"All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces." - Gary Jules, Mad World
These allergies are truly kicking my ass today. It is the last night of interactive and there is a party but all I'd like to do is go to sleep. I have to stay up though. Music folks are arriving and I'm going to finally make it to a film festival movie - Scratch: All The Way Live.
I attended two panels today both of which are related to one aspect of my job that, unfortunately for me, takes up more of my time than I would like it to. The managing of a social network (in this case, a message board) and how to deal with Spam, Trolls, and Stalkers. The first has to do with issues of privacy that we all need to be aware of online. You do not live in a vacuum. You cannot be anonymous if you post something on the internet. As soon as someone links to it or reads it and can parse who the author is and announce who you are to the world, you're no longer anonymous. This is important. What you share in places like friendster, orkut, or a message board or mailing list puts it into a space that you have no control over. If you announce where you live, that you're going on vacation, and that you just bought a new plasma screen TV to some kind of public online social network, you've given a house thief everything he or she needs to know.
I wish my board members would think about that. It is one thing to share and talk about the issues in your life in an abstract sense, in a way that doesn't get into the specifics of who you are. It is also one thing to share intimate details of your life with people that you have an expectation of trust with. It is quite another to broadcast it to the world in a message board post that everyone can read.
I have less anonymity on the message boards we maintain than I would like because I shared more information than I should have well over a year ago (a case of too much transparency from the administrators of a tool) and because my name appears in the credits. Fans of this particular show and the boards we run visit here, send me emails to my personal account, and attempt to contact me through messaging tools...all of which are far too close for comfort. I have this public presentation of myself at this site but I need to be able to separate the access that people have to me as a professional and as a private person with a public personal site.
Wow, that last sentence is convuluted.
Anyway, it is obvious to say that we are struggling with maintaining civil discourse on the boards we manage. An extended attempt at limited moderation has resulted in a much more chaotic site than it once was. The downward spiral of behavior was lightning quick. The panel today was a reminder that maintaining a social community is a task for human beings as Theresa Nielsen Hayden said (virtually); that too many rules encourage rather than discourage those who seek to disrupt the system; and, finally, that a positive, civil, and growing community is what we want on the site and that, even with limited resources, we have to work much harder to grow that kind of garden.
The other rule of all this is to not talk about what you're going to do to deal with the problems.
So, I'm done talking about it.
Ah-Choo!