Okay, I think I have it figured out…

Okay, I think I have it figured out. But first, a digression.

On the list-managers list today, we got into a discussion of admin responsibilities, becaues it was (evidently) time for the two-or-three-times-a-year argument that admins ought to stay out of things and let users take care of themselves, followed by the typical rebuttals.

I tried to describe how I viewed it in a different way than I have in the past:


If you are managing a group of some sort, your responsibility is to make decisions in a way that when the needs/interests of the group are in conflict with the needs/interests of an individual in that group, the group's needs/interests take precedence.

There are always individuals that have trouble with that concept, assuming or demanding that they be the center of the universe, or at least be catered to. Unless the group is *about you*, any group of size > 2 is about building a consensus compromise among the members so things work as well as possible for as many as possible. Any individual who can’t/won’t accept that compromise isn’t really part of the group, and is a destructive force on the group.

Some users don’t like not being the center of the universe, and generally blame the admin for having to point out that reality. It’s part of the job. But the primary responsibility of the admin is to make sure the group flourishes, not that it caters to the needs of every individual who wants to be part of the group. Not all individuals are going to fit into the group. that’s pure human nature, and making these groups virtual doesn’t change that reality (although we sure tried, didn’t we?)

To push an analogy into an unrecognizable form to make a point, the group admin is the sheepdog; the wolf has just told the sheepdog had has no right to interfere with his interactions with the sheep, because the wolf didn’t attack the sheepdog directly.

I, as sheepdog, don’t particularly care what the wolf’s attitude towards this is. Which tends to piss off the wolves, but I’m only interested in keeping the sheep happy.

I don’t care, as long as you don’t cause problems for the group. If you follow the rules set out for the group, and I don’t get complaints, then things are fine. And under most circumstances, even if you don’t fully follow the rules and I don’t get cmoplaints, things are still fine. But when I start getting complaints….

On a purely pragmatic level, if my group gets a reputation for being a place where people are harrassed and abused and nobody does anything about it — my group dies. Everyone leaves and goes somewhere safer. Except the trolls and wolves.

Someone has to be the mommy. Groups that don’t have that tend to turn into Lord of the Flies, or an empty lecture hall with the doors open to the weather.

Greg Wood immediately keyed on the problem with this description, the one that almost kept me from using it.


I know what you meant here, and of course this paragraph was pulled out
of context. But if you really only allowed sheep on your lists, I'd be
gone, because they would be very boring.


My discussion was oriented around the concept of herd (or pack, or pride, or….) and its tender. And Greg immediately caught the subtext of users as sheep and focussed on the docility that using the sheep seemed to imply. And he’s right. That’s a flaw in using this particular analogy, one I knew going in but didn’t see an easy way around to make the point I was trying to make. And it’s one that can potentially sidetrack the entire discussion if you let it.

Don’t let anyone tell you words have no power. Which is why, of course, I’m so focussed on phrases like list mom. Because it sums up in a mental vision what you’re trying to get across, and if you use the wrong term or build into it unintended side-effects, you can really, really screw up what you intend to do. That’s why stuff like this matters….

And I emphasized that in my response to Greg…


and that was the exact reason I argued with myself over using that example, because I knew the sheep image would conflict with the point I was trying to get across... Because you're exactly right, if we were in fact talking about sheep. More generally, I'm talking about animals that share a common interest (herd/pack/pride/etc), and a protector of that herd against someone who is in conflict with the herd. The specific animal doesn't matter, and sheep is a particularly negative image, but I just couldn't think of a better one to use the image I wanted to get across. But I *knew* someone would react exactly this way, too, because I did. And you're right.

Greg: I’d be gone, because they would be very boring. Wolves are frequently more interesting than sheep.

only as long as you’re watching them hunt down someone OTHER than you. that’s a “view from the sidelines” view. If you’re dinner, then it stops being interesting really fast. You, like me, should understand the implications of that rather well….

The point made here is if you look at the flock (ignoring what it’s a flock of), the administrator is the caretaker of the flock. At a macro level, this person creates and maintains the meadow the flock lives in and works to keep the flock together and safe from wolves (and if a wolf pulls an animal out into the forest, the shepard doesn’t say ‘not in the meadow any more, not my problem’). But at the same time, the shepard doesn’t tell the flock where to go or when to eat or what to play. The flock works that out for themselves.

Anyway, that’s the digression. And probably most of this entry…

But what finally clicked in what I’ve been searching for the last ten days or so was a piece in the new (September 2003) Fast Company (links to current pieces not yet available….). It’s the only business magazine I still read regularly, and this issue is full of interesting stuff. In an article on the Les Schwab Tire company, they used the phrase cult of the customer — and it crystalized a lot of the things I’ve been trying to come to terms with internally.

But not directly, but because of how it plays off the phrase I’ve been fighting with: the customer is always right.

See, the customer is not always right. That phrase ignores a basic fact of life. But to create a customer-centric environment, you have to empower the customer to feel free Do Their Thing without constantly staring over their shoulders looking for lightning bolts — but you still need to find some way to protect the interests of the owners as well. And basically, that tradeoff is…

We reserve the right to refuse service…

so very simple a concept, once I realized what I was looking for. Painfully obvious, in retrospect.

So the trick is to create an environment where people understand what’s expected of them as far as limits to their behavior, and then get out of the way unless they violate those limitations.

the user has the right to use a service in the way that makes them happy as long as the owner gives them access to the service.

the owner has the right to refuse to allow a user to use a service if the way they use it is against the owner’s wishes.

the owner has the responsibilty to deineate those rules and restrictions as simply and understandably as they can, and an implied responsibility to not set unneccessary and arbitrary restrictions.

users have the responsibilty to accept and abide by restrictions or not use the service.

And like the person who refuses to turn off the boom box in the restaurant when asked, users that won’t accept the rules will find themselves escorted off the premises, to prevent them from ruining the dining of the rest of the customers.

The group is more important than the individual. And the individual that does not accept that is not welcome in the group….

This may all seem rather simplistic, but it’s a matter of understanding where I want the lines drawn in the sane, and the checks and balances needed to create the environment and attitudes I want to promote.

And now that I know where those checks and balances exist, I can actually get this thing moving forward and finished…

One thing Laurie and I have been investigating over the years is how to bring forward the quieter voices in a community. In most communities, there’s a group of folks with fairly thick skins and a willingness to enter the mosh pit to get their comments heard — and a second group with lots of interesting things to say, but not as willing to elbow in and make themselves heard over the noise…

One thing Laurie and I have been investigating over the years is how to bring forward the quieter voices in a community. In most communities, there’s a group of folks with fairly thick skins and a willingness to enter the mosh pit to get their comments heard — and a second group with lots of interesting things to say, but not as willing to elbow in and make themselves heard over the noise…

We’ve found that second population to be as knowledgable and interesting as the primary population — just quieter. So one of the things we’ve looked for is ways to bring them forward into the community discussions. (it should be noted that when we’ve talked about this issue in our communities, the normal response is some variation of it’s no big deal, just start talking — and that normal response comes from the folks who don’t mind the mosh pit atmosphere in the first place, of course…)

One of our more successful ways we’ve found to draw these people out, at least temporarily, is a concept we’ve called lurker day. It’s fairly simple, at least conceptually. On a specific day, the regulars haul themselves off to the sidelines and sit on their hands for 24 hours, and leave the group to others. Our guideline for lurker is pretty flexible (averages 1 posting a month or less), and is generally self-policed.

it works quite well — you get a whole new set of views of the topics of the day, and the regular posters (for the most part) take the vacation with good spirits. Occassionally this encourages a lurker to join the mosh pit, but for the most part, they enjoy their day on the list, then head back to the sidelines.

For me, that’s a frustration. lurker days work — but you have to schedule and manage them, and in my mind, it doesn’t really solve the problem. It merely makes it clear there’s a problem to solve, which is how you get those people contributing on a regular basis, not on lurker days. And how do you do that without screwing up what you already have? Because it’s not broken, after all, you’re looking for improvements, not changes.

I like to use real-world analogies to help define virtual situations, because it helps me translate what we’re trying to build into known environments. Analogies illuminate both by where they work and by how they fail — and where the analogy doesn’t work is where I try to focus my ideas and experiments.

My favorite analogies for a mailing list (especially since many of mine are sports oriented) is the sports bar and the cocktail party. I especially like the cocktail party concept because it includes the concept of small groups of users
having independent but (sometimes) interrelated discussions. The advantages of a mailing list is that you can listen in to all of these discussions at once, not just the one you’re in (and you can be in multiple conversations at once!). the negative aspect of a mailing list is that, effectively, when one group is having a discussion, all of the other groups have to shut up and more or less pretend they’re not listening — good conversation requires a sense of intimacy, which is at odds with the realities of a mailing list. That’s one reason people lurk — they can never get comfortable with the facade of intimacy, they always see the audience out beyond the lights. Most conversations are between two and six people, from what I’ve seen. While there are always one or two people who seem to revel in being in almost all conversations (I certainly wouldn’t ahem know about that…), you’ll find if you study list traffic that conversations tend to be serial, and different conversations tend to attract different sub-groups, and once a conversation starts, the other chatter usually dies out and waits for it to finish.

So ultimately, instead of a cocktail party of intermingling conversations, a mailing list is more a serialized conversation among intersecting sub-groups. In essence, it’s a cocktail party where conversation can only take place in the talking-place, only one group can be in it at a time, and everyone jostles around to step in when an existing conversation ends.

(this might explain a syndrome I’ve always wondered about: when a group of people on a list get into a topic and really start a lively conversation, someone invariably pops up and tells them all to shut up; it’s as if they think the list is there to be subscribed to, but not really used. But perhaps, what they’re doing is reacting to people staying in the conversation pit too long, and trying to move them along, albeit in a non-polite way…..)

So what we’ve been talking about the last week or so is ways to create more “talking pits”, ways to get rid of that first-in-first-out aspect of a mailing list, without actually screwing up what’s working.

Lurker day has proven there are groups of people who can really contribute to the discussion — if we can find a way to allow them to contribute on their terms; create them a conversation pit away from the mosh pit of the main list.

A concept we came up with over the weekend that I think has promise is this: to create a series of “extra” mailing lists (call them, say, sharks-1 through sharks-6). Members could subscribe to any, or all, or whatever. The use of those lists would be undefined, allowing users to figure out what they want to do with them.

The only binding rules are this: (1) no cross-posting among lists, and no re-posting from list to list. The idea is to create independent places for multiple conversations, as if you’ve taken the cocktail party and spread it among different rooms in the house. Allowing cross posting defeats the purpose, the same way a PA system would defeat it in the real house. (2) you can’t tell others to move to another room. you can only offer to take your own conversation to another room.

My hope/belief is that over time, different groups would migrate into different lists and self-define what those lists are about. I’d expect the main list to continue to be the driving force in the environment, the room with the bar, the band, the dance floor and the mosh pit. less enthusiastic users wouldn’t ahve to wait for the band to take a break to spread out onto the floor and talk any more. Instead, they’d wander off to one of the side rooms. I wouldn’t be suprised to see three or four sub-lists to be more or less permanenty co-opted by sub-groups for various purposes, with the last couple of lists being left for ad-hoc discussions (“hey! let’s take this over to sharks-5 and hash it out”).

and for people who just don’t want all that complexity, the original list is still there. It only changes to the degree people find the sub-lists useful and productive and worth the hassle of populating and using. so it seems like a low-risk experiment on top of everything else. If it works, you end up with a much larger, vibrant community. If it doesn’t, the sub-lists wither and die, and you can prune them without any impact.

I’m curious what people think about this idea. has anyone tried something like this? Has it worked? Anyone know of any research or variants on this kind of setup I can research? does it seem like it might be a useful thing to try?

I’m going to propose this to our sharks list (the official guinea pig list of plaidworks) and see what the reaction is. I’m curious how they, as a potential user base of this idea, will react to it…

(a final note: this is something I’d consider for large, busy lists that “need more space”. It’s not appropriate for smaller, quieter lists. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that a list has to have a consistent level of postings to it to remind people it exists and is there to be used. If your user base is too small, you have trouble sustaining that and people get out of the habit of thinking about (and using) the list — and then it dies. It’s better to have one list with three small and somewhat related groups on it than three lists with three tiny populations, because those three lists will have great trouble building any kind of community due to the infrequent postings inherent in a tiny audience…)

I continue to make slow progress on the whole post-list-mom-reality. This one is taking a long time, because there are some tough issues I’m trying to understand, and until I understand them, I can’t delineate them.

The key one is the relationship of checks and balances between the various friction points in a community. I want this new setup to be (a) user-centric and (b) self-policing with limits. User-centric implies that all things being equal, what the members want in a community takes precedence over what the administrators and owners want. Self-policing implies that an administrator defaults to staying out of the way unless action is clearly necessary.

Some of the friction points ought to be obvious — a community goes in a direction the owner/admin finds unacceptable, for instance. You don’t want the owner/admin to try to force a community in directions it doesn’t want to go, but at the same time, the owner/admin needs some finer control than “I won’t pay for this, it’s shutting down”. The users need to feel enabled to explore and build a community — and the owner/admin needs to have something they feel is worth paying for, and a way to protect their legal liability issues (since even if they hand off responsibility to users, as the person who manages it and writes the checks, they’re ultimately liable, also)

There’s an interesting case here involving Grinnell College that I find persuasive here. I think it’s unrealistic to assume you can create/own/manage/administer/host/etc a community resource, and build disclaimers that keep you from being liable for what goes on with those resources. (Even if you ultimately win in court, it’s an expensive and pyrrhic victory, and I doubt you’d win). So that implies that anyone in a position of responsibility for a community resource has a liability for content on that resource, so you simply can’t operate something without taking an active administrative role in it, if only to protect your legal interests.

I’ve felt for a long time that the absentee landlord model for running communities leaves you with one type of community: slums. And I think it’s now becoming clear that if you ignore the necessary upkeep and allow it to slum out, eventually, you create a situation where you have a legal liability for your lack of maintenance.

The other friction point are the meta-fights. Fights within the community about whatever the community is about tend to be constructive (although when they turn into hatfield/mccoy type feuds, very annoying to all but the particulars), but when people start fighting about meta-issues, that’s where I’ve found the worst and most destructive fights occur.

Case in point — Friday, on one list we had a user pop up to tell everyone that he didn’t want anyone to send him both a personal reply and a list reply (reply-to-all). This person has a personal view of how things ought to run, and proceeded to try to tell everyone on the list (about 5,000) to do it his way.

This is a failed request on the face of it. Even if all 5,000 people were willing to remember that this specific user wants his mail this specific way (hah!) as new users come on board, they won’t “know the rules”. You create an infinite loop of failures, leaving only frustration on all sides. Worse, his implication is that everyone should do it that way, even though a lot of people (for instance, myself) want both copies. So he’s put his preferences above others, or worse, made the assumption that those 5,000 users will remember he wants it one way, and I want it another, and actually do it.

Not a chance. users will continue to do it the way they’re comfortable with it, and ignore all of this, leaving the users complaining about it unhappy and frustrated. left unchecked, the arguments are going to grow (this one mutated into the normal reply-to meta-fight before being shut down) and the resentments increase: the original person gets more nad more pissed that nobody is doing what he wants, and those around him are pissed that he keeps telling them how to run their lives.

That stuff has to be cut short. non-administrators can’t be allowed to try to set meta-policies; that’s to be left to the owner/admin on a community basis, and to individuals on how their machines operate. (if you don’t like how stuff arrives, teach your own machine to fix it; that part you control completely. The rest, you control not at all — and attempts to control it anyway creates these conflicts).

The issue I’m trying to figure out is where to draw the lines in the sand that enable users to self-police content, but not meta-issues, and how to frame that in a way that a typical user can easily understand. Meaning no more than a couple of paragraphs of non-geek english.

(and no, I don’t expect the list documentation to stop all of these meta-fights; the people who most need guidance to not do this tend not to read the documentation anyway. but it gives the users and the admins/owner easily accessible fodder to shut the discussion down early while it’s small and harmless…)

And unfortunately, this is the critical path right now, and while I work this stuff out, I’m blocked. grump. But it’s getting closer. I know what I want out of all of this now — I just can’t quite get it written out yet. and it serves no useful purpose in my head, other than as a map for myself…

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you’re there to drain the swamp. And worse, all it takes is one alligator.

Trolls don’t scale. you don’t need lots of problem-makers to screw up or kill a community; one or two is enough. That was a key problem with USENET: one idiot you could ignore, three would make you crazy, ten would make you leave, and USENET had no way to ban out the trolls — kill files help cut the noise, but earplugs aren’t the same as silence.

It used to be that I’d spend a lot of time trying to work with problem-makers, trying to solve problems. I found, though, that most of the time, that work was wasted. Their either couldn’t get it or didn’t want to try. Or lied through their teeth at me just to make me think they’d behave, until my back was turned.

A few of those convinced me to stop wasting my time, at least most of the time. Life is too short to be taken advantage of.

As Bill Cosby once said, Parents don’t want justice. Parents want quiet.

It serves no constructive purpose for the list (or my sanity) to have a long, nasty fight before kicking out a troll, so now, I tend to use a quick hook on obvious cases — pull the plug, and the onus is on them to convince me they’re worth being allowed another chance, not on me to have to prove they ought to be kicked out. Occasionally, one does, too. And while that argument continues, it continues off-list, saving everyone else the hassle.

Use of terms like “freedom of speech” or “my right” or “lawyer” are guarantees that they’ll never get back in, either. The US first amendment means you have the right to start up your own damned list to babble on, not that I have to subsidize your babbling. Use of a mailing list is a privilege, given to you by the owner of the list, not a right. That privilege can be taken away for any reason, or for no reason, and that ought to be made explicit in the list rules and documentation (for the same reason restaurants use the “we reserve the right to refuse service…” boilerplate).

there’s a class of person out there who gets off by destroying what you built. That’s all they want. And the only way to deal with them is quickly. There’s a second case, that of a person not compatible with your community, but who insists that the community reshape itself to his preferences. That’s a lot less clear-cut, but IMHO, ultimately, the best thing for both that person and the community is to invite the person to search for a more compatible community, and usher them out the door. This needs to be done politely — but it needs to be done.

I’ve sometimes considered wherher you could build two parallel, overlapping communities based around dominant but incompatible personalities, but to be honest, the thought scared the crap out of me, even though I have a perfect test case on one of my lists. The chances of it working long term are too risky for my tastes, and I’d hate to try it and then have to patch things back together if it fails… Ultimately, I think the answer for these things is for multiple independent communities on the same subject, with some level of cooperation between them that everyone feels comfortable with. That allows people to migrate to the community they feel most comfortable with, and the information sharing minimizes the issues of people feeling they’re missing something that might be going on the ‘other’ community. as if we have time these days to be everywhere on everything…

And that’s a huge change in the community aspect of the net many old-timers (and others) still haven’t gotten: ten or 12 years ago, when the net was still fairly small and intimate, having a single place for information was a good thing. But as the net’s grown up and the population has gotten large and diverse, there’s more of a need to break up discussions by community as much as by topic.

Think about it: in a small town, you might only have one bar. But when the size of the town doubles, or triples, can you imaging the bikers, the gays, the mill workers and the sports fans all sharing the same bar?

But there’s still a lot of that “small town” attitude on the net, and it’s changing more slowly than it should. We’re all better off with 10 smaller communities on a topic than one huge one, especially if that community is always fighting over which sub-group within it is going to be in charge… Especially so if those smaller groups can build some type of cooperative sharing structure…

As I’ve been mullling over rewriting FAQ and Rules for the lists and the site, I’ve had to take a step back and I’ve realized it’s time to rebuild the underlying philosophy of what kind of groups we want and how those groups ought to be managed.

As the net has gone from a small population and geek toy to today’s huge place with a mainstream audience, the expectations and needs of the audience have changed, and so have the expectations that we (as admin/owner) can have about what your users ought to know and be capable of.

The end result of that is that I feel, every 18 months to two years, you need to sit back and re-examine your communities, how you manage them, and how you present that management philosophy to them.

As I’ve been mullling over rewriting FAQ and Rules for the lists and the site, I’ve had to take a step back and I’ve realized it’s time to rebuild the underlying philosophy of what kind of groups we want and how those groups ought to be managed.

As the net has gone from a small population and geek toy to today’s huge place with a mainstream audience, the expectations and needs of the audience have changed, and so have the expectations that we (as admin/owner) can have about what your users ought to know and be capable of.

The end result of that is that I feel, every 18 months to two years, you need to sit back and re-examine your communities, how you manage them, and how you present that management philosophy to them. This doesn’t mean I do that every two years, but it never hurts to think it through and tune things up as the world changes around you…

And now, I realize that the whole List Mom concept has hit end of life, and it’s time to go in a different direction. Or more correctly, properly document and represent the direction I think is appropriate and have been aiming at for a while anyway.

Back when Laurie and I started running mailing lists, tings were relatively simple — this was back in what I call the Pre-AOL universe. Your typical audience was fairly small, generally technical, probably worked in the computer industry or was in computer science at college, or was attached to someone who was. You were running the lists because (a) you wanted to, and (b) you had the ability to set up and run the thing on your company’s computer — so lots of the early list admins were also system administrators, and their tasks were primarily technical. You had a user group that, when someone got upset or flew off the handle, could deal with a nice, sysadminly “will you shut up already?”

And then AOL connected to the internet, and unleashed its users on it. This created two types of culture clash. You had the AOLers, who saw the rest of the internet as just an extension of AOL, and assumed it all acted the way AOL did, and exported the AOL culture to the rest of us, and at the same time, you started seeing mroe and more people discovering the internet, and joining in without any context or culture whatsoever, and no real clue what any of this was, or how it worked. Worse, unlike the techies, they didn’t care how it worked.

So there were major changes that happened in online communities (primarily lists and usenet, since those were the dominant systems in the pre-web universe), as the old guard met the chatroomers met the real-lifers. For the most part, there wasn’t a common context or language among them. But in many cases, you ended up with one mailing list about one topic with three (or more!) populations, all wanting things done their way. The admins tended to be technically oriented, not socially oriented, so there tended to be struggles in attempting to manage these situations.

Out of that chaos came a period I now lovingly refer to as my list nazi period. The old guard users were pissed, and wanted things taken back to the Good Old Days (we now realize you can’t, and shouldn’t. funny, but the old guard always has problems with that, and while I sympathize, down the path of rejection of tomorrow lies stagnation and death. And fi that’s okay for you, fine; not okay for me). The chatroomers weren’t there for detailed discussion, they saw lists as funny forms of chatrooms and, well, chatted. And the real-lifers were, well, hard to convince that no, I wasn’t paid tech support, and no, the rest of the list wasn’t there to entertain then, and otherwise shut up and stay in the closet until called.

So all this begat a new, rather hard core administrative style, what I now fondly call my List Nazi period. But it was a response to trying to keep the existing subscriber base together and happy against the influx of a new group of people with a different culture and attitude.

Does this sound familiar? It’s effectively the same problem that USENET had (and had again), the one that the Backbone Cabal had during the first major growth spurt. Ultimately, attempts ot steer USENET in a specific direction failed, because ultimately, a system had been built with a million steering wheels and no rudder.

On mailing lists, it worked better, but over time, created a new set of problems. Eventually, the need for such a tight leash receded, but the leash didn’t loosen. This ended up causing other, different problems — stagnation of the list population, and creating a strong disincentive to post to the list. People get tired of having their every move second-guessed. It kills the community aspect of things.

So in late 1998 and early 1999 (as I remember it…), we threw out all of our list documentation, rules, attitudes, etc, etc etc, and started from scratch. And out of that navel examination came the concept of the List Mom.

Why List Mom? A lot of thought went into coining a new term. We wanted a term that specifically excluded any concept of ownership, but instead of stewardship. You may have created a mailing list. You may own the server it runs on. You may manage the list, and set policy for it. But you don’t own it; the users do.

We wanted a term that looked more to the social aspect than the technical. An admin is a technically oriented person — list administration increasingly is about social issues, not technical ones, and increasingly is done by non-technical people who never deal with the underlying hardware or software.

And finally, we wanted a term that disconnected the administrator from the power of the position. The reason we finally decided to use List Mom was simple: we couldn’t see anyone being taken seriously if they’re yelling things like “you have to do what I tell you! I’m the List Mom!” (think of the underlying image: “you have to eat your lima beans! why? Because I’m the mom, and I said so!”). It’s a term we felt was consciously disarming and non-threatening. In fact, we felt it was anti-threatening, and a way to overtly remind the admin not to take themselves too seriously. (quick digression: in case it’s not obvious, while the terminology is generalized, the primary target of this de-frocking is, of course, me. That others have found it useful enough to adopt is a thrill to me, but I was struggling primarily to find a way to restructure how I ran mailing lists to solve problems I felt I was causing, and to build those changes into the infrastructure such that both the users and myself would understand the changes were happening and the status quo had been thrown out — and to limit the chances of things slipping back into the old habits again…)

I’ve come to see these different administration philosophies as almost a life-stage motif. When we started managing groups on the net (going back to about 1980 for me, even before I was on the Arpanet or USENET), the audience was basically the computer club — build the clubhouse and open the door.

Then later, you start growing because people have discovered the club, but not all of them know (or care) about the history of the club. JKust that you can hang out there and have fun. Nobody — not the old-timers, not the newcomers, and even the admins — really know what the social mores and structures are or ought to be. Some folks are more comfortable in the environment than others, but everyone’s new to this, because it’s no longer a uniform social culture, but a diverse one. So it’s up to the admins to instill structure and try to guide people in the search for figuring out how all this is supposed to work. Which to me sounds a lot like, well, kindergarten. Lots of kids, big kids, small kids, and an authority figure.

And then the kids start growing up, and creating their own personality. That personality isn’t going to completely match the parent’s wishes — it never does. The chiild is now an adolescent and comes home from school one day with purple hair. Some parents are englightened enough to deal with that; the rest of us become List Nazi’s.

And then you find that purple hair isn’t the same as being pregnant, or getting someone pregant, and that the sky doesn’t fall in and the world doesn’t end. Sooner or later, you come to grips with the hair. Your child hasn’t yet moved out, but they are dating. The dance of trusting and earning trust is going on. That’s the List Mom phase.

Which, I find out to my surprise, is a transition phase, not really a philosophy or attitude to itself. It’s a close approximation of what I want, but not close enough. And I believe it’s now time to make that change.

When the net was young and outgrowing it’s clothes faster than you could buy bigger ones, someone had to be the daddy. And then the net was grown, but not really grown up, and and you still needed someone to take on the mantle of authority, but they no longer made all of the decisions (and generally, there was disagreement where to draw the line). And later, as you figured out you could trust them without watching them every minute, as an admin, you learned to back off.

And now, it’s time to take the next step, and throw out the parent/child, the owner/user model, and move to the kind of relationships adults have with each other: that of partner.

The kid has moved out into their own place, and as parent, it’s time to learn to stop being a parent, and become a friend.

List Mom might have been a term with power diminished, but still with power. and while on a practical level someone ultimately has to have the power and responsibility, I think the adult phase of this implies an admin who exercises authority as little as possible. The real world equivalent to this for me is the mediator, or the ombusdman instead of the boss, the arbitrator or the administrator.

So the List Mom is dead. Long live the, well, something.

Exploring where we’ve come from ends. Time to explore where we’re headed. I know where I’m headed here, but to be honest, I haven’t drawn the map. I’ll start that once I publish this piece, because I hope to have everyone help getting the lines in the right places. This is a path I don’t feel I want to blaze alone and then surprise people with. I’d rather we blaze it together, as partners. Which is the basis of why I’m doing this, isn’t it?

(Another reason why I’m doing this in public? Simple: Lots of people have adopted and adapted the concept of List Mom. I’m honored and amazed to see how the term and concept have migrated on their own, and how it’s been adapted and modified along the way. While I’m not encouraging or suggesting they move along the path with me — I want to give them the opportunity to help with this process, and be aware of the process, so they can join in if they want.

And I feel strongly this is our process, not my process. I’m driving, but I need help with the map.

Shall we?

(P.S: where the hell did this come from? Good question — I hadn’t planned on tearing it out to the foundation and starting over, either. But a few weeks ago I was talking about parents and partners over some other issue, and I started to realize it was relevant to this, also.

Eating your own dog food. If you won’t, why should any other dog?