[governance] Question about inappropriate behavior was RE: [] US House Bill ...

[Norbert Bollow]

[with IGC coordinator hat on]

Avri Doria <avri at acm.org>:

> BTW is this a a warning that if if i discuss such subject i am
> infringing the rules of this list?

No. If I recommend or discourage something, that is not intended to
imply that acting to the contrary would infringe the rules of this
list.

I discourage seeking caselaw on what is or isn't acceptable wording in
postings because the process of bringing up words that someone else
has used, and criticizing their words (as opposed to just addressing
the substantive content in a constructive manner) is not conductive to
having a climate of constructive substantive discussion.

What I have written here is to some extent a special case of the
recommendation that I made earlier to generally avoid ad hominem
references of any kind unless they are clearly friendly: It is not
really possible to claim that some remark constitutes unacceptable
behavior without at least implicitly making an unfriendly ad hominem
reference to the author of the remark. (In fact it might easily be in
fact a personal attack on the author of the original remark, and in
that case it is not only contrary to my recommendation but also against
the posting rules.) Also, whatever was wrong with the original remark
is not likely to be made better by repeating it for the sake of
criticizing the remark, and it is likely to come up again if/when the
original author of the remark and/or people with similar viewpoint
defend it, etc. Some kinds of remarks have the effect of turning the
IGC into an environment with so much hostility that it is not
conductive to constructive discussion. That is the problem to which
the coordinators need to offer a solution. If I as one of the
coordinators chose to participate in discussions about whether specific
remarks have violated the posting rules, would that help to achieve the
objective of facilitating constructive discussions? I believe that it
would do the opposite. And I further believe that such discussions in
the absence of participation of the coordinators are not helpful
either. Let us look for a better way forward. 

The general recommendation about ad hominem remarks intentionally goes
above and beyond the posting rules of the IGC Charter. To the extent
that this recommendation goes beyond those rules, it will of course not
be enforced.

I believe that whether we will succeed in significantly improving
to climate of discussions in IGC, to make it a less hostile place,
more conductive to constructive discussions, will depend primarily on
whether sufficiently many of the more active participants in this group
will choose to follow this recommendation about ad hominem remarks, or
something similar. This recommendation can of course be discussed and
refined, and I think that it would be worthwhile to do so - certainly
more worthwhile than trying to work out precise caselaw on the
boundaries of the posting rules.

Precisely knowing the boundaries of the posting rules is not going to
significantly help to solve the problem that we have in the IGC, but
avoiding unfriendly ad hominem references more generally (i.e. also
outside the contexts of personal attacks and outside of clearly
increasing the degree of hostility of the overall climate of
interaction in IGC) will help significantly.

I certainly hope that sufficiently many of the people here value the
intended outcome of having a more productive discussion space highly
enough that they are willing to choose the words in their postings in
a way that is conductive to achieving that outcome.

Greetings,
Norbert

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