion and then we agreed to capture the main points onto a wiki page which is currently hosted on DARnet, here.

wiki

I was going to reproduce my own point of view in this post, since I have some quite clearly differentiated attitudes in comparison with other practitioners, but I think I’ll just post a link to the wiki page which is a collaborative effort and contains a pluralistic approach to the collection of tips and the art of summary.

Tips_on_community_behaviour_issues_for_moderators

If you are a facilitator or moderator then I’d appreciate it if you’d have a look and let us know if this kind of thing is of any use beyond the context within which it arose or not. If it seems worthwhile, then do please bookmark the page, share it, edit it and add in your tuppence worth wherever you like.

Talking about wages is not the same as price fixing June 26, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics, COP, listservs , add a comment

My friend Miguel read the discussion in the online facilitation listserv and decided to note it on his blog rather than reply there, which is fair enough. I do that sometimes.

eme ká eme
Price-fixing and communities of practice.

This week there was an exchange that ended thus:

On 21/06/07, Elissa Perry wrote:

I belong to two other “professional” lists and both have stated in their rules and enforce a no pricing discussion clause as this can be construed as illegal price-fixing.

One group¹s rules state “Rule: 1.5 Please don’t discuss freelance rates on this list, as it potentially violates antitrust/price-fixing laws. This is non-negotiable.”

Another group has a rule which states

“Rule 72b: Anybody who interferes with a free flowing discussion by introducing unnecessary words of caution, calling upon laws of foreign lands and quoting rules from unspecified other groups shall be 1) cautioned 2) banished 3) deported to Australia.”
–
Andy Roberts

Andy’s quip is worth reading :-). But Elissa had raised an interesting point. Indeed that was not the first time that I have seen debate about freelance prices quashed in a community resource. A printing and pre-press forum is notorious for the squabbles whenever labour issues are raised.

Communities of practice are a queer beast in this sense. They are somewhat of a “vertical labour union” gathering different levels of professionals, often bosses and workers side by side, so they are awkward places to debate the sharing of the spoils.

And, when the members are indeed all independent service providers… they become a prime coordination environment. In the unlikely event of a profession-wide membership (or a membership wide enough to determine prices) it can indeed be perceived as a cartel. Which can be illegal, or not, depending on the country.

I’m glad you liked the quip. I’ll probably blog a reply myself but meanwhile I’d like to say that I view communities of practice as essentially horizontal, not vertical. What practices do managers have in common with workers? Employers have more to discuss with each other, even in competitive corporations, as do workers of the same trade regardless of who they work for. So I would think it perfectly reasonable for practitioners who organise together in communities to discuss pay and conditions.
The confusion with price fixing cartels of the rich and powerful is not helpful, nor ever likely to be applicable.

( Read Miguel’s further comment on his site )

The mention of deportation to Australia, by the way, for readers unaquainted with UK history is a reference to the Tolpuddle Matryrs, who were dealt with such in the 1830s precisely for organising a combination of agricultural workers against poverty wages in the rural economy.

In response to another post, I wrote:

I would reject the idea that a group of people disclosing
their individual pay rates could constitute a cartel. Monopolies which
seek to inflate profits through artificial price fixing of commodities
and workers seeking to ascertain a going rate let alone a decent
living wage, are two very different scenarios.
The issuing of warnings about implausible legal ramifications is not a
neutral action, however well meant. For a start, there is the
question of which counry’s legal system, if any, holds sway over
different individuals. Presumably the people who would urge caution
would logically need to take the laws of the most repressive state
represented in this international group, and quel the discussion down
to a level which complies with the most draconion of legal systems.

It can’t be illegal in many places in the world simply for folks to
talk to each other, and if that were to be the case then the best
attitude to take is not to voluntarily export such repression onto the
internet, but to secure new freedoms there.

The Art of Threading February 17, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation, listservs , add a comment

On a listserv, mailing list or similar, have you ever been accused of hijacking somebody else’s thread and wondered what on earth they are talking about?

One possibility is a side effect of systems which bridge between email and web based forums. Yahoogroups and googlegroups are popular examples but not the only ones. People who use email to read groups will sometimes start a new thread in the same way that they might initiate a new conversation with an old contact - by finding the last message that person sent to them, hitting reply, deleting the old message and composing a new one complete with new subject header. That’s generally a good idea because it vastly reduces the chances of getting their email address wrong.

But if you do this with a threaded discussion list there’s a chance that somebody reading the group via the web interface will wonder why on earth you have suddenly started talking about a completely different subject in “their” thread.

( As an aside, I remember in the past such complainants being mocked for some time afterwards by being referred to as “Oh Threadmaster”, but that’s probably a different set of circumstances )

There’s a pertinent problem here of how best to deal with this potential conflict between two slightly different sets of users of the same discussion group - the email list users and the web forum readers.

This is how I decided to tackle it when a mild complaint was raised on one of the groups I facilitate:

I noted your comment about threads earlier, and it might be worth trying to clear up some possible misunderstandings about the way the
discussions are presented to people when we read this group.
I believe a lot of people, probably most and including myself are
reading the messages as they arrive in our email inboxes. In this
case, it all depends what kind of email reading software or webmail
sevice you are using, and how it is set up , as to how the topics and
messages are displayed. Many will simply sort by message subject or by
date. There is also the option of reading the group directly from the
archives at eg http://groups.google.com where it appears a bit like a
web forum. I’ve just looked and it is true that the new subjects can appear as
continuations of older topics where people have simply hit the reply
button in their email and then changed the subject.

I’m not saying that we need to have any specific rules or even
guidelines necessarily about how to post or start new subjects, just
to try and be aware that other people may have a different experience
or view of the concept of what is a thread and where it starts.

If you wanted to be sure of starting a new thread by email, compose a
new mail rather than a reply. Set the To: or recipient to
somegroup@yagoogroups.com ( you should be able to get that pasted in
from your address book ) and type in a new subject and message.

If in doubt, it’s nearly always better to send in any information,
questions, ideas or opinions in any old way you can rather than not
bother.

Response to Stephen Clift January 23, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics, listservs , 1 comment so far

On Tim Erikson’s blog Stephen Clift replies to my comment re reply-to-sender in e-groups:

P.S. Andy, our decade long idea has always been that being “public” needed to be an affirmative choice. We want to avoid mistaken messages to all. We do need to point out that you must press “reply-to-all” in our welcome and future monthly reminder posts. Also, what we really need in Newham and other newer forums is a coordinated and aggressive recruitment drive. With 400 members this setting might make a lot more sense.

I am of course familar with the arguments for reply to sender, and I don’t agree with them. People have already made an affirmative choice to be public when they join a public forum. On the other hand the reply to sender default is more suitable to private networking type of communication rather than group discussion.
The fear of accident is a red herring which discloses a predisposition towards privacy rather than openness and the 400 number is arbitrary. Yahoogroups is probably the largest system of e-groups and many of them seem to work quite healthily with reply-to-group and over 1000 subscribers. And before the web, we had Usenet with undisclosed numbers of subscribers to each group, but reply-to-group set as default in all variations of newsreader software, and many subscribers coping with up to 200 messages per day in high traffic groups. I’ve been subscribed to a couple of majordomo e-groups which switched from reply-to-group to reply-to-sender at the dictat of the group owner and in both cases the traffic subsequently declined from a healthy series of ongoing overlapping topic discussions into sporadic postings with periods of inactivity such that the new visitor will find a dead group and move on. In other words, reply-to-sender artificially maintains an effectively less-than-critical mass.
But I guess you will carry on insisting on sticking with the decade long idea, after all they are your groups and sufficiently lurker friendly that we could all become lurkers with nothing to lurk in. Thousands of youth in newham have myspace and facebook accounts, but are in my opinion extremely unlikely to adopt the practice of denying spontaneity and consciousy complying with counter intuitive instructions to try and make a seriously uncool medium work for social groups. Is it deliberate policy to disenfranchise them in order not to embarrass the occasional big wig who doesn’t know what he’s doing?

Reply to sender December 3, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : listservs , add a comment

I generally give up on email groups where the owner insists on having the default set so that replies go to the individual sender rather than the group. The argument in favour seems to be based on prioritising the prevention of accidental damage caused by somebody who doesn’t know what they are doing sending a message which is intended to be private, out to an entire membership of a list. Another argument is that ‘reply to group’ tends to encourage extended discussions between a small number of individuals that nobody else is interested in and would be better conducted in private.

Both of these arguments would seem to me to be based on a concept of an email list as more of a place for making one-off announcements than for holding group discussions, and yet some intended discussion lists are encumbered with the same set up.

To counter the first, I would argue that mistakes caused by the unwary thinking they are replying to a group when their messages gets sent only to one person are more damaging, since cumulatively they sap the vitality of a group, foreshorten discussions and can reduce conversations levels down below the necessary critical mass.
Some people like a quiet life, but then why a join a discussion list if you don’t want to be bothered by people talking to each other in public?
Also, by pandering to the type of poster who doesn’t understand the idea of group discussion and thinks email is a medium only for 1 to 1 communication, such people are going to have that view and expectation reinforced which will only make them more likely to make the mistake should they later join a group which has been set up properly. So the solution of setting the default incorrectly for an intended discussion list rather than an announcement list is actually contributing to the problem rather than solving it.

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