slow progress…..
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…
Related posts:
- Slow down, enjoy the show… Sometimes I think here in Silicon Valley we forget...
- Slow Motion Killing Tom Benjamin’s NHL Blog » Blog Archive » Slow...
- slow sales of the PS3? Could it be that demand for the playstation 3...
- before and after (well, in progress…) For those who have broken bread in the Church...
- critiquing your progress…. So one of the things I’ve been doing reecently...
and any purchases you made will be treated as referrals by us.
