The List Mom is Dead! Long Live the, um…..

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?

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