On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 23:28:17 -0800
Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 2/20/01 9:24 PM, "J C Lawrence" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Good luck. You'll need it
Aye, if I were to try and think of a situation that would be
messier, I'd have some trouble.
>> Yet, he is sabotauging the very community basis that found the
>> list and its value without also providing himself as a target for
>> moderation or removal.
> Yup. You can't remotely call it a troll, but the end result is the
> same. It drives out people who differ from him, and list diversity
> suffers horribly.
Precisely.
> A bad situation. Unfortunately, you're headed into the purely
> subjective area of the tone of the list, and it's a minefield.
Quite. Fortunately I have a reputation of having handled this sort
of thing well before, and the list itself is not prone to taking
sides (ie there are no camps or personality cults). That makes it
at least a little easier.
>> direct competition with one of his commercial ventures and has
>> caused him to have to re-write his business plans to work around
>> the non-profit and attempt to salvage his sunk costs.
> Oh, ouch. So on top of everything else, there are issues of
> conflict of interest (going in both directions) and the ability to
> claim you're trying to harrass him.
Bingo. Happily the fact that the technical association is a
non-profit (which is what scuppered his business plans) and that he
got rather a back eye (which he seems rather unaware of) in
attempting to co-opt the association on a commercial footing in the
early days puts me in a slightly better position, but he has no
shortage of ammunition here.
He also has an extant history of complaints against my moderation
decisions (I canned posts he thought should be let thru, I didn't
let him retort when a thread had wandered off topic and one of his
areas was hit, etc). His public positioning of me is as a
benevolent egocentric dictator (surprise!) -- which is of course
true, but prejudicial.
>> I find myself somewhat in a quandry as to how to approach this.
>> Approaching him will not help (done before, behaviour worsened,
>> he has little to lose and a lot to gain).
> That's the first try. And yes, most times it doesn't help.
Yup. Been there, but felt I should say so upfront rather than
handle all the, "Why don't you ask him nicely?" responses.
>> The list is hand moderated. The temptation is to silently boot
>> him.
> Bad move. It plays into his hand.
True.
> Whatever you do, if you do anything, do it openly, and with as
> much public consensus and feedback as you can.
Historically the list has not been a concensus forum, at least not
stylistically. Its been run much on the line of the benevolent and
rather doting grand-fatherly tyrant (I find that form works well for
technical fields).
>> Ideas on approaching this?
> Yeah, all bad. I'd like to say I've had thiings that worked, but
> in my experience, I've never really handled these situations in a
> way I thought worked. These days, I try to isolate these things as
> early as possible, and shoot to kill early while the problem is
> small. Once the problem is big and people get involved in taking
> sides, all hell usually breaks loose. Unfortunately, when it's
> small, you usually don't notice it. I've had lists die over stuff
> like this.
I'm currently considering the following approach:
I make a post to the list as list owner saying something to the
effect of:
The number and rate of posts which I've had to moderate recently
has increased by an order of magnitude over the last month or
so (true BTW). I'm also concerned that the respectfully
friendly atmosphere of the list has been degrading. This sort
of thing can silently kill a list as people shut up, leave, or
simply become less involved and interested.
I'd rather that didn't happen.
I'm still investigating this situation and graphing adjectival
patterns (I've found tracking back patterns of use of adjectives
can indicate causes of cultural shifts).
The idea being to give some idea that there will be changes in the
moderation patter without defining what those changes will be.
> I dunno -- all paths lead to schism, or worse. Maybe schism isn't
> bad -- at some point, you say "this is the way it's done here, if
> you don't cooperate, we'll have to ask you to leave". But if he
> does, he's likely to take his faction with him, and you end up
> with two lists that don't like each other.
I'm confident that I hold a strong enough position to prevent that.
He's not in a good enough position to split and carry any
significant percentage with him. This of course doesn't mean that
the heat and noise will do either of us any good.
> And given your organizational situation -- that's tough
> politically. You'd need, IMHO, everyone on your side to understand
> what's going on and back you in doing it, since you don't want
> someone to wuss out in the management chain when the heat
> hits. They might do it anyway, agreements or no.
You got it.
> Ugh. Have you considered resigning and having them giv ethe list
> to soemone else?
It sure has been tempting.
--
J C Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------(*) http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--
