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

[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.