Technical solutions for social safe spaces
I mentioned a few days ago that i had a discussion with Mo about social safe spaces online. Now, let's be clear here, I strongly support the idea. Social safe spaces are important, and they tend to be difficult to establish and maintain online. There are examples of them, but to date they're mostly maintained through social means rather than technical ones. That is, they remain safe spaces because the majority of participants actively work to keep them that way.
There's nothing wrong with social maintanence of safe spaces, of course. That's how most such spaces are handled in face to face situations. However, I think we can do better by intentionally structuring a community. So, here's an outline of what I put forward during the discussion. You'll probably see what it's likely non-viable: it takes way too much work on the part of someone(s).
First you take a multi-user blog. Something like WordPress' Multi-User install would work. You give a set of protected speakers who you trust to deal with the topics in a socially safe and thought provoking manner (a lot of these people are probably going to be from within your potected class) top-level access. They post regular blog entries and the like, and can comment on one anothers' posts freely.
Below these people you have other registered users. Registration is free and open, anyone can do it. However, if you're not a top-level poster, then all your comments are screened. A moderator will read the comment before allowing it to go up in order to check for content, but also to check for presentation. If a comment is rejected, the moderator will explain why and offer suggestions for changes to be made if the comment is to be accepted. You can see where this ends up being a lot of work. Moderators end up having to enter dialogs with users in order to help explain where a comment makes the social space unsafe either in content or in presentation.
You could optionally include a mid-level user drawn from the low-level user base. Mid-level users can't make new posts, but can comment without screening. By placing users with good track records in this category you can reduce the load on the moderators. However, I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea for two reasons. Socially, this creates a privileged class, and I'm pretty sure it would have a serious negative impact. Technically,and perhaps more importantly, there's a built-in delay when comments are moderated. It reduces the speed at which one can comment. Creating mid-level users makes low-level users conversationally disadvantaged (see Chris' comments on yesterday's post for some reasons why). Since part of the point of this design is to teach new users to maintain safe spaces on their own, disadvantaging those same users like this is a huge problem.
So, you can see that the moderators are doing a lot of work here. They're doing so much work that they're probably not the same people as your top-level posters. I think it would be hard to maintain general social leadership through posting and commentary and still have time to engage people personally at the low level. That time demand is serious and possibly crippling.
Another problem that arises is that due to the built-in time-delay on comments showing up you disrupt the expected communication style. You're bound to get multiple comments turned in before they can all be approved which means that some comments will be made without the context of previous ones. This means you probably can't go with a straight chronological listing (like WordPress defaults to), and will need to move either to threaded comments (like LJ defaults to) or something similar that allows you to keep conversational threads separate.
Which has its own sets of problems. Splitting off discussion threads often results in disrupted context since people aren't sure what parts of the discussion you've read and what parts you haven't.
Thomas
There's nothing wrong with social maintanence of safe spaces, of course. That's how most such spaces are handled in face to face situations. However, I think we can do better by intentionally structuring a community. So, here's an outline of what I put forward during the discussion. You'll probably see what it's likely non-viable: it takes way too much work on the part of someone(s).
First you take a multi-user blog. Something like WordPress' Multi-User install would work. You give a set of protected speakers who you trust to deal with the topics in a socially safe and thought provoking manner (a lot of these people are probably going to be from within your potected class) top-level access. They post regular blog entries and the like, and can comment on one anothers' posts freely.
Below these people you have other registered users. Registration is free and open, anyone can do it. However, if you're not a top-level poster, then all your comments are screened. A moderator will read the comment before allowing it to go up in order to check for content, but also to check for presentation. If a comment is rejected, the moderator will explain why and offer suggestions for changes to be made if the comment is to be accepted. You can see where this ends up being a lot of work. Moderators end up having to enter dialogs with users in order to help explain where a comment makes the social space unsafe either in content or in presentation.
You could optionally include a mid-level user drawn from the low-level user base. Mid-level users can't make new posts, but can comment without screening. By placing users with good track records in this category you can reduce the load on the moderators. However, I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea for two reasons. Socially, this creates a privileged class, and I'm pretty sure it would have a serious negative impact. Technically,and perhaps more importantly, there's a built-in delay when comments are moderated. It reduces the speed at which one can comment. Creating mid-level users makes low-level users conversationally disadvantaged (see Chris' comments on yesterday's post for some reasons why). Since part of the point of this design is to teach new users to maintain safe spaces on their own, disadvantaging those same users like this is a huge problem.
So, you can see that the moderators are doing a lot of work here. They're doing so much work that they're probably not the same people as your top-level posters. I think it would be hard to maintain general social leadership through posting and commentary and still have time to engage people personally at the low level. That time demand is serious and possibly crippling.
Another problem that arises is that due to the built-in time-delay on comments showing up you disrupt the expected communication style. You're bound to get multiple comments turned in before they can all be approved which means that some comments will be made without the context of previous ones. This means you probably can't go with a straight chronological listing (like WordPress defaults to), and will need to move either to threaded comments (like LJ defaults to) or something similar that allows you to keep conversational threads separate.
Which has its own sets of problems. Splitting off discussion threads often results in disrupted context since people aren't sure what parts of the discussion you've read and what parts you haven't.
Thomas