I'd like to see a bit more discussion of Internet forum governance, now that the immediate issues that might cloud the issue have blown past. I was discussing recent Brin-L events with a friend today, who pointed out that those who expressed offense at any talk of member removal were themselves guilty of intimidation and seeking a form of censorship. It hadn't really occurred to me that insisting that the list managers, in particular, refrain from any such discussion, is hypocritical. "Don't you dare talk about censorship!" is paradoxical. "Keep talking about censorship and I'm leaving!" strikes me as passive-aggressively expressing the same paradox.
Given that there may be situations in which rules need to be enforced -- rules that will stifle or remove people from the community -- what's the appropriate means to make such decisions? One of the insights that came to me here recently is that the means of making such decisions (which I suppose can't be much more than warnings and removal) depends on the nature of the community. It seems to me that a list devoted to pure brainstorming types of activities should be extremely reluctant to pass judgment. In fact, in such a community, members individually probably should refrain from doing so. On the other hand, community that is very focused on a particular task probably should have a quick and easy means of removing those who distract it from the goal. My friend told me about a system on AOL called "eviling," in which any participant can give any other one "evil" point. Acquire enough evil points and you're out. But there's a consequence of giving someone else an evil point; you get a tenth of an evil point yourself. The idea is that it takes very few disruptive people to ruin a community... but the community also needs to avoid creating the monstrosity of people who are so negative that they'd hand out "evil" points indiscriminately. Assuming that most people are good, this creates a penalty for behaving as though they aren't. I've toyed with the idea of creating filtered mailing list mirrors to enable such sorts of feedback systems, but never really felt as though the right feedback system was obvious. I didn't find much about "eviling" on-line. Anybody here familiar with it? Thoughts? Nick -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (408) 904-7198
