I Learn from Bill

I read this post on the Yahoo!groups blog. This post talks about the Cleveland Park neighborhood discussion group in Washington, DC. Bill Adler is the chief moderator of the group and in this blog post, he talks about the group and its moderation philosophy.

Fascinating stuff! When I met Bill at Yahoo! last month, he said "I'm glad to see you have more rules for your group than we have for ours." His comment got me to scurry back and re-read my posting guidelines. Yup, all of them are important for us - each posting guideline comes from the scrapes and bruises that list-moderation experience provides.

The biggest difference between the Cleveland Park moderation and Ask Liz Ryan moderation is that we always write to let a member know if we're not planning to post his or her message. We post almost everything. Most of the messages are wonderful and warm and thoughtful and smart. Some of them are, hmm, not especially smart or useful at all. I still post them, if they don't violate a posting guideline. In the Cleveland Park group, the moderating view is that if a message doesn't add anything to the conversation, is poorly written, or shows a poor grasp of the group's mission, it doesn't get posted.

Wow. I am impressed. I couldn't moderate this way, but I respect Bill's worldview.

If I didn't write to folks and tell them "I'm sorry that I can't post your message, as it attacks another of our members, in the phrase 'You don't sound like you know Jack about marketing, to me,' I'd hear from the member in two hours, demanding to know what became of his post. The Cleveland Park moderators would simply delete that post. See, if I did that, I'd be deluged with mail from our members demanding to know what happened to their posts. As it is, I get a message or two a week from someone wanting to know why a given message didn't get posted.

Sometimes the tone is affronted and a bit accusatory. "I'd be pleased to know what you found unacceptable about my message, and by what whim you deleted it," is typical. Er, um, nothing, is the reply from me, and here's the page on the archive where your message can found, as it was posted last week. Hmm. Sometimes our member writes back to say "Oops." Then I write back to say "Have a great week!" with a smile emoticon. More flies with honey, and all that.

The big issue with list-serv moderation is the balance between letting people say [write] what they want to, and keeping the rest of the members from reading drivel or self-promotional stuff or meandering mush. I like Bill's guideline that says that free-of-information posts don't get posted. We already have about 23 posting guidelines for our group, but that information-free guideline is a good one. I always wince when I post something that says "you could try that cigar shop on Monroe Street, I forget the name, and I'm not sure it's still there."

The theme throughout the Cleveland Park moderator guideline is that the group is not a public forum but a members-only group, with privileges and obligations, like any community organization. This is a good mental model for me. Years ago, I settled on the model of a spectrum for online discussion, running between two extremes. At one end of the spectrum is a telephone pole in an alley, where anyone could walk up and post a garage-sale notice or a flyer about a lost cat or a notice that rat poison will be applied in the alley on Monday. At the other end of the spectrum is a pulpit or a podium - a channel where the communication is all one-way and 100% managed. I would say "Our group should be halfway down the spectrum between the telephone pole and the pulpit."

As time goes on, I find it appropriate to shift the focus slightly down the spectrum, away from the telephone pole in the alley and toward the pulpit or podium. This is for the members' benefit, as [in my estimation] the desire to allow a fellow member to express his or her in-the-moment reactions is outweighed by the desire of most of the members not to read junk.

People don't want to read drivel. They don't have time. What is a moderator's duty to keep empty fluff out of a discussion group? I think that is important. We moderators aren't natively more thick-skinned than other people, at least I'm not; we react to criticism like anyone else. When someone writes "How DARE you decline my post?" we shrivel - I do, anyway. We second-guess ourselves. Then we go back and read the post, the one that says "I am soooo happy Bcuz my cat likes the new littr Im uzing." Does the community want to read this? We have to make a judgment call: no, it does not.

The photo of baritones marching on the field is unrelated to the subject matter of this post - but it's colorful. My son Mac is one of those marching baritones. Go Fairview!