[governance] Rudeness tectics (was Re: Reinstate the Vote)

[Norbert Bollow]

Veni Markovski <veni at veni.com> wrote:

> On 11/24/07, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > Now that the problem has been defined, can we proceed to discussing
> > what can be done about it?
> 
> Yes, please.
> 
> What are your suggestions?

Here's what I have in mind for OpenISO.org:

- The "Guidelines" documents and the "welcome messages" for the
  email mailing lists implementing the OpenISO.org "Working
  Groups" will make clear that behavior such as rudeness which
  is disruptive of fact-oriented discussion is not considered
  acceptable, and will result in the transgressor "being moderated"
  (i.e. the mailing list system would hold future postings from
  them for checking and manual approval by a "moderator" who will
  check that the postings are -in his or her reasonable judgement-
  not rude or otherwise disruptive).

- In order to prevent such moderation from resulting in a severe
  loss of transparency and accountability, I plan to set up an
  additional mailing list <modevents at OpenISO.org> which will not
  be used for substantive discussions, but only for informing
  anyone who might be interested about "moderation events" (such
  as someone being added to the list of people whose postings
  will be help for moderation, or a posting being rejected) and
  for complaints/discussion/rants/whatever about such modevents.
  There will be no moderation of the modevents mailing list;
  participants of that mailing list are expected to know how to
  use killfiles or equivalent blackholing techniques.

The point of this set-up is to ensure that rude people and other
trouble-makers are not able to prevent the Working-Group mailing
lists from fullfilling their function.  The modevents mailing list
does not need such protection because it is not a problem with
regard to the goals of OpenISO.org if rude people prevent useful
discussions from occurring on that list.

I would expect that this kind of approach has more general
applicability in that it could be adapted to any kind of online
discussion.

With regard to this mailing list and other fora where this kind
of problem is occurring, I think that the main question is this:
Is the political will there to implement a system like this?  I'd
certainly welcome the use of such a set-up on this list and for
all other internet-based internet governance discussions, but due
to other commitments I won't take the time to fight for that.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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