As many of you may know, there's been a bit of an explosion recently over the topic of adoption of Codes of Conduct (aka "CoC") at Origami conventions, and lots of very heated online discussion, primarily on the Facebook platform. In the interest of clearing the air, and giving people an open forum in which to talk about this, we are opening discussion here, starting on *Sunday, May 16th*.
Because of the randomness of the Facebook interface, maintaining a public discussion there is quite difficult. We thought the O-list, as a public forum, might be able to help by providing a neutral platform, one where everyone can see everything, users cannot block each other, and content cannot be deleted - the list is publicly archived. List traffic has been pretty light, lately, too, so it’s not like a temporarily-busy conversation would drown anything out. Since one of our moderators and list owners, Joseph Wu, was involved in the Facebook conversations, he's agreed to temporarily step down as moderator here, leaving me in charge of the list and its moderation. I will state at the outset that I feel this issue is important, or I wouldn’t be agreeing to take this on, nor offering the list as a tool for discussion. I myself had not spent much time thinking about these issues, but over this past week have come to understand the value such guidelines provide, even in our "safe" little corner of the universe. We have to remember that the greater world, of which the origami community is but a subset, has its serious issues, and occasional bad actors. Helping protect the members of our community against those bad actors is important - and policies and procedures like Codes of Conduct provide structures and frameworks for helping people feel safe. More importantly, knowing that these structures exist encourages people to come forward when there are problems. All that said, I hope you trust that I will moderate this discussion fairly, openly and transparently. I haven’t spent literal decades keeping this list running without learning how to apply guidelines evenly! So, since this is likely to be contentious, there are ground rules (a meta Code of Conduct, if you will) and temporary changes to how the list will operate, to whit: - Joseph will (temporarily) step down from the group of list administrators; - All posts to the list will (temporarily) be moderated. All non-CoC posts will be OK'd as promptly as the moderator(s) can get to them - All CoC-related postings will have a mandatory minimum 6-hour "cooling off" period; if this happens during my nighttime hours, it may be longer - I have to sleep sometime - but content will be let through in the order sent. During "cooling off," you have the opportunity to delete your own posts - do so if you wish to resend any particular posting. Anyone resending without deleting the original, first, will have both copies deleted; I won't have time to sort through versions. Once a message is OK’d by an admin, there is no calling it back. If you’re not interested in reading about this topic, I suggest you create a filter to pull out CoC-related mail (it will all have "coc" in the subject, see below.) If, instead, anyone wishes to temporarily have their list subscriptions set to "no mail" for the duration of the conversation, please contact me at < [email protected]> and I'll be happy to do so for you, and will re-enable mail delivery for you when the conversation dies down. To participate: - all CoC-related posts must have the letters "coc" in the subject, e.g: Subject: CoC - this is the subject - watch your language; I'm a sailor, I know swearing. Do not go there. - be polite; no SHOUTING IN CAPITALS - no name-calling, personal attacks, or ad hominem arguments. ("I think person A is a bad person, so their arguments are invalid.") Stick to arguing about the value of the propositions, not the people in the discussion. **Failure to abide by the above rules will get you temporarily removed from the list**. Questions? Want to see the moderation/deletion thing in action before you post? Contact me before Sunday at: <[email protected]> Any list-related or CoC-conversation-related email sent to my personal address will be deleted, unread. Please be reasonable, be sane, and use this discussion forum well. Anne
