nine and sixty rules and moderation

[zeborah]

birdsedge wrote:
Who rules?

And who rules the rulers?

And there were a couple of replies there but this may be something we need to discuss more.

[Or should we just create the community already and make it up as we go along?]

Do we want to moderate?

What do we want to moderate?

• Do we want to ever be able, for whatever reasons and under whatever restrictions, to exclude entire people; or do we want to only ever exclude particular topics, or styles, or posts?
• Should it be defined or will we know it when we see it?

Who do we want to do the moderating?

• One supreme dictator, a supreme triumvirate, a group of representatives polling the mood of the tyranny of the mob?

I know what I want but it may well not be what's best for the group so I need to think some more before I actually say anything.

Comments

Some rambly thoughts

[brooksmoses]

I think some level of making it up is probably good, and some level of having things predetermined would be good. A way to address that would be to have a stated intent to revisit things at a certain point. (Or maybe an unstated-externally intent; I dunno.)

I think, to some extent, there should be a cabal. A community like this is going to require work, and I do think that the "this is a thing we-the-cabal are creating to provide as a gift to the community" is a far more functional model for that than "this is a thing that we are obligated to provide to the community according to its wishes" -- aside from the fact that the community will say both "yes" and "no" and "you should do it a different way" such that chasing its wishes is a goose chase, the very most critical thing is that the community be what the people putting in the work want it to be, or else they lose their reward for putting in the work, and it's harder and harder to put it in.

Also, whole-group conversations about "how should this group be moderated" on an active group are IME rarely productive and often lead to lots of bother and ill feelings, and also tend to drag in the people who would otherwise have sense and desire to stay out of such off-topic disagreements, because of the impression that if they don't join in, their views will be left out. I think that's liable to lead to failure states.

I like the way Making Light is moderated.

I think there should be a clear statement of purpose. I like the way that rasfc has rasff, and many other communities of this sort have "that's off-topic, discuss it over there" solutions rather than "that's off-topic, go away"; IMO it makes it a lot easier to keep the main community on-topic, because it's a much more pleasant thing to move a post or conversation to a different forum rather than to delete it altogether.

I don't think the community should be very strictly limited to talking about writing; cats and chocolate and their moral equivalents should be on-topic, but it would be nice to have a way to encourage about-writing conversations.

One community I am on has a strict no-politics rule, on grounds that even sane and pleasant conversation about politics quickly degenerates, and it's best to simply not give that a place to start. I think this to be a reasonable rule, especially since it's explained that way. This may be a little harder since fictional politics is obviously on-topic, but.

I think the technical ability to ban people is a good thing to have. I think this should be very rarely, if ever, actually used.

Re: Some rambly thoughts

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

You make a lot of sense.

On a Livejournal community, there's always 'take it to your own blog' so I don't think we need to have an off-topic list.

Re: Some rambly thoughts

[brooksmoses]

Mmm, yes. And that's definitely a benefit of doing this on LJ.

Re: Some rambly thoughts

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That sounds good and I don't think I have anything to add.

I agree that a cabal is probably the way to go. One person in charge leads to problems if they get too busy/fall sick/get overwhelmed by Life Stuff; relying on a large group reaching concensus is going to lead to lots of acrimony and arguing as everyone fights their corner and by the time a decision is reached, everyone will feel sour and exhausted.

With luck, the fact that the group would have the ability to ban people will prevent us ever having to do that.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

The only moderation I really would want is if we allow anonymous commenting, that should be moderated to keep out spam.

I think we should create the group -- or someone should -- and take it out for a test drive.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

should we just create the community already and make it up as we go along?

My vote is for that. nine_and_sixty or nine_and_sixty_ways?

(Don't know whether the latter isn't too long.)

Do we want to moderate?

We have the option to step up if we need it - approve membership, member only posting, member only commenting, banning posters.

What do we want to moderate?

I think a charter - along the lines of the rasfc FAQ and incoporating the 9&60 ways thing - would be a good idea, a general signpost of 'this is what we would like to achieve here.

Initially, I don't see a reason for moderation - we're all adults and all used to discussions; eventually it might come to that point - one hopes it doesn't, but you never know.

One supreme dictator, a supreme triumvirate, a group of representatives polling the mood of the tyranny of the mob?

Somewhere along the lines of the latter, I think. You can set up a number of maintainers for a community, and any drastic change - such as banning someone who is not a spammer/outright attacking another member - ought to be discussed, at least among a core group.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

My vote is for that. nine_and_sixty or nine_and_sixty_ways?

It has occurred to me to make a more ergonomic suggestion -- perhaps "9and60ways"? I'm assuming that ampersands aren't allowed in LJ names.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm not against the idea of a cabal. But how do we get our cabal? Does it ever change?

If there are any 'rules' they need to be flexible and open to sensible interpretation. Even the no-politics rule may be stretched if there's something that's particularly relevant to someone's WIP. (But I do agree that 'no-politics for the sake of politics' is a great idea).

As to banning people. We all know the basic two or three people who we don't want to see on nine-and-sixty-ways, so what do we do if they follow us here? On rasfc we can each individually killfile them, but not here. It has to be a group decision. (And we mustn't go all Lord of the Flies.)

Regarding spam and posts from non-writers: technically can we limit posts to members only? And if we were to say that membership is only open to active writers, i.e. those with a WIP would that help?

The problem is that would exclude people like mjlayman who doesn't write, but who is a longstanding and valued member of rasfc, so already we're into breaking our own rules because the cabal isn't going to exclude her, is it? She might even be a member of the cabal.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

As hrj says below, I don't think we want to make it members only, but I do think we want to encourage posts from people who are actively writing (or have written) something fictional and discourage posts from non-writers -- unless they have anything pertinent to say about writing, but is that likely?

There have been times when I was reading rasfc when I had people that I really really like in my killfile, purely on the grounds that they never posted about writing. If I want to know about their lives and their cats etc, I'll read their LJ. The thing is, we need a bit of a social aspect to the group because it oils the wheels of communication, but if the social side dominates, it ceases to be a useful resource for writers. (At least for me.)

[zeborah]

I've been mostly reading with interest everyone's thoughts, and still processing (though it sounds like things are coming down on the side of a cabal for what I agree are very good reasons).

On this topic - I think we want to encourage posts about writing fiction, but that needn't be from a fiction writer. It might be from a knowledgeable sf fan, or an agent or editor, or whatever.

[brooksmoses]

...unless they have anything pertinent to say about writing, but is that likely?

As a datapoint, I believe that I've started on-topic threads on rasfc; I've certainly posted writing-related posts on LJ (of the "this is a shiny idea; anyone want it?" sort) more recently than that.

Thus, though I'm mostly a non-writer in any active or actual sense, I'd very much like to have the option to post something if I do have something pertinent to say!

As to the social bits, one of the nice things about LJ, as someone pointed out in one of these conversations, is that we can easily have the lives-and-cats conversations in nearby spaces.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I certainly wasn't intending to exclude non-writers from contributing if they have anything to say regarding writing, I just feel that we should make sure that the social stuff stays in people's own LJs and that we shouldn't feel that because we know and like someone, they can post whatever they like. (This would also apply to writers too, of course. If they're not posting about writing, they shouldn't be posting to the nine_and_sixty community but on their own journal.

It's just occurred to me that one of the advantages of using an LJ is that the rasfc-substitute doesn't have to be busy all the time to keep people reading. The use of Friends Pages means that if there are no interesting writing topics, we keep in touch socially via our LJs, but at any point, if someone posts a writing post, it will immediately show on the Friends Page.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

And if we were to say that membership is only open to active writers, i.e. those with a WIP would that help?

As you said, it would exclude people we do want here (as well as excluding people we don't, and who have sufficient debating skills to argue that they are active writers, so why are we excluding them?). Also, not everybody who is and active writer has a WIP all the time-- it would exclude me at the moment, for example, because everything I have is stalled.

(And I'm still more or less against doing it here: already I get flustered tracking down the various parts of this discussion.)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Hamm - not that I think restricting membership is a good idea, but I should perhaps not have defined 'active writers' as 'those with a WIP' as there are plenty of active, experienced writers who are between books or - as you say - stalled. 'Those with a WIP' was shorthand for 'those who generally write with a view to (eventual) publication'. (Bearing in mind there are some people who inhabit rasfc who don't write at all.)

Even so, some of those who don't write can and do often contribute constructively. One of them is likely following this discussion with interest and she was very helpful in giving me some insight into a particular character motivation in a now completed WIS.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I think there are several practical reasons for having a small cabal in charge. The most important one (in my experience) is simple redundancy. Communities and mailing lists that have a single owner are in peril if Life Happens in any of its terrifying degrees. Further, if there are day-to-day tasks (e.g., if new members are being manually approved or the like), it's important to be able to trade off tasks, to go on vacation, to have a busy off-line period, etc. A cabal size of three or four is probably optimal.

If some level of moderation is applied, then having a small cabal also means that decisions can be bounced around a little before being made without getting the whole community bogged down in processing. And (as I've seen on several mailing lists with this arrangement), if there is some sort of heavy-handed action that needs to be taken, there's a certain defusing quality to being able to say "the moderators as a group decided on this" rather than "I as supreme autocrat decided on this".

Regarding possible moderation, as green_knight notes, the LJ context means that threads of potential or growing controversy can be moved (or set up originally) on personal blogs where "my journal, my rules" prevails as always. But I suspect the ideal would be for the format itself to encourage this practice, rather than moderators having to do anything more than perhaps occasionally provide gentle suggestions.

At least initially, I'd worry that making the community "must be a member to post" might put stumbling blocks in the path of potential new members who are exploring the community from outside LJ. I do think, however, that developing a culture of "please sign your posts if you aren't a logged-in LJ member" could be a good thing, discouraging anonymous drive-bys.

On the whole, however, I'd prefer to see the initial set-up driven by a "mission statement" rather than by a set of rules and regulations. And I think it's definitely time to set up the community and go for it. (Particularly given that there's next to no "cost" involved in setting the community up.)

As a side note, I'm planning to do a sum-up of the responses to the "what we want in a community" post on my journal, but I may not get to it for a couple days as I'm about to fly home from the east coast and then will be involved in SCA stuff all weekend.

[karinfromnosund.livejournal.com]

This is more or less the comment I was going to make, so now I just say: Thank you, and Me too.

[brooksmoses]

There's also, on LJ, a distinction between "must be a member to post" and "must be a member to comment on a post" which isn't present in Usenet. (The former being a requirement, actually; the latter being optional.) And, of course, the difficulty of becoming a member is variable; in particular, whether or not it's a matter of being approved or just of clicking a button.

[julesjones]

Back home with my own connection again, so I can catch up on the discussion.

Agreed that it needs a cabal, and ideally one spread over several timezones. I'm part of the cabal for an LJ comm set up to replace one part of the Rumor Mill, and we had our first real moderation decision today. I was effectively offline, and in bed when it happened anyway, but one of the US timezone mods spotted it and sent out a note to the rest of the mods asking for opinions. If it had been a seriously urgent item, she could have dealt with it there and then.

As Brooks notes, there is a distinction between needing to be a member to make a new post, and needing to be a member (or even have an LJ account) to be able to comment on a thread. One possibility is having a date-pinned open thread where non-members can post a request that someone put up a post for them, although that does involve potential problems if it doesn't happen and they get into a huff about it.